beaked whale
1
7.4
- noun
- /biːkt weɪl/
- Specialized
:
ballena con pico
- The twenty species of beaked whales known by 1997 were grouped into six genera.
- species of beaked whales
Examples
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Even a researcher like me, who has spent his life counting and identifying whales and dolphins while traveling the oceans of the world, sees beaked whales only occasionally.
Academic text (2002) -
During a whale-watching tour, we were excited to spot several beaked whales swimming gracefully near the boat.
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Beaked whales are probably the most poorly known group of large mammals alive today.
Academic text (2002) -
Several species of beaked whales have never been identified alive in the wild; practically everything known about most of them is based on stranded animals.
Academic text (2002) -
All we knew for certain was that this was a fairly large beaked whale, that it was found in the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, and that it was probably a rare species.
Academic text (2002) -
Conservation workers thought they were Gray's beaked whales and took tissue samples before burying them about nine feet under the sand.
Blog text (25) -
The animals that Balcomb photographed were also larger than most species of beaked whales; researchers estimated them to be between twenty-three and thirty feet long.
Academic text (2002) -
In 1968, Joseph C. Moore, then a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, published a preliminary taxonomic review of the five living genera of beaked whales known at that time.
Academic text (2002) -
Indopacetus has suddenly become one of the better-known beaked whales, and future writers of cetacean field guides will have to christen another species as least known.
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Within six months of the publication of our paper, fisheries biologist Charles Anderson contacted me about a beaked whale stranded on a beach in the Maldives, in the northern Indian Ocean.
Academic text (2002)
Synonyms
A family of whales with long beaks that dive very deep
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun phrase is a straightforward compositional description: 'beaked' describes having a beak-like feature and 'whale' names the animal, so the meaning is literally a whale with an elongated beak-like jaw. This adjective+noun pattern is cross-linguistically common and therefore a B1 learner who knows the constituents should be able to infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Beaked whale gets its name from the animal's long, bird-like beak, a thin pointed snout people could easily see, and because of that clear image the name now means 'a whale with a long beak' used for these medium-sized whales that dive deep.