urchin

noun

ur·​chin ˈər-chən 

1

archaic : hedgehog sense 1a

2

: a mischievous and often poor and raggedly clothed youngster

street urchins

3

: sea urchin

Synonyms

• devil
• hellion
• imp
• mischief
• monkey
• rapscallion
• rascal
• rogue
• scamp

Examples of urchin in a Sentence

we could never resist the little urchin's pleas for candy

Recent Examples on the Web

After cutting open another half dozen, my hands were stained red, urchin spines were embedded in my skin and my mouth was dancing. —Jaime Lowe, New York Times, 26 Sep. 2024

Correspondent Maura Barrett helps researchers place adult-sized urchins in a reef. —Evan Bush, NBC News, 19 Sep. 2024

But when director Susan Seidelman suggested her for the movie’s eponymous downtown urchin, Madonna’s face wasn’t yet implanted in everyone’s cerebral cortex. —Matthew Jacobs, Vulture, 5 July 2024

Caribbean reefs lost, on average, more than 90 percent of their urchins in a matter of weeks, and those populations have yet to recover. —Benji Jones, Vox, 8 Oct. 2024

Word History

Etymology

Middle English yrchoun, urcheoun, hirichoun "hedgehog, sea urchin," borrowed from Anglo-French heriçon, hirçun, irechon, going back to Vulgar Latin *ērīciōn-, *ērīciō, derivative (with the Latin suffix -ōn-, -ō, usually of persons) of Latin ērīcius "hedgehog, kind of military obstacle," from *ēr "hedgehog" + -īcius (or -icius), adjective suffix; *ēr, if earlier *hēr, probably going back to a root noun from the Indo-European verbal base *ǵ^her-s- "bristle, become stiff," whence also Greek chḗr "hedgehog" (attested only by the grammarian Hesychius) — more at horror entry 1

Note: The word urchin in its original sense has been largely replaced by hedgehog in standard British and North American English. Despite this recession, the Survey of English Dialects showed that urchin in various phonetic manifestations, with variants such as prickly-urchin, was still in dialect use in the west Midlands and north of England in the 1950's (see Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar, Routledge, 1994). The application of urchin in a more or less pejorative way to a child, much more rarely to a young woman, began in the sixteenth century; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first edition, it became more common after ca. 1780. — The Anglo-French borrowing evidenced in Middle English clearly reflects a northern French form with a hushing consonant; compare modern Walloon urechon, irchon (Mons), Picard iršõ. Trésor de la langue française follows Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch in treating Old French heriçon, etc., as a derivative of a putative simplex *eriz (matching Old Occitan aritz, Italian riccio, Spanish erizo, etc.) joined to the diminutive suffix -on (see aileron). Both references allude to an article by Albert Stimming that analyzes the fall of inherited vowels in French in medial syllables (Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 36. Band [1913], pp. 466-71); according to Stimming, the medial vowel in hypothetical *ericionem should regularly have dropped, yielding *erçon, which is not attested—hence the formation evident in heriçon must be a later development. However, Pierre Fouché regarded heriçon and a few other words with similar structure—sénecon "groundsel," soupçon, Old French sospeçon "suspicion," hameçon "hook"—as exceptions in which in the affricate terminating the syllable acted in the same way as a geminate in preserving the preceding vowel (Phonétique historique du français, vol. 2, Paris, 1969 [1958], pp. 487, 489-90). — The word *ēr is attested in classical Latin only as an accusative form irim in Plautus; both this vocalism and the loss of h are taken as dialectal, or, as Ernout and Meillet put it, "country words" ("mots de campagne"). An accusative erem was used by the Late Latin poet Nemesianus (3rd century A.D.). The formation with the suffix -īcius (or -icius—vowel length is uncertain) is anomalous, as neither suffix is otherwise appended to animal names; Manu Leumann suggests that the formation may have originated in soldiers' speech, with ērīcius/ēricius alluding originally not to a literal hedgehog, but rather an obstacle with sharpened ends used in fortifications.

First Known Use

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing urchin

• sea urchin

Kids Definition

urchin

noun

ur·​chin ˈər-chən 

1

: a mischievous child

2

: sea urchin