(n.) A valuable fur-bearing animal of the genus Mustela (M. erminea), allied to the weasel; the stoat. It is found in the northern parts of Asia, Europe, and America. In summer it is brown, but in winter it becomes white, except the tip of the tail, which is always black.
(n.) The fur of the ermine, as prepared for ornamenting garments of royalty, etc., by having the tips of the tails, which are black, arranged at regular intervals throughout the white.
(n.) By metonymy, the office or functions of a judge, whose state robe, lined with ermine, is emblematical of purity and honor without stain.
(n.) One of the furs. See Fur (Her.)
(v. t.) To clothe with, or as with, ermine.
Example Sentences:
(1) Ermine cloaks the coalition's first post-local election test on Wednesday.
(2) I’ll know that the high walls of inequality are tumbling down when a lass from Lincoln’s Ermine estate with a degree from Lincoln University and years of frontline policing experience, including running a police force, gets to run the Met.
(3) But it did have a very particular place in the Liberal Democrat heart, both because the ermine-trimmed anachronism that still co-writes Britain's law offends the party's modernity and rationalism, and because great Liberal heroes moved heaven and earth to reform the chamber a century ago.
(4) The site of modification of the COOH-erminal half was localized in the tryptic peptide which contained the only glutamic acid residue in this fragment of H1...
(5) In the hundred years since the shake-up provoked by the People's Budget, countless blueprints for wholesale rationalisation have run up against ermine-trimmed facts on the ground.
(6) For services to West Ham, women in business and The Apprentice, Karren Rita Brady, hereafter to be known as Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge, stood robed in ermine before the Speaker, Baroness D’Souza, to be formally introduced into the House of Lords.
(7) Among 22 adult ermines, 41% were infected by one or more of five species (Taenia mustelae, Alaria mustelae, Molineus patens, M. mustelae and Trichinella spiralis).
(8) When I got my first electric guitar, I wasn't happy with the look of it, so he found me some ermine white [paint], left over from his second beloved Ford Cortina, and helped me spray it.
(9) The royal horses could have been left to munch hay in their stables, the ermine stored in mothballs, and the Crown jewels kept on show at the Tower.
(10) The potassium concentration (aK) of the environment of a repetitively discharging membrane can increase sufficiently for a supra-threshold depolarization at afferent erminals.
(11) This was no coronation, rather an investiture or an inauguration, almost republican with some red ermine attached.
(12) Once burgers and hot dogs had been given the pimped ermine-collar treatment, it was only a matter of time before chicken went the same way.
(13) A vision in ermine, tiaras, wigs and scarlet robes.
(14) Trichinella spiralis occurred with a maximum prevalence of 50% in martens, but only occurred in 9% of ermines.
(15) Dealing as it does with a family of ermine miscreants, the show looks and feels luxurious, even when Fleming is unfurling reams of dickheadery.
(16) A study was made of the pathogenicity of brucellae culture isolated from various wild and Game animals of the extreme North of the USSR (wolf, polar fox, ermine, glutton).
(17) The term ermine phenotype has been chosen to describe patients with white hair with black tufts.
(18) Helminths are reported for the first time from ermines (Mustela erminea) and martens (Martes americana) in Washington (USA).
(19) The Guardian's Ermine Sayer spent the day at Passmore's Academy.
(20) Labour donor Sir Gulam Noon will also be taking ermine, as will broadcaster and campaigner Joan Bakewell and Gordon Brown adviser Stewart Wood.
Stoat
Definition:
(n.) The ermine in its summer pelage, when it is reddish brown, but with a black tip to the tail. The name is sometimes applied also to other brown weasels.
Example Sentences:
(1) Eagle picked him up when he started to claim that a former Labour MP who supports the health reforms, Dr Howard Stoate, had been defeated at the election by the Tories.
(2) Dr Howard Stoate General practitioner; former clinical commissioning group chair; former MP • Any chance the CQC could find the present government “inadequate” and place it in special measures, please ( Prestigious hospital in special measures over staff shortage , 22 September)?
(3) Their job involves eradicating animals that might want to eat these small game birds: foxes, stoats, weasels and, in the days when it was legal to do so, birds of prey.
(4) Dominance relationships between different categories of stoats (femalefemale, adult and juvenile male male) were examined, as was social dominance between individual stoats of the same sex.
(5) With senior Labour figures claiming the prime minister lost his cool because he has lost "the argument over the NHS", the intervention by Stoate– the only practising GP to serve in parliament when he stood down at the general election – robs Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, of a line of attack: that the government reforms have high-profile defenders in the medical profession.
(6) There are 370 plant species recorded there and you might spot stoats, yellow necked mice, dormice and badgers too.
(7) Mawle employed three keepers whose work included controlling predators (foxes, stoats, crows) by legal means to ensure a healthy wild grouse population.
(8) Infection was also not found in 40 stone martens, 5 badgers and 3 stoats.
(9) The prime minister regularly plays fast and loose with the facts at prime minister's questions and he got it wrong again yesterday when he claimed that ex Labour MP Howard Stoate had lost his Dartford seat at the general election.
(10) Stoate, the former MP for Dartford, writes in the Guardian that doctors do not "glibly accept every aspect of the health bill; it clearly has many inherent problems".
(11) Although the stoats and squirrels in question had died of natural causes, the charity Advocates for Animals denounced “perverse” and “out-of-date shock tactics” that “exploited and degraded animals”.
(12) And shrinking rivers and lower water levels in ditches and streams expose the burrows of riverbank mammals, such as water voles, leaving these animals vulnerable to predators, such as stoats and weasels.
(13) It sold in a limited run of 11 bottles, each artfully stuffed inside a deceased wild animal – seven stoats, four grey squirrels – costing between £500 and £700.
(14) – 'reveal overwhelming enthusiasm'," he said, quoting Dr Stoate.
(15) Eagle shouted that Stoate had stood down before the election and the PM had got his facts wrong.
(16) The original used the spellings Howard Stoat and David Willets.
(17) By legally trapping and killing stoats and foxes to ensure plentiful supplies of grouse, he helped conserve endangered birds: woodcock, snipe, golden plover, lapwing, ring ouzel, and “buckets and buckets of curlew”.
(18) The flea species did not reflect the status of their usual hosts in the diet of stoats, but did reflect the stoats' use of their usual hosts' habitat.
(19) As you report, "Eagle picked him up when he started to claim that a former Labour MP who supports the health reforms, Dr Howard Stoate, had been defeated at the election by the Tories."
(20) Howard Stoate, the former Labour MP who left parliament to focus on his work as a GP, has attacked David Cameron for quoting him "out of context" on the government's health bill.