hedgehog
Pluralhedgehogs
Verbhedgehogs, hedgehogging, hedgehogged
Pluralhedgehogs
Formshedgehogs, hedgehogging, hedgehogged
- 1A small spiny-backed mammal of the subfamily Erinaceinae, native to Afro-Eurasia, that often rolls into a ball when threatened.
A hedgehog rolled into a spiny ball as the fox approached.
In the garden, hedgehogs hunt slugs and beetles after dark.
Note
The animal every other sense borrows from is named with a plain English compound: hedge plus hog, from Middle English heyghoge, a hog of the hedges. It pushed aside two older names: yrchoun, borrowed from Old French, and the native Old English īl. Shakespeare's Tempest already puts the spines to work, with hedgehogs that 'mount their pricks' at a footfall.
- 2A porcupine or other spiny mammal that resembles the true hedgehog.
A hedgehog had climbed onto the porch roof and was gnawing the cedar shingles.
The dog came home with quills in its nose after tangling with a hedgehog.
Note
American English stretches the name: in US usage hedgehog can cover the porcupine and other spiny look-alikes, though true hedgehogs belong to Afro-Eurasia. When precision matters, say porcupine for the American animal and keep hedgehog for the Old World mammal. Outside the US, readers will picture the small creature that rolls into a ball.
- 3A rich chocolate cake or slice that has some resemblance to an American brownie.
The café served a dense hedgehog topped with chocolate icing.
He crushed cookies and cocoa together to make a no-bake hedgehog.
Note
An American reader will not recognize this Australian bakery word. The closest US equivalent is a brownie, and it can be baked as a cake or cut as a slice. It works as a countable noun, as in Paul Mitchell's 'hedgehogs with sultanas as well as breadcrumbs'. It also works as a menu item ordered without an article, as when Lili Wilkinson's narrator asks for 'a vanilla slice instead of hedgehog'. Hedgehog cake is also found.
- 4To protect oneself by curling the body into a tight ball.
Threatened by the dogs, the small animal will hedgehog within seconds.
The boxer hedgehogged against the ropes, shielding his head from the blows.
Note
It is usually seen as a state rather than an action. A. L. Kennedy writes 'hedgehogged round now', Edwin Thomas 'stayed hedgehogged in my ball', and Robert Ryan describes a dead man 'hedgehogged, just like the others'. The verb can take an object or stand alone, so a person can hedgehog or hedgehog themselves. Keep it apart from the military defense, where a unit, not a body, closes up.
- 5To fit or cover with spiky projections like a hedgehog's quills.
Defenders hedgehog the ramparts with rows of sharpened stakes.
The sculptor hedgehogged the steel sphere with hundreds of jutting rods.
Similarstud
Note
It is mostly met as a past participle followed by with. Antonia Quirke's Choking on Marlon Brando has styrofoam cups hedgehogged with butts, and Max Hennessy's Back to Battle has walls hedgehogged with daggers of glass (both 2008). George Ryder's 'hedgehogged tray' of cheese and pineapple sticks nods to the party-food arrangement. It is a descriptive writer's word for clutter that bristles.
- 6A party-food arrangement of a halved melon or potato studded with cocktail sticks of cheese and pineapple.
She carried out a hedgehog bristling with cocktail sticks of cheddar and pineapple.
No retro buffet felt complete without a foil-covered hedgehog of cheese and pineapple.
- 7A person who views the world through a single, overarching idea or philosophy.
She's a hedgehog, fitting every new fact into her grand unifying theory.
Great hedgehogs build entire systems of thought around one central conviction.
Oppositefox
Note
A philosopher's character type that almost always comes paired with its opposite, the fox. The usual idiom is a hedgehog, not a fox, or a hedgehog rather than a fox. It was said of Austin in The Month (1970), and of Dewey by J. E. Tiles (1992), who 'spent his life trying to articulate and restate a single vision'. It praises depth and consistency, but can hint at working 'within limitations'.
- 8Ellipsis of Czech hedgehog.
