" urchins "

[Noun]  | "ur*chin" | \ ˈər-chən \

1: hedgehog

2: a mischievous and often poor and raggedly clothed youngster

3: sea urchin

Origin: 14th century ;

 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 *ǵher-s- "bristle, become stiff," whence also Greek chḗr "hedgehog" (attested only by the grammarian Hesychius) {mat|horror:1|};

  * Note : The word urchin in its original sense has been largely replaced by {hedgehog|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|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 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.;

[Noun]  | "sea urchin" 

1: any of numerous echinoderms (class Echinoidea) that are usually enclosed in thin brittle globular tests covered with movable spines

Origin: 1591 ;

[Noun]  | "urchins" 

[Noun]  | "urchin"