What is the difference between an ermine and a weasel ?

An ermine is a member of the weasel family so that an ermine is a weasel but a weasel is not necessarily an ermine--- could be my x-husband.

More information is needed for full credit.

Okay, an ermine is a short-tailed weasel. True weasel has a much longer tail.

I looked in both Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster and both indicated that an ermine is a essentially weasel whose coat turns white in the winter. MW says " especially : a short-tailed weasel (Mustela erminea) of the forests and tundra of Eurasia and No. America " Britannica says that it is the short-tailed weasel that royal robes were made from. Infoplease.com indicates that "Species living in snowy regions acquire white coats in winter and are then known as ermine." implying that both species are called ermine. Basically, I was looking for the answer that they are the same animal, but that an ermine was the animal with a white, or winter, coat.

Encarta says that ermines, mink, polecats and ferrets are all different species of the weasel family, which is what I meant by my first answer.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761560270&pn=1

Let me try to resolve this with the aid of the (British) Mammal Society, who ought to know, ermine being a fur of European nobility

The fur 'ermine' comes from the stoat, whose Latin name is mustela erminea ( which gives us a clue!). Depending on how far North you are, your local stoat turns a bit white, mostly white or wholly white in Winter.However the black tip to its tail remains. That is why ermine is white with black dots or small dashes in it; the pelts are arranged so as to show the tail tips.( This effect is sometimes imitated or improved by tipping in the white fur,whether genuine stoat fur or not, with black ink ).

Now, your weasel is mustela nivalis . How do you tell them apart ? [Pause now for an ancient schoolboy joke I've been dying to offload for ages; since I was a schoolboy, I suppose:

"The one is weasily distinguished because the other is stoatally different" ]

As the Latin name indicates the stoat and the weasel are related; the polecat and its domestic version the ferret are of that family; surprisingly perhaps the badger, meles meles, is a cousin too

In fact the weasel is the much smaller animal. A male stoat may weigh as much as 445gms ( about a pound) but a male weasel is less than a third of that, say, 130gms and the stoat's body is about 275mm long ,c 11 inches, against about 200mm , c 8 inches . (I've seen smaller, female stoats carrying off rabbits, the prey slung over the back, like a man carrying coal sacks, to take to their young; they are amazingly strong ; the rabbit is bigger and awkward too).

The weasel is gingery red over the top of its body but has cream underparts.

The word ermine is used exclusively for the fur down in the East here, not the stoat itself, but the Oxford English Dictionary says that the word can be used for the animal and is so used particularly when it is in its winter coat.

The OED defines weasel as the weasel of which I write, m. nivalis; the stoat as m. erminea. M-W just tries to confuse you over weasel though it does define stoat correctly. The OED does note that 'weasel' has been applied to animals that resemble it. It is also 'a native or inhabitant of South Carolina '(!); perhaps they'd best stick with mammals

[This message was edited by FredPuli on 08-24-03 at 07:37 AM.]