A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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sea urchin
A sea urchin is a spherical spiny animal that grazes algae off rock with a five-toothed apparatus on its underside. The spines move, the tube feet grip, and the whole animal walks slowly on both. Its skeleton, called a test, is a rigid mosaic of interlocking plates arranged in fivefold symmetry, and it is what remains as the pale ridged ball found on a beach.
Etymology
Urchin is the old English word for a hedgehog, from Old French, and it meant that for centuries before it meant a scruffy child. So a sea urchin is a sea hedgehog, and the same comparison was made independently in Greek, Latin, and most European languages.