Urchin
noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A mischievous child.
"And like these fresh green things were the dozens of babies, tots, toddlers, noisy urchins, laughing girls, a whole multitude of children of one family. For Collier Brandt, the father of all this numerous progeny, was a Mormon with four wives."
- 2 poor and often mischievous city child wordnet
- 3 A street urchin, a child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets.
"And the urchins that stand with their thievish eyes / Forever on watch ran off each with a prize."
- 4 A sea urchin.
- 5 One of a pair in a series of small card cylinders arranged around a carding drum; so called from its fancied resemblance to the hedgehog.
"Here we have a carding-engine, with the drum surmounted with urchin or squirrel cards[…]"
Show 3 more definitions
- 6 A neutron-generating device that triggered the nuclear detonation of the earliest plutonium atomic bombs. historical
- 7 A hedgehog. obsolete
- 8 A mischievous elf supposed sometimes to take the form of a hedgehog. obsolete
"We'll dress [them] like urchins, ouphes, and fairies."
Example
More examples"Christopher Columbus once accidentally ate a sea urchin. Then, he did it a second time... intentionally."
Etymology
From Middle English yrchoun, irchoun (“hedgehog; sea urchin”), from Old Northern French irechon, from Vulgar Latin *ērīciōnem, from Latin ērīcius. Compare modern French hérisson, whence the English doublet herisson.
Related phrases
More for "urchin"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.