puffin

Noun

puffin (plural puffins)

1. (obsolete) The young of the Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), especially eaten as food.
2. The Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) or (by extension) any of the other various small seabirds of the genera Fratercula and Lunda that are black and white with a brightly-coloured beak.
   • The place was just, in short, the only spot on that part of the coast where anybody could well live; there was a neat little creek, where a boat might lie as snug as a puffin in her nest, and out from this creek a ledge of sunken rocks ran into the sea.1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 527
   • Naturally the Chickies and the Gooverooskies and the Epatkas—the Burgomaster Gulls and the Kittiwakes and the Puffins, who are always looking for a chance to be rude—took up the cry, and—so Limmershin told me—for nearly five minutes you could not have heard a gun fired on Walrus Islet.1894 May, Rudyard Kipling, “The White Seal”, in The Jungle Book, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published June 1894, →OCLC, page 110

   Synonyms:

   pope, sea-parrot

3. Any of various African and Asian pierid butterflies of the genus Appias. Some species of this genus are also known as albatrosses.
4. (obsolete) A puffball.