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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

urchin.

A hedgehog.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈɜːtʃɪn/Received-Pronunciation/ˈɜːtʃən/Received-Pronunciation/ˈɝt͡ʃɪn/General-American/ˈɝt͡ʃən/General-American
  1. A hedgehog.

    archaic · dialectal
  2. A mischievous elf supposed sometimes to take the form of a hedgehog.

    obsolete
  3. A mischievous child.

  4. A street urchin, a child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets.

  5. A sea urchin.

  6. One of a pair in a series of small card cylinders arranged around a carding drum; so called from its fancied resemblance to the hedgehog.

  7. A neutron-generating device that triggered the nuclear detonation of the earliest plutonium atomic bombs.

    historical
Where this word comes from

From Middle English yrchoun, irchoun (“hedgehog; sea urchin”), from Old Northern French irechon, from Vulgar Latin *ērīciōnem, from Latin ērīcius. Compare modern French hérisson, whence the English doublet herisson.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.