pericarp

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Botany The wall of a ripened ovary; fruit wall.
2. n. A membranous structure surrounding the cystocarp of red algae.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. In flowering plants, the seed-vessel or ripened ovary. It should accord in structure with the ovary from which it is derived, but extensive changes frequently take place during fructiflcation by which the original ovarian form is obscured. Thus, by abortion the original number of cells in the ovary may be reduced in the fruit, as in the oak, chestnut, elm, and birch; or by the intrusion of false partitions the original mumber may be increased in the fruit, as in Datura, Linum, Astragalus, etc. The pericarp may acquire external accessions, as the wing of the maple, ash, and hoptree, the prickles on the pod of Datura, Ricinus, etc., or the barbs of the Boraginaceæ. Connected organs may modify the ovary, such as the adnate calyx of the apple, the pappus of the Compositæ, the persistent style of Clematis, the fleshy calyx of Gaultheria, or the fleshy receptacle of the strawberry. The walls of the ovary may change in consistence in the mature pericarp, being leaf-like in the pea-pod, columbine, caltha, etc., thickened and dry in nuts and capsules, fleshy or pulpy in berries, and fleshy without but indurated within, as in all stone-fruits. Where the walls of the pericarp are composed of dissimilar layers, the layers are distinguished as exocarp, endocarp, epicarp, mesocarp, and putamen. In cryptogams the pericarp is a variously modified structure containing certain organs of reproduction. Thus, in the Characeæ it incloses the oösperm, while in the Florideæ it incloses the carpospores. The term is also sometimes synonymous with the theca or capsule of mosses.

Wiktionary

1. n. botany The outermost layer, or skin, of a ripe fruit or ovary.
2. n. used figuratively

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Bot.) The ripened ovary; the walls of the fruit. See Illusts. of capsule, drupe, and legume.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the ripened and variously modified walls of a plant ovary