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A small, long, thin wild animal with short legs, brown fur on top and white or cream underneath, and a black tip on its tail. It is a cousin of the weasel and looks very like one, only bigger, and the black tail-tip is the mark that tells them apart. Stoats are hunters — quick, bold, and famous for killing rabbits much larger than themselves. They live across Britain, northern Europe, northern Asia and North America; in the far north, and in cold winters, a stoat turns white all over except that black tip, and in that white winter coat its fur is called ermine, the fur once used on kings' and judges' robes. The word is a plain countable noun: a stoat, two stoats. It is much more a British word than an American one — in North America the same animal is usually called a short-tailed weasel or, in the far north, an ermine. Say it to rhyme with coat and boat.
白鼬（俗稱貂，冬毛稱 ermine 白貂皮）
組成The origin is genuinely uncertain. It comes from Middle English stote, first written down in the middle of the 1400s, where it already meant this animal, especially in its brown summer coat. It looks a little like Old Norse stutr and Swedish stut, both meaning 'bull' or 'steer', but nobody has explained convincingly how a word for a bull became a word for a small hunting animal, so scholars leave it open.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，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。
stoatnoun詞源 1/ˈstəʊt/
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Mustela erminea, the ermine or short-tailed weasel, a mustelid native to Eurasia and North America, distinguished from the least weasel by its larger size and longer tail with a prominent black tip.
- I have never seen Stoats hunt in packs, but it is certain both Weasels and Stoats do so.
- In 1953 it was reported that the stoat had increased to a high population level, but that the weasel introduced at the same time had disappeared (de Vos et al. 1956).
stoatverb詞源 2/ˈstəʊt/
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businessmanufacturingsewingTo stitch (edges of relatively thick cloth, fur, etc, for example on either side of a join or tear) together in a way that is invisible from the 'front', by sewing part of the way into and then back out of the thickness of the material from the 'back' side (without the thread going all the way through to the 'front' side of the material).
- to stoat two very ravelled edges
- The tear to be stoated must have firm edges; it is impossible to stoat ravelled edges such as most serges have. The cloths which give the best results are vicunas, boxcloths, closely woven tweeds, meltons, and overcoatings.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。