1 [C] a hollow place or structure that a bird makes or chooses for laying its eggs and sheltering its young:
sparrows building a nest of twigs and dry grass
2 [C] a place where insects or other small creatures live and produce their young:
an ants' / wasps' nest * a nest of mice
3 [sing.] a secret place which is full of bad people and their activities:
a nest of thieves
4 [sing.] the home, thought of as the safe place where parents bring up their children:
to leave the nest (= leave your parents' home)
5 [C,usually sing.] a group or set of similar things that are made to fit inside each other:
a nest of tables
IDIOMS see EMPTYadj., FEATHERv., FLYv., HORNET, MARE
verb [V] to make and use a nest:
Thousands of seabirds are nesting on the cliffs.
Rate this entry
About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for nest is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is nest a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, nest is tagged as noun.
Does nest appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — nest appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
