finch

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

• noun Any of various birds of the family Fringillidae, including the goldfinches, siskins, and canaries, having a short stout bill used for cracking seeds.
• noun Any of various birds of the families Cardinalidae and Emberizidae, including the sparrows, cardinals, and grosbeaks, having a similar bill.

from The Century Dictionary.

• An obsolete contracted form of finish.
• noun The chaffinch; any bird of the genus Fringilla or family Fringillidæ, of which the species are very numerous; a bunting, sparrow, grosbeak, etc. See Fringillidæ.
• noun Any small conirostral oscine passerine bird, as of the family Ploceidæ or Tanagridæ; a weaver-bird or tanager.
• noun Loosely, in composition, some other small bird, as the fallow-finch.
• noun Peucæa cassini, a kind of summer finch of southwestern parts of the United States: named for the same.
• noun The yellow-hammer.
• noun The Texas sparrow, Embernagra rufovirgata. See Embernagra.
• noun A misnomer of the Canadian sparrow or tree-sparrow, Spizella monticola.
• noun The snow-bunting, Plectrophanes nivalis, in the plumage of winter, or of the female and young male.
• noun The pine-siskin, Chrysomitris pinus: so called from its fondness for the seeds of the pine.

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

• noun (Zoöl.) A small singing bird of many genera and species, belonging to the family Fringillidæ.
• noun See Brambling.
• noun the canary bird.
• noun See Chaffinch.
• noun See under Diamond.
• noun (Zoöl.) one of several very small East Indian falcons of the genus Hierax.
• noun [Obs.] to swindle an ignorant or unsuspecting person.

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

• noun Any bird of the family Fringillidae, seed-eating passerine birds, native chiefly to the Northern Hemisphere and usually having a conical beak.
• verb To hunt for finches, to go finching.

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

• noun any of numerous small songbirds with short stout bills adapted for crushing seeds