- 1鼠海豚（口語常被說成海豚，但不是同一種）
A porpoise is a sea animal that looks a lot like a dolphin. It is a mammal, so it breathes air: it comes up, takes a breath, then goes under again. Though actually, it is not a dolphin. A porpoise is usually smaller, with a rounder head and a short snout — not the long “” many dolphins have. From a boat, people often just say dolphin for both, and that is how everyday talk works; scientists keep them apart. Porpoises tend to be quieter and less . You meet the word in nature films, aquariums, and news about the sea. There is a rarer verb, to porpoise, meaning to leap in and out of the water the way this animal does (a plane or a submarine can “porpoise” too), but the animal is the sense that matters here.
組成From old French, from a Latin nickname meaning “pig-fish”: porcus “pig” + piscis “fish.” People thought it looked a bit like a hog in the sea.
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。
porpoisenoun/ˈpɔːpəs/
- 1
A small cetacean of the family Phocoenidae, related to dolphins and whales.
- Near-synonyms: sea hog, sea pig, seaswine, mereswine
- They captured 25 porpoises and set them free back into the Yangtze after raising them for a month in Puqi County, Hubei.
- 2
Any small dolphin.
porpoiseverb/ˈpɔːpəs/
- 1
Said of an air-breathing aquatic animal such as a porpoise or penguin: To repeatedly jump out of the water to take a breath and dive back in a continuous motion.
- Urging them to join me, I raced in circles through the surging water, chased my tail for the children, blew spouts of foam through the sunfilled spray, porpoised to and fro across the river in shallow leaps that stitched the air and water into a table-lace of foam.
- 2
Said of an aircraft: to make a series of plunges when taking off or landing; or of a watercraft: to successively plunge up and down in the water.
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。