A small brown-and-grey bird, about the size of your hand, that lives close to people. Sparrows are one of the most common birds in the world — you see them on the street, on rooftops, hopping around outside restaurants looking for dropped food. They are not beautiful in the way a parrot is beautiful. They are plain, small, noisy, and everywhere. That plainness is part of what the word carries. When English speakers say 'sparrow' in a story or a poem, they usually mean something small and ordinary and easily overlooked — a life that nobody counts. There is a famous line in the Bible about God noticing even when one sparrow falls, and that line is the reason the word feels the way it does to many English speakers: tiny, cheap, but still seen. In everyday talk, though, it is just the bird. A person might say 'there were sparrows all over the balcony' and mean nothing more than that. One more thing: English speakers are not careful bird-namers. Many small brown birds get called sparrows by ordinary people even when a bird expert would say they belong to a different family. If you hear someone point at a little brown bird and say 'sparrow', they may just mean 'small brown bird'.