spicula
English
Noun
spicula
Noun
spicula (plural spiculas or spiculae)
- A little spike; a spikelet.
- 1861, Various, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861[1]:
- And yet Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described,--not a bird nor a berry of the woods, nor a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor winter, nor sun, nor star.
- 1906, John Tyndall, Six Lectures on Light[2]:
- Introducing the alum-cell, and placing the coating of hoar-frost at the intensely luminous focus of the electric lamp, not a spicula of the dazzling frost is melted.
- A pointed fleshy appendage.
- 1904, John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson[3]:
- Nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries.
Latin
Noun
(deprecated template usage) spīcula
References
- “spicula”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- spicula in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
- spicula in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.