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thunderbird

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈθʌndə.bɜːd//
  • United States//ˈθʌndɚ.bɝd//

A mythological bird, often associated with stormy weather, especially in various indigenous North American mythologies.

noun

  1. 1

    A mythological bird, often associated with stormy weather, especially in various indigenous North American mythologies.

    A man there was, grim his expression, just like a Thunderbird his features were frightening.

    The Thunderbird, one of the most powerful symbols of Indigenous American mythology, borrows heavily from eagle features.

    Candace Thomas, a Tsleil-Waututh artist, provided the design for the crosswalk which now spans the intersection of Dollarton Highway and Sleil-Waututh Road. It depicts a thunderbird embracing both residential school survivors and missing and murdered Indigenous women, according to the news release.

  2. 2

    The golden whistler, an Australian insectivorous songbird (Pachycephala pectoralis, formerly Pachycephala gutturalis), whose male is conspicuously marked with black and yellow, and has a black crescent on the breast.

Etymology

From thunder + bird.

Forms

plural
thunderbirds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).