Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A name of various birds.
  • noun and gull.

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

  • noun The lapwing.
  • noun The European black-headed, or laughing, gull (Xema ridibundus). See under laughing.
  • noun The pewee.

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

  • noun UK Alternative form of peewit.

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

  • noun small olive-colored woodland flycatchers of eastern North America
  • noun large crested Old World plover having wattles and spurs
  • noun small black-headed European gull

Etymologies

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

[Imitative of its call.]

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word pewit.

Examples

  • As I came near them, some of them kept flying round and round just over my head, and crying "pewit" so distinctly one might almost fancy they spoke.

    Types of Children's Literature Walter Barnes

  • As I came near them, some of them kept flying round and round, just over my head, and crying "pewit," so distinctly one might almost fancy they spoke.

    The Confederate First Reader: Containing Selections in Prose and Poetry as Reading Exercises for the Younger Children in the Schools and Families of the Confederate States. Richard McAllister 1864

  • What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew!

    The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 10, No. 262, July 7, 1827 Various

  • For surely Pan was there, where the curlew cried and the pewit mourned, and sometimes the waiting soldiers must almost have imagined his mocking laughter borne in the winds that swept across the bleak hills of their exiled solitude.

    A Book of Myths Jeanie Lang

  • Hinpoha listened to his disgruntled "pewit phoebe, pewit phoebe," and made haste to throw him some crumbs.

    The Camp Fire Girls at School Or, The Wohelo Weavers 1924

  • It is unmistakably spring, because the pewit bushes are budding and on yonder aspen we can hear a forsythia bursting into song.

    Mince Pie Christopher Morley 1923

  • Now and then I caught the cry of a pewit, or saw a snipe glance up from his bed; but mainly I was busied about the mare.

    The Splendid Spur Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903

  • It spanned the stormy Atlantic and the cold North Sea and set me down in sight of the little village of straw-thatched farm-houses where I played in the long ago, right by the dam in the lazy brook where buttercups and forget-me-nots nodded ever over the pool, and the pewit built its nest in spring.

    When I went Home to Mother 1901

  • ” Hence stork and swallow are the friends of man, while the pewit dwells in exile, fleeing ever from his presence with its lonesome cry.

    When I went Home to Mother 1901

  • The leaves made a lonely sound as they rustled over her head, and when at last she saw a black object moving about among the trees at some distance beyond the rock-pile, it is not surprising that she immediately gave the pewit call, loud and clear.

    The Scotch Twins Lucy Fitch Perkins 1901

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.