# seagull

Pronunciation: say "SEE-gul" /ˈsiː.ɡʌl/

## Noun

1. A popular name for any of various gulls (family Laridae), white birds often with a dark back, with long pointed wings and short legs.
   - Simple: A white sea bird with long wings and short legs, often with a darker back.
   - _A seagull landed on the railing and eyed our sandwiches._
   - _Flocks of seagulls scattered as the fishing boat returned to the dock._
2. A fan or member of Brighton and Hove Albion, an English soccer club nicknamed after the bird. *(slang, UK)*
   - Simple: A fan or player of the English soccer club Brighton and Hove Albion.
   - _As a lifelong seagull, he travels to every away match._
   - _The seagulls celebrated wildly when their team won promotion._
6. A diacritic mark shaped like ̼ that attaches beneath a base letter as a sort of accent.
   - Simple: A small mark shaped like curved wings, written under a letter as a kind of accent.
   - _Linguists place a seagull beneath a consonant to show it is articulated with the tongue against the upper lip._
   - _The transcription used a seagull under the t to capture the unusual sound._

## Verb

3. In rugby, to run with the back line in open play instead of attending to one's main positional duties. *(slang, Australia, British, New Zealand)*
   - Simple: To drift around the back of the field instead of doing your main job in open play.
   - _Young players often seagull when they lose confidence in the forwards' game._
   - _The flanker was seagulling out wide while his pack did the hard work._
4. To work as a casual, non-union dock laborer hired to load and unload ships. *(New Zealand)*
   - Simple: To work on the docks as a casual laborer who is not in the union.
   - _Plenty of newcomers seagull on the waterfront before they earn a steady place._
   - _She seagulled at the port through the lean winter months._
5. To propel a small boat using a British Seagull outboard engine.
   - Simple: To power a small boat using a British Seagull outboard motor.
   - _Old hands still seagull out to the fishing grounds rather than trust modern engines._
   - _We seagulled gently along the canal, the little motor puttering behind us._

## Origin

Formed from "sea" plus "gull," where the second element derives from a Brythonic language, as seen in Welsh "gwylan" and Breton "gouelan."

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/seagull (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).