Other forms: hatchlings
A hatchling is a creature only just out of its shell. Turtle hatchlings, a tiny hatchling, hatchlings on the beach.
For sea turtles it names the most dangerous hours of the animal's life: they emerge at night and run for the sea, and very few survive the crossing. The word covers birds, reptiles and fish. Note the -ling ending, which names a young or small one, as in duckling and yearling.
1nounhatchlingA creature only just out of its shell.
“The tiny hatchling was still wet, with bits of eggshell stuck to its feathers.”
hatchling is a young animal.
Hatch plus -ling, an ending naming a young or small one. Duckling and yearling are formed the same way.
Proto-West Germanic
*hakkju
Old English
hæċ
Middle English
hacche
English
hatch
English, today
hatchling
From hatch + ling. trans person in reference to the term crack someone's egg (“realize one is transgender”). hatch comes from Middle English hacche, hache, from Old English hæċ, from Proto-West Germanic hakkju (compare Dutch hek ‘gate, railing’, Low German Heck ‘pasture gate, farmyard gate’), variant of haggju ‘hedge’. More at hedge.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA