A big white bird with very long thin red legs, a long red beak and black on its wings. It wades in shallow water for frogs and fish, and famously builds a huge untidy nest of sticks on a chimney or a church roof in Europe — many villages there are proud of their storks and count the day they come back each spring. The bird matters in English mainly for one story: parents used to tell small children that a stork brings new babies, dropping them down the chimney. So 'the stork is coming' or 'a visit from the stork' is a soft, slightly old-fashioned, joking way of saying a baby is on the way, and a stork with a cloth bundle in its beak is the standard picture on a card for a new baby. Not a common word in daily conversation — you meet it in children's books, nature programmes and that one joke.