- 1倉鼠。台灣人養的那種，口語也常叫黃金鼠。
A hamster is a small, round pet animal. It looks a bit like a mouse, but it has only a tiny tail, so you hardly see one, and it has fat cheeks. Inside those cheeks are pouches: the hamster stuffs food in them and carries it home to hide. They are mostly awake at night, and they run in a wheel and hoard seeds in corners of the cage. English borrowed the word from German Hamster. Before that, people sometimes called the animal a German rat, which is and not quite right — it is not a rat. In everyday English, hamster is the animal; a verb meaning “to hoard,” from the same German word, is rare in English.
From the word’s history
Borrowed from German Hamster; displaced the earlier term German rat.
借自德文 Hamster，取代了較早的說法 German rat。
組成Borrowed from German Hamster. It took the place of the older English name German rat.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
hamsternoun/ˈhæm(p)stə/
- 1
Any of various Old World rodent species belonging to the subfamily Cricetinae.
- The hamster stuffed his puffy cheeks with food.
- Since the pregnancy interceptive agents or the menses regulators may also influence the development of either trophoblasts or the maternal cells (epithelial and stromal) at the embryo attachment site, another in vitro assay method using using trophoblast cells of hamster and mouse isolated from a preplacental organelle, the ectoplacental cone, has been developed.
- 2
Any of various Old World rodent species belonging to the subfamily Cricetinae.
- 3
Any of various other rodents of similar appearance, such as the maned hamster or crested hamster, Lophiomys imhausi, mouse-like hamsters of genus Calomyscus, and the white-tailed rat (Mystromys albicaudatus).
hamsterverb/ˈhæm(p)stə/
- 1
To secrete or store privately, as a hamster does with food in its cheek pouches.
- Probably the city government knew that without that hamstering half the city would starve and they somehow got the police to lay off. It was in the little stinky one-horse towns that you had all the trouble.
- […] in his bedroom in neat stacks — he always hamstered them away upstairs as soon as the morning was done. This year the gifts sat ignored […]
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。