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porcupine

UK/ˈpɔː(ɹ)kjʊˌpaɪn/US/ˈpɔː(ɹ)kjʊˌpaɪn/
nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,782 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: porcupines

A porcupine is a rodent covered in long defensive quills. A porcupine's quills, startle a porcupine, porcupine tracks.

The quills are modified hairs and cannot be shot, whatever the stories say — they detach on contact and are barbed, which makes them very hard to pull out. The name means spine pig, which is exactly what it looks like and not at all what it is.

The Cosmonaut · CC BY-SA 2.5 ca

Definitions of porcupine

  1. 1nounporcupineA rodent covered in long defensive quills.B1+

    “The dog came home with porcupine quills stuck in its nose.”

porcupine is an animal.

Where it comes from

Old French porc-espin means spine pig, from Latin porcus, a pig, and spina, a thorn.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *perḱ-

  2. Latin

    porcus — pig

  3. Old French

    porc-espin

  4. Middle English

    porke despyne

  5. English, today

    porcupine

Built from

  • spinus · Latin — spine

From Middle English porke despyne, from Old French porc-espin, from Latin porcus (“pig”) + spinus (“spine”), hence also spine pig. Cognate with Spanish puercoespín, Italian porcospino, Portuguese porco-espinho.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

porcupine in the wild

  • The term covers two families of animals, the Old World porcupines in the family Hystricidae, and the New World porcupines in the family Erethizontidae.

    Porcupine

  • The largest species of porcupine is the third-largest living rodent in the world, after the capybara and beaver.

    Porcupine

  • The North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum), also known as the Canadian porcupine, is a large quill-covered rodent in the New World porcupine family.

    North American porcupine

  • Alongside the Cape porcupine, it is one of the largest porcupine species in the world.

    Crested porcupine

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.