Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A genus of plants, natural order Cycadaceœ, natives of Asia, Polynesia, and Australia. They are trees with simple stems, bearing a crown of crowded pinnate leaves with numerous narrow leaflets. The pollen is contained in valvate anthers on the under surface of scales, which are united into large cones. The seeds are borne on the edges of greatly altered leaves, produced in the regular series of the ordinary leaves. The seeds of several species are made into flour for bread, and the pith of the trunk yields a coarse sago, whence the common but incorrect name of sago-palm. The species frequently cultivated in hothouses are C. revoluta, from China and Japan, and C. circinalis, of the East Indies. The seeds of the latter are known as madu-nuts.
- n. [lowercase] A plant of the genus Cycas.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Bot.) A genus of trees, intermediate in character between the palms and the pines. The pith of the trunk of some species furnishes a valuable kind of sago.
WordNet 3.0
- n. type genus of Cycadaceae: genus of widely distributed Old World evergreen tropical trees having pinnate leaves and columnar stems covered with persistent bases of old leaves
Examples
“Herbert was not mistaken: he broke the stem of a cycas, which was composed of a glandulous tissue, containing a quantity of floury pith, traversed with woody fiber, separated by rings of the same substance, arranged concentrically.”
“Granite House with an ample supply of cycas stems.”
“Cyrus Harding and Herbert, after having examined that part of the Far West where the cycas grew, took their bearings, and returned to Granite House, where they made known their discovery.”
““It is a ‘cycas revoluta,’ of which I have a picture in our dictionary of Natural History!” said”
“A conservatory built in the center of the building on the south side contained a very interesting collection of orchids, cycas, and some tree ferns from the Philippines.”
Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
“We directed our steps to that part of the town where the better class seemed to reside, in cool, shady lanes, the houses embowered in large-leaved tropical trees, cocoa-nut, banana, bread-fruit, calabash, and other palms, with cycas and tree-ferns with stems some fifteen feet high.”
“I found it amazing to have banana plants in my bedroom and soon I was growing exotic things like strelitzia and cycas.”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“In the burning plains that rise but little above the level of the sea, reign the families of the banana, the cycas, and the palm, of which the number of species comprised in the flora of tropical regions has been so wonderfully increased in the present day by the zeal of botanical travelers.”
COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1
“Cycas simplicipinna (this name means the undivided leaflet cycas which makes no sense at all (as most have undivided leaflets) until you learn it was split out of one of the few that does C. micholitzii);”
“Deep in the mountains in a nature reserve, we saw Cycas taiwaniana, a special species of cycas, and next to this we saw a large piece of land approved for mining.”
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