Word.ws English Dictionary

pelicans

pelicans is the plural of pelican.

Meaning of pelican

Noun

pelican (plural pelicans)

  1. Any of various seabirds of the family Pelecanidae, having a long bill with a distendable pouch.
    • The old have outlived that mental world we so misname in calling it a world of enjoyment;—they have outlived the feverish dreams which waste those keen hopes—the pelicans of the heart, feeding on the life-blood of their parent;—they have now no part in the excitement of success, whether in its...1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter III, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 54
  2. A native or resident of the American state of Louisiana.
  3. (obsolete) A retort or still having a curved tube or tubes leading back from the head to the body for continuous condensation and redistillation.
  4. A set of forceps used to force overcrowded teeth apart.
    Synonyms:
    dental pelican
  5. (Canada, slang) A waterbomber.
  6. (slang) An ageing prostitute.

See all 13 meanings of pelican

Phrases with pelicans

Questions about pelicans

What is pelicans the plural of?
Pelicans is the plural of pelican.

Words near pelicans in the dictionary

  1. pelicanist
  2. pelicanists
  3. pelicanlike
  4. pelicanries
  5. pelicanry
  6. pelicans
  7. pelick
  8. pelicks
  9. Pelico
  10. Pelicos
  11. Pelides

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pelicans (page history and authors); pelican (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: “pelicans.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pelicans. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.