dog whelk
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.90 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
1
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "1971 January 14, Graham Chedd, Peter Stubbs, Gerald Wick (section editors), Monitor: Starving dog whelks grow teeth in the estuary, New Scientist, Volume 49, Number 734, page 57, A recent study of shell-shape in the dog whelk Nucella lapillus along the Bristol Channel suggests - that in progressively less saline conditions the species lives in a colonising situation, where periodic food shortages, rather than physiological limitations, decimate populations and sometimes lead to local extinction."
- "Evidently the dog whelks perceive the chemicals released by the crabs and their prey.[…]Dog whelks are believed to have evolved in the Pacific, and to have spread into the North Atlantic in the Pliocene, during a warm period when it was possible to pass along the coast of the Arctic Ocean."
- "The dog-whelk is carnivorous; acorn barnacles and the mussel Mytilus edulis (p. 254) are the main prey species."
Inflected Forms
Synonyms
Atlantic dogwinkle
purple