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bunting

UK/ˈbʌntɪŋ/US/ˈbʌntɪŋ/
nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,614 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: buntings

Bunting is strings of small flags hung up for a celebration. Hang the bunting, streets full of bunting, take down the bunting.

It is a mass noun with no plural, so it is a length of bunting rather than three buntings. It was originally the loose woven cloth that flags were made from, and the name moved from the material to the decoration. A bunting is also a small bird.

Msasso139 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of bunting

  1. 1nounbuntingStrings of small flags hung up for a celebration.C1

    “The street was decorated with bunting for the royal wedding.”

bunting is a decoration.

Where it comes from

Possibly from a dialect word for sifting cloth, since the loose weave suited both sieves and flags.

  1. Middle English

    bonten — to sift

  2. English, today

    bunting

Built from

  • bunting · English — sifting flour
  • bundt · English — to bind or tie together

+ (textile) Possibly from dialect bunting (“sifting flour”), from Middle English bonten (“to sift”), hence the material used for that purpose. Possibly from Germanic bundt (“to bind or tie together”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Weddings & Celebrations

Practise this word

bunting in the wild

  • The genus name Emberiza is from Alemannic German Embritz, a bunting.

    Ortolan bunting

  • The buntings are a group of Old World passerine birds forming the genus Emberiza, the only genus in the family Emberizidae.

    Emberiza

  • The snow bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis) is a passerine bird in the family Calcariidae.

    Snow bunting

  • The snow bunting is the most northerly recorded passerine in the world.

    Snow bunting

  • The corn bunting (Emberiza calandra) is a passerine bird in the bunting family Emberizidae, a group now separated by most modern authors from the finches, Fringillidae.

    Corn bunting

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.