Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A four-footed animal.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Four-footed; having four limbs fitted for sustaining the body and for progression; habitually going on all fours: opposed to aliped and biped: correlated with quadrumanous and pedimanous: chiefly said of mammals, but also of four-footed reptiles, as lizards and tortoises. Compare
quadrumanous . - noun A four-footed or quadruped animal: especially, a four-footed mammal, as distinguished from a biped, as man or a bird.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Having four feet.
- noun (Zoöl.) An animal having four feet, as most mammals and reptiles; -- often restricted to the mammals.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a
four-footed orfour-legged animal - noun a
mammal ambulating on all fours
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective having four feet
- noun an animal especially a mammal having four limbs specialized for walking
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped is Latin for beast, as everybody that's gone through the grammar knows, or else where's the use of havin 'grammars at all?
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An odd hairy quadruped is upsetting residents of Scott Town, Jamaica, again.
Archive 2008-06-01 2008
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The male monkey makes insulting faces at me, and the quadruped is something of a bully.
Even so, Spring -- quickly come the_mercury 2007
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"I 'll see to that." said Miss Asphyxia. as she gathered up the reins and gave a cut to her horse, which started that quadruped from a dream of green grass into a most animated pace.
Oldtown Folks 1869
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"And pray, friend, what may you call a quadruped?"
The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper 1820
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'The head of a quadruped is the head of a quadruped,' and being given that 'A horse is a quadruped, 'so that whatever is true of' quadruped 'generally we know to be true of' horse, 'we are entitled to substitute the narrower for the wider term, and in this manner we arrive at the proposition,
Deductive Logic St. George William Joseph Stock
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_malapropos_; for instance, she called out, to a little fat, stupid, roly-poly girl, to whom Miss Benson was busy explaining the meaning of the word quadruped,
Ruth Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell 1837
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I should have thought, said Pleydell, that very respectable quadruped, which is just now limping out of the room upon three of his four legs, was rather of the Cynic school.
Chapter LII 1917
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It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs.
The New Jerusalem 1905
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To take the weight of the body off the spine, and to render both ends of the column mobile, these exercises are carried out in the "all-fours" attitude, the patient crawling in imitation of a quadruped, that is, in such a way that the hand and knee of one side are approximated, while those of the other side are separated; in other words, the hand and knee of one side should not move forward simultaneously (Fig. 230).
Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. Alexander Miles 1893
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