• Bosnian: crna
• Croatian: crna
• Japanese: 黒色の (kuro iro no)
• Serbian:

  Cyrillic: црна

  Roman: crna

• Bosnian: crna
• Croatian: crna
• Dutch: zwart , sabel
• French: sable
• German: schwarz
• Hungarian: fekete
• Italian: nero
• Polish: czarny
• Portuguese: sable
• Romanian: negru
• Russian: черный
• Serbian:

  Cyrillic: црна

  Roman: crna

• Spanish: sable
• Swedish: svart

Derived terms

• sable antelope
• sablefish

Related terms

• zibeline

See also

References

• Random House Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1987.

French

Pronunciation

• [sabl

]

Etymology 1

Latin sabulum

Noun

fr-noun m

1. sand

Derived terms

• bac à sable
• sable mouvant

Etymology 2

From Old French martre sable "sable marten", an animal. Possibly from an Old Slavonic word; compare with Russian соболь.

Noun

fr-noun m

1. The heraldic colour sable; black.

Spanish

Noun

sable

1. saber; cutlass

The sable (Martes zibellina) is a small carnivorous mammal, closely related to the martens. It inhabits forest environments primarily in Russia from the Ural Mountains throughout Siberia, in northern Mongolia and China and on Hokkaidō in Japan. Its range in the wild originally extended through European Russia to Poland and Scandinavia. It has historically been harvested for its highly valued fur, which remains a luxury good to this day. While hunting of wild animals is still common in Russia, most fur in the market is now commercially farmed.

Etymology

The name sable appears to be of Slavic origin and to have entered most Western European via the early medieval fur trade. Thus the Russian and Polish sobol became the German Zobel, Dutch Sabel; the French zibelline Spanish cibelina, cebellina, Finnish soopeli and Mediaeval Latin zibellina derive from the Italian form. The English and Medieval Latin word sabellum comes from the Old French sable or saible.

The term has become a generic description for some black-furred animal breeds, such as sable cats or rabbits.

Physical Appearance

Males weigh 880-1800 grams and have body length between 380-560 mm, with relatively long tails between 90-120 mm. Males are somewhat larger than females (700-1560 grams, 350-510 mm). Winter pelage is longer and thicker than their summer coat. Coloration varies in color from tan to black. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to an increase of hunting and poaching in the 1990s, in part because wild caught Russian furs are considered the most luxurious and demand the highest prices on the international market. Currently, the species has no special conservation status according to the IUCN, though the isolated Japanese subspecies M. zibellina brachyurus is listed as "data-deficient".

Because of its great expense, sable fur is typically integrated into various clothes fashions: to decorate collars, sleeves, hems and hats (see, for example the shtreimel). The so-called Kolinsky sable-hair brushes used for watercolor or oil painting are not manufactured from sable hair, but from that of the siberian weasel.

References

External links

Martes zibellina on U. M. Animal Diversity Web

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