Crossword clue
Wading bird crossword clue
15 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "wading bird", from as short as 4 letters up to 9, grouped below by the length of your slot.
Written by Blake Boege
Answers by length
Read the row that matches your slot. IBIS is the shortest answer here and TRUMPETER the longest.
| Letters | Answers |
|---|---|
| 4 |
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| 5 |
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| 7 |
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| 8 |
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| 9 |
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What this list looks like
If your slot is 5 wide you have the most to choose from, with 4 candidates.
At 4 letters you have IBIS and RAIL, and short answers like these turn up far more often than their share of the dictionary suggests.
The list mixes 1 synonym with 14 examples of the thing itself.
Which one does the setter mean?
Four squares is IBIS, which along with the four-letter RAIL is the pair to try first. IBIS is a crossword regular because of its vowel pattern. Five squares gives you HERON, STORK and CRANE, and only the crossings will separate them.
How these differ
These are birds that feed standing in shallow water, and they sort by bill. IBIS has a long curved bill for probing mud. SPOONBILL has the flattened tip its name describes. HERON and STORK are tall and straight-billed, the heron a solitary ambusher, the stork more social. FLAMINGO filters rather than stabs. CRANE is the odd one: it is a wader by build but often feeds in dry fields, and it is the tallest flying bird. RAIL, LIMPKIN and COURLAN are secretive marsh birds you are far more likely to meet in a grid than in a marsh.
Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have
Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.
Where these answers come from
These came out of a dictionary. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “wading bird” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.
Common questions
- What is the answer to the crossword clue "wading bird"?
- There is more than one. 15 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Four squares is IBIS, which along with the four-letter RAIL is the pair to try first. IBIS is a crossword regular because of its vowel pattern. Five squares gives you HERON, STORK and CRANE, and only the crossings will separate them.
- How many letters is the answer to "wading bird"?
- Anything from 4 to 9. The length with the most candidates is 5. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.