white-footed mouse

noun

white-foot·​ed mouse ˈ(h)wīt-ˌfu̇-təd- 

: any of various largely nocturnal mice (genus Peromyscus) of North and Central America typically having whitish feet and underparts

especially : a common woodland mouse (P. leucopus) of North America

Illustration of white-footed mouse

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

In this view, distinguishing one Omicron sublineage from another is less like distinguishing a wolf from a cow and more like distinguishing a white-footed mouse from a deer mouse: important to a rodentologist but not really to anyone else. —Jacob Stern, The Atlantic, 9 Jan. 2023

Acorns are an important food source for the white-footed mouse, a popular target of the ticks that carry the Lyme bacterium. —Jennifer Barone, Discover Magazine, 8 July 2012

If a tick feeds on an infected white-footed mouse, the tick has a 90 percent chance of picking up the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, says Felicia Keesing, a Bard College disease ecologist. —Kat Eschner, Scientific American, 7 July 2022

The wide-ranging white-footed mouse, well known among New Yorkers, and very closely related to the deer mouse, was predicted to be susceptible by a computer model that Barbara Han and her colleagues built. —Carolyn Kormann, The New Yorker, 10 Feb. 2022

Word History

First Known Use

1827, in the meaning defined above

Medical Definition

white-footed mouse

noun

white-foot·​ed mouse ˌ(h)wīt-ˌfu̇t-əd- 

: a common woodland mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) that has whitish feet and underparts and that is a reservoir for the spirochete of the genus Borrelia (B. burgdorferi) causing Lyme disease