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Glite Dictionary
mouse nest

mouse nest

3.4
A small home mice build to keep and raise their babies
  • noun
translation icon : nido de ratón
  • To keep the pests away, she removed the mouse nest she found under the porch.

Examples

  • While cleaning the garage, I found a mouse nest hidden in an old box.

  • Bumblebees live socially, usually in abandoned underground field mouse nests.

    Academic text (1994)

  • The garden shed was filled with tools and, to my surprise, a mouse nest behind the stacks.

Synonyms

mouse's nest
vsmouse nest
5.6

A place a mouse makes to live and raise its babies

is made by more than one small rodent rather than a single one

Surface Forms

mouse nest singular
mouse nests plural

Morphology

mouse + nest

The meaning is directly and transparently derived from combining 'mouse' (a small rodent) with 'nest' (a structure for holding young), yielding a type of nest associated with mice. This simple noun–noun compositional pattern (modifier + head) is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

Mouse nest: The noun mouse nest comes from the small, warm bundles that mice make as a nest to have their babies. They use shredded paper, cloth, or grass and hide these soft piles in quiet places, so the phrase means 'a nest built by mice' and 'a place where they raise their young'.