sand-martin

See also: sand martin

English

Noun

sand-martin (plural sand-martins)

1. a migratory passerine bird in the swallow family.
   • 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Vintage Classics, paperback edition, page 172

     But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns.