porpoise
/ˈpɔːɹpəs/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.56 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
Said of an air-breathing aquatic animal such as a porpoise or penguin: To repeatedly jump out of the water to take a breath and dive back in a continuous motion.
Intransitive verb
verb
Said of an aircraft: to make a series of plunges when taking off or landing; or of a watercraft: to successively plunge up and down in the water.
Intransitive verb
Example Sentences
- "Near-synonyms: sea hog, sea pig, seaswine, mereswine"
- "They captured 25 porpoises and set them free back into the Yangtze after raising them for a month in Puqi County, Hubei."
- "Urging them to join me, I raced in circles through the surging water, chased my tail for the children, blew spouts of foam through the sunfilled spray, porpoised to and fro across the river in shallow leaps that stitched the air and water into a table-lace of foam."
Etymology
From Middle English porpeys, purpeys, borrowed from Anglo-Norman porpeis, purpeis, Old French pourpois, porpois, pourpais, porpeis (“porpoise”), from Vulgar Latin *porcopiscis (“porpoise”, literally “hog-fish”), taken from Latin porcus (“hog, pig”) + piscis (“fish”). Compare (in transposed order) obsolete Italian pesce porco and Portuguese peixe porco; also Latin porcus marīnus (“sea hog”); akin in formation to Frankish *mariswīn (“porpoise, dolphin”) (whence German Meerschwein, English mereswine). Displaced native Middle English brunswyn. More at mereswine.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *perḱ-, porpeys, porpeis, pourpois, *porcopiscis, porcus
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈpɔːɹpəs/
- British English: /ˈpɔːpəs/
Usage
- Canadian usage
- American usage
- Intransitive verb