esculent

English

Etymology

(deprecated template usage)

From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Latin ēsculentus (“edible; nutritious; full of food”), from ēsca (“food”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɛskjʊlənt/

• Audio (UK):

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Adjective

esculent (comparative more esculent, superlative most esculent)

1. Edible.
   • 1859, Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species:

     ...no one puts the swedish and common turnips together, though the esculent and thickened stems are so similar.

2. "Good enough to eat": attractive.
   • 1979, Kyril Bonfiglioli, After You with the Pistol, Penguin, published 2001, page 334:

     My custodian was now the ‘Old Bill’, the magistrate was one of those soppy, earnest chaps who long to hear of broken homes and deprived childhoods and Johanna was looking esculent in a cinnamon sheath such as you could not buy with a lifetime's trading-stamps.

Noun

esculent (plural esculents)

1. Something edible, especially a vegetable; a comestible.
   • 1997, Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon:

     Meanwhile, maize and morning glories, tomatoes and cherry trees, every flower and Esculent known to Linnæus, thriv’d.

2. (mycophagy) An edible mushroom.
   • 2015, Vera Stucky Evenson, Mushrooms of the Rocky Mountain Region: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming:

     [Morchella] esculentoides [is] similar to Morchella esculenta, a European esculent, whose name, appropriately, means "edible".

Coordinate terms

• poculent

Anagrams

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