Definitions

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

  • noun Any of various vertebrates of the group Sauria, which includes most of the diapsids, such as the dinosaurs, lizards, snakes, crocodilians, and birds. Sauria was formerly a suborder consisting of the lizards.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Belonging or relating to the Sauria, in any sense; having legs and scales, as a lizard; lacertiform; lacertilian.
  • noun A member of the Sauria, in any sense; a scaly reptile with legs, as a lacertilian or lizard.

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

  • adjective (Zoöl.) Of or pertaining to, or of the nature of, the Sauria.

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

  • noun A reptile of the suborder Sauria; a lizard.
  • adjective Pertaining to the Sauria.
  • adjective Resembling a lizard.

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

  • adjective of or relating to lizards
  • noun any of various reptiles of the suborder Sauria which includes lizards; in former classifications included also the crocodiles and dinosaurs

Etymologies

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

[From New Latin Sauria, former suborder name, from saurus, lizard, from Greek sauros.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Late Latin *saurianus, from Ancient Greek σαύρα (saura, "lizard")

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Examples

Comments

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  • . . . he was one of the very few larger saurians in the émigré marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable and altogether admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he founded a Russian-language quarterly which he is still directing today, thirty-five years later, in his heroic dotage.

    --Vladimir Nabokov, 1974, Look at the Harlequins!‎ p. 130

    June 13, 2009