Word.ws English Dictionary

bloodbird

bloodbird noun: an Australian honeyeater, the scarlet myzomela (Myzomela sanguinolenta).

bloodbird: an Australian honeyeater, the scarlet myzomela (Myzomela sanguinolenta)
Image: JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

bloodbird (plural bloodbirds)

  1. An Australian honeyeater, the scarlet myzomela (Myzomela sanguinolenta).
    • I was watching a lovely little read-headed honey-eater—that beautiful scarlet and black bird, familiarly known as the bloodbird— feeding busily in the top of a small turpentine tree, and ceasing operations now and again to utter his little running call.1914, Amy Eleanor Mack, A Bush Calendar, page 29
    • At first only one bloodbird dipped low to catch insects in the last of the milkweed bursting their pods in the fields.2013, Alyxandra Harvey, “Anywhere”, in Colleen Anderson, Steve Vernon, editor, Tesseracts Seventeen

Forms of bloodbird

pluralbloodbirds

Origin of bloodbird

From blood + bird, from the bright red colour of the male.

Questions about bloodbird

What does bloodbird mean?
Bloodbird means an Australian honeyeater, the scarlet myzomela (Myzomela sanguinolenta).
What part of speech is bloodbird?
Bloodbird is a noun.
What is the plural of bloodbird?
The plural of bloodbird is bloodbirds.

Words near bloodbird in the dictionary

  1. bloodbanks
  2. bloodbath
  3. bloodbaths
  4. bloodberries
  5. bloodberry
  6. bloodbird
  7. bloodbirds
  8. bloodborne
  9. bloodclaat
  10. bloodcurdler
  11. bloodcurdlers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bloodbird (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bloodbird.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bloodbird. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.