Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A North American freshwater fish (Carpiodes cyprinus) that has one ray of the dorsal fin extending conspicuously beyond the others.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The sailfish, spear-fish, or skimback, Carpiodes cyprinus, a kind of carp-sucker. The name is also given to other fishes of that genus, as C. difformis.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) An American fresh-water fish (
Ictiobus cyprinus syn.Carpiodes cyprinus ); -- called alsocarp sucker ,sailfish ,spearfish , andskimback .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Carpiodes cyprinus, a
freshwater fish of thesucker family with a longfilament that extends back from thedorsal fin .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
quill + back
Support
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Examples
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Since Lyons is one of the state's foremost experts on fish, he wasn't likely to encounter challenges to his identification of, say, a quillback carpsucker.
JSOnline.com 2010
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Kelp greenling, quillback and copper rockfish, and most notably, lingcod - a fish much prized by anglers - have also taken up residence in the large gap between the cement ballast and the plastic sewage pipe.
hernesheir commented on the word quillback
It's a fish, not a porpentine.
January 2, 2012