couchant
adjUK /ˈkaʊtʃənt/
Etymology From Middle English couchant, from Middle French couchant.
1
Of an animal Lying with belly down and front legs extended; crouching.
- The dogs, with eager yelp, / Are struggling to be free; / The hawks in frequent stoop / Token their haste for flight; / And couchant on the saddle-bow, / With tranquil eyes, and talons sheath’d, / The ounce expects his liberty.1801, Robert Southey, “(please specify the page)”, in Thalaba the Destroyer, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] [F]or T[homas] N[orton] Longman and O[wen] Rees, […], by Biggs and Cottle, […], →OCLC:
- There were the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities of gravel.1865, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “The Shipwreck”, in [Sophia Thoreau; William Ellery Channing], editors, Cape Cod, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 14:
2 more examples
- Two figures faced each other, large, austere; / A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast, / An angel standing in the moonlight clear; […]1880, James Thomson, chapter XX, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems, London: Reeves and Turner, […], →OCLC:
- Or again, have you ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance?1922 October 26, Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, Richmond, London: […] Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, →OCLC:
2
Government, Heraldry, Hobbies, Lifestyle, Monarchy, Nobility, Politics Represented as crouching with the head raised.
- His crest was covered with a couchant Hownd, / And all his armour seem'd of antique mould […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- Derived terms
- couchant and levant, counter-couchant, levant and couchant