Swallowtail
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The forked tail of a swallow.
- 2 a man's full-dress jacket with two long tapering tails at the back wordnet
- 3 Anything, such as a burgee, of a similar forked shape.
- 4 A type of tailcoat with two long tapering tails.
"It was April 22, 1831, and a young man was walking down Whitehall in the direction of Parliament Street. He wore shepherd's plaid trousers and the swallow-tail coat of the day, with a figured muslin cravat wound about his wide-spread collar."
- 5 Any of various butterflies of the family Papilionidae, many of which have a long extension to each hindwing.
"Here I obtained the rare and beautiful swallow-tail butterflies, Papilio aenomaus and P. liris; the males of which are quite unlike each other, and belong in fact to distinct sections of the genus, while the females are so much alike that they are undistinguishable on the wing, and to an uneducated eye equally so in the cabinet."
Example
More examples"Kotaro found a large swallowtail butterfly and chased him about 20 meters inside the grass field."
Etymology
From swallow + tail.
Related phrases
More for "swallowtail"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.