puffin

A puffin

From Middle English poffin, poffoun, puffon, apparently from puff + -ing, or perhaps ultimately from Middle Cornish (compare Breton poc'han (“puffin”)).

• IPA^(key): /ˈpʌfɪn/

• Audio (UK)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌfɪn

puffin (plural puffins)

1. (now obsolete) The young of the Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), especially eaten as food. [14th–19th c.]
2. The Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) or (by extension) any of the other various small seabirds of the genera Fratercula and Lunda that are black and white with a brightly-coloured beak. [from 17th c.]

   Synonyms: (Britain, regional) pope, sea-parrot

   • 1894 May, Rudyard Kipling, “The White Seal”, in The Jungle Book, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published June 1894, →OCLC, page 110:

     Naturally the Chickies and the Gooverooskies and the Epatkas—the Burgomaster Gulls and the Kittiwakes and the Puffins, who are always looking for a chance to be rude—took up the cry, and—so Limmershin told me—for nearly five minutes you could not have heard a gun fired on Walrus Islet.

3. (entomology) Any of various African and Asian pierid butterflies of the genus Appias. Some species of this genus are also known as albatrosses.
4. (obsolete) A puffball.

• fraterculine

From English puffin.

• IPA^(key): /py.fɛ̃/

• Audio

  (file)

puffin m (plural puffins)

1. shearwater

• “puffin”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.