wingspan
Americannoun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of wingspan
Explanation
To find a bird's wingspan, you need to measure the distance from the tip of one outstretched wing to the other. An eagle has a much larger wingspan than a sparrow. Anything with two wings has a wingspan, which is one way to get a sense of its size. So birds and butterflies can be measured for wingspan, but so can airplanes. A flying squirrel can have a wingspan of over a foot, and some hummingbirds have wingspans that are barely over an inch. Sports commentators often mention the wingspan of basketball players — in this case, they're referring to the distance between a player's outstretched fingertips.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
They're actually quite small birds, about the size of a wood pigeon, but they look much bigger - they have a wingspan much bigger in comparison to most other birds to their body size.
From BBC ● Aug. 26, 2026
Designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962, the terminal has a dramatic, glass-walled facade with a sloping roofline that recalls a wingspan.
From Slate ● Aug. 18, 2026
"The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot wingspan, around the size of a barn owl."
From Science Daily ● Jun. 23, 2026
When opponents are lucky enough to launch the ball over his 8-foot wingspan, they invariably miss.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 2, 2026
“Such maneuverability! How does the wingspan compensate for the weight of the horse’s body, I wonder?”
From "The Titan's Curse" by Rick Riordan
Pyka's planes are sometimes called large drones, but it seems an understatement: they all have 11.5m wingspans.
From BBC ● Sep. 1, 2026
Each is 80 to 100 feet wide, sized for helicopters and warplanes that have shorter wingspans than most commercial passenger aircraft, said Damien Symon, a researcher at The Intel Lab, an intelligence consulting firm.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 5, 2025
Because of cicadas' larger size -- with wingspans that can rival a small hummingbird's -- they use less energy to expel pee in jets.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 11, 2024
From lappet-faced vultures with nine-foot wingspans to long-crested eagles with spiky mohawks, Africa’s raptors are undeniably spectacular birds.
From National Geographic ● Jan. 4, 2024
They were mock-ups of the actual aeroplane, with wingspans of up to five feet.
From "Dragonwings" by Laurence Yep
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
