Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A short thick solid food-storing underground stem, sometimes bearing papery scale leaves, as in the crocus or gladiolus.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In botany, a bulb-like, solid, fleshy subterranean stem, producing leaves and buds on the upper surface and roots from the lower, as in the cyclamen.
  • noun In zoology, a cormus.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) A solid bulb-shaped root, as of the crocus. See bulb.
  • noun (Biol.) Same as Cormus, 2.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A short, vertical, swollen underground stem of a plant (usually one of the monocots) that serves as a storage organ to enable the plant to survive winter or other adverse conditions such as drought.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun solid swollen underground bulb-shaped stem or stem base and serving as a reproductive structure

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin cormus, from Greek kormos, a trimmed tree trunk; see sker- in Indo-European roots.]

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Examples

  • Tribes that have more contact with modern medicine take the root, known as a corm, and crush it for use as a topical remedy for snake bites, Morgan said.

    Archive 2007-02-01 2007

  • In bananas these offsets are called suckers, but because they grow from the corm, which is an underground swollen stem, they are in fact offsets.

    5. How plants live and grow 1991

  • "It's called a corm, and the plant smells stronger, too."

    The Clan of the Cave Bear Auel, Jean M. 1980

  • The plant absorbs immense amount of sunlight energy with its vast leaves and stores the energy in its corm, which is located underground.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • The plant absorbs immense amount of sunlight energy with its vast leaves and stores the energy in its corm, which is located underground.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • This ground-covering bulb (actually called a corm) is poisonous, as is every part of the plant, which is why it's used in homeopathic remedies for gout.

    The Globe and Mail - Home RSS feed 2010

  • The plant absorbs immense amount of sunlight energy with its vast leaves and stores the energy in its corm, which is located underground.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • The [[plant]] takes in immense amount of sunlight energy with its enormous [[leaves]] and stores the energy in its corm, which is located underground.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • The plant absorbs immense amount of sunlight energy with its vast leaves and stores the energy in its corm, which is located underground.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • The plant absorbs immense amount of sunlight energy with its vast leaves and stores the energy in its corm, which is located underground.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

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  • It is autumn. Chestnut-boughs clash their inflamed leaves. The garden festers for attention: telluric cultures enriched with shards, corms, nodules, the sunk solids of gravity. I have raked up a golden and stinking blaze.

    - Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, XII

    August 30, 2008

  • August 30, 2008