featherless

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   having no feathers or having lost the usual covering of feathers

   Plato's definition of a human as a featherless biped invited a famous counterexample involving a plucked chicken.

From Middle English fethirles or fedyrles, formed from feather + -less. It is cognate with Dutch veerloos and German federlos, parallel Germanic compounds meaning "without feathers."

Topics