from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun Any of various storklike wading birds of the family Threskiornithidae of temperate and tropical regions, having a long, slender, downward-curving bill.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun In angling, an artificial hackle-fly, ribbed with silver tinsel, with body, hackle, wings, and tail scarlet.
noun A bird of the family Ibididæ, or of the genus Ibis in a wide sense.
noun [capitalized] [NL.] The leading genus of the family Ibididæ, formerly more than coextensive with the family, but successively restricted to various generic types of ibises.
noun Some bird like an ibis, or supposed to be an ibis, as a wood-ibis or wood-stork. See Tantalinæ.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun (Zoöl.) Any bird of the genus Ibis and several allied genera, of the family Ibidæ, inhabiting both the Old World and the New. Numerous species are known. They are large, wading birds, having a long, curved beak, and feed largely on reptiles.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun Any of various long-legged wadingbirds in the family Threskiornithidae. They have long downcurved bills used to probe the mud for prey such as crustaceans.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun wading birds of warm regions having long slender down-curved bills
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Middle English ibin, from Latin ībis, from Greek, from Egyptian hbj.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From Latin ībis, from Ancient Greek ἶβις (ibis), from Egyptian
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Examples
The ibis is a bird that was found so useful in destroying locusts and serpents in Egypt, that in olden times it was made a capital crime for any one to destroy it.
These birds formed the topic of our after-supper conversation, and then it generalised to the different species of wading birds of America, and at length that singular creature, the "ibis," became the theme.
supbob91 commented on the word ibis
located in Merriam Webtster's Notebook Dictionary pg 39.
From Robert Mcfarland
September 25, 2010