black vulture
1
6.8
- noun
- /blæk ˈvʌltʃər/
:
buitre negro
- "While they slip and grip and grapple a few miles from shore, 400 villagers and 200 black vultures wait near the beach for the great arrival.
Examples
-
At the nature reserve, a black vulture was perched on a branch, keeping watch over its territory.
-
" It's a black vulture.
Fiction book (1993) -
Big black vultures wheeled so high above that they looked the size of mockingbirds.
Fiction book (1999) -
Black vulture—
Blog text (11) -
An even more unsettling picture features two black vultures ("Carrion crows," as Audubon himself would have called them) about to feed on the head of a deer (ill. 7).
Academic text (1995) -
During the hike, we spotted a black vulture soaring in the sky, searching for food.
-
A black vulture landed near the roadside, drawn by the scent of something dead.
Synonyms
42
3.3
A large bird with a bare head that eats dead animals
A large black bird that eats dead animals, found from the southeast United States to South America
A very large vulture that lives in southern Europe, Asia, and northern Africa
A large black vulture that eats dead animals in the Americas
A large bird in the Americas that eats dead animals and often has a bare head
A large bird that eats dead animals and lives in Africa, Europe, or Asia, not in the Americas
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'black' (color) modifies 'vulture' (a scavenging bird), so a learner who knows both words will understand this refers to a vulture that is black in plumage. This adjective+noun pattern is a straightforward and cross-linguistically common way to name animal types, so the expression is immediately comprehensible to a B1 learner.
Etymology
The name black vulture is literal: people used black to show its dark feathers and vulture to show it 'eats dead animals'. So black vulture means a large, dark bird that scavenges and is found in different parts of the world.