Other forms: squirrels
A squirrel is a small animal with a big fluffy tail that collects nuts in trees. A grey squirrel, squirrels in the park, squirrel away.
It buries nuts in thousands of separate places and finds most of them again by memory and smell — the ones it forgets grow into trees, which is why squirrels plant woods. To squirrel something away means to store it for later. Note that the Greek name means shadow-tail.
1nounsquirrelA small bushy-tailed animal that lives in trees.
“A squirrel ran up the tree with a nut in its mouth.”
squirrel is an animal.
Old French escurel comes from Latin sciurus, from Greek skiouros — skia, shade, plus oura, tail.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ḱeh₃-
Latin
sciūrus
Vulgar Latin
*scūriolus
Old French
escurel
Anglo-Norman
esquirel
Middle English
squirel
English, today
squirrel
From Middle English squirel, squyrelle, from Anglo-Norman esquirel and Old French escurel (whence French écureuil), from Vulgar Latin scūriolus, diminutive of scūrius, variant of Latin sciūrus, from Ancient Greek σκίουρος (“shadow-tail”). Displaced native Middle English acquerne, aquerne, from Old English ācweorna. See dialectical English con and puristic English oakwern.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA