CARRION

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does carrion mean? 

• CARRION (noun)
  The noun CARRION has 1 sense:

1. the dead and rotting body of an animal; unfit for human food

  Familiarity information: CARRION used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CARRION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The dead and rotting body of an animal; unfit for human food

Classified under:

Nouns denoting animals

Hypernyms ("carrion" is a kind of...):

body; dead body (a natural object consisting of a dead animal or person)

 Context examples 

He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

“THAT carrion! And he ever cared for her, she'd tell me. Ha, ha! The liars that these traders are!”

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

He's a foul feeder, is Mr. Malone, a carrion eater, like all of his kind—porcus ex grege diaboli—a swine from the devil's herd.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The Houyhnhnms keep the Yahoos for present use in huts not far from the house; but the rest are sent abroad to certain fields, where they dig up roots, eat several kinds of herbs, and search about for carrion, or sometimes catch weasels and luhimuhs (a sort of wild rat), which they greedily devour.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

More broadly, the researchers used the bees as a model organism to better understand the impact of changing land uses on the diversity of species that make up a community of organisms and, in turn, their delivery of ecosystem services, such as crop pollination, water filtration (by mussels, for example) or carrion scavenging (vulture feeding).

(Diverse Bee Communities Best for Apple Orchards, U.S. Department of Agriculture)

And I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of fishes.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

He disgusted me much while with him, for when a horrid blow-fly, bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room, he caught it, held it exultantly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and, before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and ate it.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

But where the conical explosive bullets of the twentieth century were of no avail, the poisoned arrows of the natives, dipped in the juice of strophanthus and steeped afterwards in decayed carrion, could succeed.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Our numbers and our noise had frightened all living creatures away, and save for a few pterodactyls, which soared round high above our heads while they waited for the carrion, all was still around the camp.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)