plover

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plover

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Inherited from Middle English plover, from Anglo-Norman plover, plovier, from Medieval Latin plovarius, pluviārius, of disputed origin; perhaps from Latin pluvia (“rain”).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈplʌvɚ/, /ˈploʊvɚ/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈplʌvə/
• Rhymes: -əʊvə(ɹ), -ʌvə(ɹ)
• Hyphenation: plov‧er

plover (plural plovers or plover)

1. Any of various wading birds of the family Charadriidae.
2. (Australia) A masked lapwing (Vanellus miles).

plover (third-person singular simple present plovers, present participle plovering, simple past and past participle plovered)

1. To dote over, or, crowd or nestle with
   • 1997, Barry MacSweeney, The Book of Demons, page 107:

     Invisible twine plying merchants are unravelling the long grasses and the plovering pull of the long windstrewngrasses pluck the prince in his chest his heart his passion and love as if no tomorrow.

   • 2000, Stuart Jeffries, Mrs Slocombe's Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly, page 144:

     I would blanch, I would quail and, maybe in that season, I would have plovered — plovered my head deep into my feathers and plovered away on thin, wading bird's legs.

   • 2002, Calvin Bedient, The Violence of the Morning: Poems, page 42:

     Our Dove's a fat man's tits plovering a T - shirt;

2. To hunt for plover.
   • 1769, John Poulter, The Discoveries of John Poulter, Alias Baxter, page 5:

     Gentlemen often came from Dublin, and payed me for going into the Channel with them a plovering and fishing, and going aboard of Ships in the Bay; but once among the rest, some of these Chaps came to hire my Smack, to go into the Bay, which I let them have to my Sorrow;

   • 1865, Henry Onderonk, Queens County in Olden Times, page 87:

     There is a handsome prospect from the plains, which render very good shooting in the season of plovering.

   • 1962, Diary and Autobiography of John Adam, page 244:

     Brisler went Yesterday a plovering with a Party who killed about an hundred.

3. To wade along the shore, examining the sand like a plover does.
   • 1971, John Ciardi, Lives of X., page 50:

     Men with nothing to do plovered the sand - edge with clam rakes that raked nothing.

   • 2021, Clive Chatters, Heathland:

     Blathwyte indicates the scale of another population of waders through recording an annual crop of 250 Lapwing eggs Vanellus vanellus being taken by 'plovering' gamekeepers.

   • 2021, Jeffrey Cohen, Stephanie Foote, The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, page 282:

     If we can let the plovers do their plovering thing, then perhaps, instead of rejecting our human weirdnesses, we embrace them.

• Provel

• plewer, pluver, pluwer
• plovere, ploware, plowere (Late Middle English)

Borrowed from Anglo-Norman plover, plovier, from Medieval Latin plovarius, pluviārius.

• IPA^(key): /pluˈveːr/, /ˈpluvər/

plover (plural plovers)

1. plover (bird of the family Charadriidae)

• English: plover
• Scots: pliver, plivver

• “plover, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

plover

1. Alternative form of plovoir