- 1流浪兒、街童（多用於舊時故事中衣衫襤褸的窮孩子）
An urchin is a poor child who lives rough on the streets — dirty, in torn clothes, with no one really looking after them. The word carries a picture with it: a small, quick, cheeky child begging or stealing to eat, the kind you meet in Dickens or in a stage musical about old London. That picture matters, because the word now feels old-fashioned and literary. Real social workers today say 'street child' or 'homeless child'; 'urchin' belongs to stories set in the past. It is not a cruel word — it usually comes with the writer's pity, and often a little affection for the child's toughness — but it does look at the child from the outside, so do not use it about a real child you know. You will also see 'street urchin', which means the same thing with the picture spelled out. Two other uses to file away. Modern speakers sometimes use it about a child who is simply messy: 'come here, you little urchin', said to a kid covered in mud. And the word appears in 'sea urchin', the round sea animal — that is the older meaning showing through, because 'urchin' once meant hedgehog.
組成From Middle English yrchoun 'hedgehog; sea urchin', from Old Northern French irechon, from Latin ērīcius 'hedgehog'. The child sense grew out of the hedgehog sense — a small, ragged, prickly little creature. Modern French hérisson 'hedgehog' comes from the same source.
同家族的字
- sea urchinthe spiny sea animal, named from the same hedgehog word — its spines look like a hedgehog's
原始詞典資料7 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。
urchinnoun/ˈɜːtʃɪn/
- 1
archaicdialectalA hedgehog.
- 2
obsoleteA mischievous elf supposed sometimes to take the form of a hedgehog.
- We'll dress [them] like urchins, ouphes, and fairies.
- In old wives tales that in old time did live, To whose odde tales much credit men did give, Great store of goblins, fairies, bugs, nightmares, Urchins, and elves, to many a house repaires.
- 3
A mischievous child.
- And like these fresh green things were the dozens of babies, tots, toddlers, noisy urchins, laughing girls, a whole multitude of children of one family. For Collier Brandt, the father of all this numerous progeny, was a Mormon with four wives.
- 4
A street urchin, a child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets.
- And the urchins that stand with their thievish eyes / Forever on watch ran off each with a prize.
- 5
A sea urchin.
- 6
One of a pair in a series of small card cylinders arranged around a carding drum; so called from its fancied resemblance to the hedgehog.
- Here we have a carding-engine, with the drum surmounted with urchin or squirrel cards[…]
- 7
historicalA neutron-generating device that triggered the nuclear detonation of the earliest plutonium atomic bombs.
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。