Dictionary

sand-martin en · NOUN

Meanings

1. a migratory passerine bird in the swallow family.
   • But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns. 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Vintage Classics, paperback edition, page 172

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