Sparrow
name, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The house sparrow, Passer domesticus; a small bird with a short bill, and brown, white and gray feathers.
"Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a sparrow, but by putting one leg forward first, and then the other."
- 2 small brownish European songbird wordnet
- 3 A member of the family Passeridae, comprising small Old World songbirds.
- 4 any of several small dull-colored singing birds feeding on seeds or insects wordnet
- 5 A member of the family Passerellidae (or Emberizidae, under classification systems that subsume the New World sparrows under Emberizidae), comprising small New World songbirds.
Show 2 more definitions
- 6 Generically, any small, nondescript bird.
- 7 A quick-witted, lively person. London, UK
"cockney sparrow"
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"The boy can't tell a swallow from a sparrow."
Etymology
From Middle English sparwe, sparowe, from Old English spearwa, from Proto-West Germanic *sparwō, from Proto-Germanic *sparwô, from Proto-Indo-European *spḗr (“sparrow”). Cognate with Dutch spreeuw (“starling”), Alemannic German Spar (“sparrow”), German Sperling (“sparrow”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål spurv (“sparrow”), Norwegian Nynorsk sporv (“sparrow”), Swedish sparv (“sparrow”), Breton frao (“crow”), Tocharian A ṣpārāñ, Ancient Greek ψάρ (psár, “starling”).
From Middle English Sparow.
Related phrases
More for "sparrow"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.