Crews dragged a hedgehog across the road to block the advancing column.
The shoreline bristled with one rusting hedgehog after another.
Note
Soldiers clipped Czech hedgehog to this, the name of an obstacle of three steel rails joined at right angles into a tripod. It was set against tanks and landing craft and widely used in World War II. The short form has outlived that war: Bill Chappell, writing in March 2022, describes Ukrainian civilians welding their own hedgehogs from bars and beams. The barricade also gives the verb to take up a hedgehog defense.
- 9A World War II anti-submarine weapon that launched a spread of small bombs ahead of a ship to explode underwater against submerged subs.
The escort's hedgehog scattered a ring of charges ahead of the bow.
Crews reloaded the hedgehog after every attack run on the U-boat.
Note
A historical naval weapon shares its name with the steel antitank obstacle, so the two are easy to confuse. This hedgehog was a spigot mortar that fired a cluster of charges at once, so their underwater explosions formed a pattern around a submerged submarine. The name is informal and belongs to World War II. Make the naval context clear when you use it.
- 10An edible woodland mushroom, Hydnum repandum, with soft spines under its cap in place of gills.
Foragers prize the hedgehog because worms rarely spoil it.
A cluster of hedgehogs pushed up through the mossy forest floor.
Note
Foragers also know this mushroom as sweet tooth and wood hedgehog. Wood hedgehog is the clearest choice wherever the animal might be meant. Randy Molina and David Pilz noted in 1998 that hedgehogs fruit from autumn until late spring. They added that many consumers were still unfamiliar with them and that the commercial trade was small. In the plural, the word reads naturally as the mushrooms.
- 11To take up an all-around defensive position, using barricades arranged like a hedgehog's spines.
Cut off from the main army, the battalion chose to hedgehog and wait for relief.
The defenders hedgehogged across three farms, each strongpoint covering the others.
Note
The verb is born of encirclement. Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad (1966) spells out what hedgehogging meant to the men inside one: they were surrounded, in a predicament to escape as fast as possible. It runs both ways: Samuel Mitcham writes that Luettwitz hedgehogged his regiment, and that the 90th Light Division simply hedgehogged south of El Adem. The g doubles in hedgehogged and hedgehogging.
- 12A type of dredging machine, used to clear material from the bed of a waterway.
Workers ran the hedgehog along the canal to lift years of silt.
The port kept a hedgehog busy deepening the approach channel.
Note
The name belongs to the early history of dredging. Tomlinson's Cyclopædia of Useful Arts (1868) describes the first such machines as loosening material rather than raising it. They were bars or prongs set upright in a frame and fastened to a barge, and sluices did the scouring afterward. Those upright prongs are what the bristling name recalls.
- 13A type of transformer with an open magnetic circuit whose iron-wire core ends fan outward, giving it a bristling, spiky look.
The bristling iron ends made the hedgehog easy to spot among the old gear.
Early electricians wound their coils around a hedgehog whose core spread out at each end.
- 14A type of plane curve in differential geometry, formed as the envelope of a family of lines.
The textbook illustrated a hedgehog with several inward-pointing cusps.
Each choice of support function traces out a different hedgehog in the plane.
Note
Differential geometry files this term among its curves. A hedgehog is determined by a support function, and it generalizes the convex curve. A convex outline stays smooth and simple, but a hedgehog may develop cusps and cross itself. Those spiky points are where the animal name stops being only a metaphor.
- 15A medick, Medicago intertexta, whose seed pods are armed with short spines.
The botanist pressed a hedgehog between sheets of paper for the collection.
Spiny pods make the hedgehog easy to identify in a meadow.
- 16A shrub native to South Africa, of the species Retzia capensis.
The hedgehog clings to rocky slopes in the Cape region.
Botanists rarely find the hedgehog growing outside South Africa.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English heyghoge, equivalent to hedge + hog; it replaced the earlier non-native Middle English yrchoun (from Old French hirchoun) and displaced the still older Middle English il (from Old English īl, iġil). In its philosophical sense, it comes from Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox.