Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An amphibian, especially a frog, or, in some classifications, a frog or a salamander but not a caecilian.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of or pertaining to the Batrachia, especially frogs and toads.
  • noun One of the Batrachia.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective (Zoöl.) Pertaining to the Batrachia.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A frog or toad.
  • adjective Pertaining to a frog or toad.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective relating to frogs and toads
  • noun any of various tailless stout-bodied amphibians with long hind limbs for leaping; semiaquatic and terrestrial species

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Greek batrakhos, frog.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From modern Latin Batrachia, former name of the zoological order Anura, from Greek βατραχεια, neuter plural of adjective from βατραχος ‘frog’.

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Examples

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  • from Middlemarch

    October 1, 2007

  • "'...now that I come to recollect, I found no batrachians of any kind on Rodriguez; and I could scarcely make an intelligent native understand what I meant by a frog, though I imitated his motions in a very lively manner, and his cry.'"

    --Patrick O'Brian, The Far Side of the World, 272

    February 23, 2008

  • ""You idiot. Snakes don't cough."

    "How do you know? You're not an ophiologist. You're a batrachianist.""

    Under the Harrow by Mark Dunn, p 167

    September 3, 2011

  • Window-panes fogged by her slow batrachian breath. Cold Comfort Farm.

    February 23, 2013

  • https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-globalized-jitters-penny Nov 2017

    "The gurning batrachian monster that crawled out of the mordant id of mass society to squat in the Oval Office was a symptom of our collective neurosis before he was a cause."

    November 28, 2017