Other forms: puffins
A puffin is a small sea bird with a bright striped beak. A colony of puffins, watch the puffins, a puffin burrow.
The colour is seasonal: the bright plates on the beak are grown for the breeding season and shed afterwards, so a winter puffin looks like a different and duller bird. They nest in burrows and can hold a dozen small fish crosswise in the bill at once.
1nounpuffinA small sea bird with a bright striped beak.
“Puffins nest in burrows on the cliffs of the island every summer.”
puffin is a bird.
Middle English poffin, apparently from puff, and once used of the cured carcass of a young seabird.
Middle English
poffin
English, today
puffin
From Middle English poffin, poffoun, puffon, equivalent to puff + -ing, or perhaps ultimately from cnx - (compare Breton poc'han (“puffin”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA