rattail
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See also: rat-tail
English
[edit]
Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From rat + tail: all of the nonliteral senses come from something else's fancied resemblance to the tail of a rat.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]rattail (plural rattails)
- Any of the large dark-colored deep-sea fish of the Macrouridae family of ray-finned fish.
- 1995 December 26, William J. Broad, “Creatures of the Deep Find Their Way to the Table”, in The New York Times[1]:
- In the North Atlantic, Russians pioneered the harvesting of rattails, a ubiquitous deep fish with big eyes and a long tail that swishes back and forth in a sinuous motion.
- A fish, a California chimera (Hydrolagus colliei, syn. Chimaera colliei).
- A hairstyle characterized by a long lock of tail-like hair dangling from the back of the head; the dangling lock itself.
- 2013 July 28, Elizabeth Day, The Observer:
- All of which could explain why, when I had my hair styled in a tight ponytail for the shoot accompanying this feature, most people who saw me thought I looked "unapproachable" (which might simply be a polite way of saying: "You looked like you had a rattail and a Croydon facelift").
- A type of file (cutting tool) with a round cross section and usually also a taper toward the distal end.
- Synonym: rat-tail file
- (slang) A towel that has been tightly twisted along the diagonal to make a rudimentary whip with a towel corner at the tip, typically used in juvenile pranks.
- An excrescence growing from the pastern to the middle of the shank of a horse.[1]
Hypernyms
[edit]- tail (structural)
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]fish
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hair
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a type of file — see honing steel
See also
[edit]- (hairstyle): mullet
References
[edit]- ^ “rattail”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
Further reading
[edit]
rattail on Wikipedia.Wikipedia 
Macrouridae on Wikispecies.Wikispecies 
Category:Macrouridae on Wikimedia Commons.Wikimedia Commons