Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A hair or hairlike structure, especially on the surface of a cell or microorganism.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In botany, one of the fine slender bodies, like hair, covering some plants.
- n. In zoology, a hair or hair-like body, especially a hair in any way distinguished from those which collectively cover the body.
Wiktionary
WordNet 3.0
- n. hairlike structure especially on the surface of a cell or microorganism
- n. any of the cylindrical filaments characteristically growing from the epidermis of a mammal
Etymologies
- From the Latin hair (Wiktionary)
- Latin. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“It does explore the topic of homology between the flagellar axial proteins rod-hook-filament and the T3SS pilus, which is incredibly useful.”
“A bacterium connects itself to another through a tube structure called pilus (there are lots of them, spiky things, plural: pilli), you can see them in the second illustration in this article (scroll up).”
“Stultissimus pilus occipitis mei plus scit, quam omnes vestri doctores, et calceorum meorum annuli doctiores sunt quam vester Galenus et Avicenna, barba mea plus experta est quam vestrae omnes Academiae.”
““Ubera tua intumuerunt, et pilus tuus germinavit; et eras nuda et confusione plena.” — “Thy breasts were fashioned, and thy hair was grown, and thou wast naked and confused.””
“The pilus prior commanded a cohort; the primipilus a legion.”
“Antony called a war council, not a meeting of his intimates but a gathering that included all his legates and tribunes, plus the primipilus and pilus prior centurions—sixty men altogether.”
“A desperate pilus stretched from the outer flank of Ekarete's ship.”
“A pilus extended from Tasmin's ship; Yalnis's ship accepted it.”
“Air rushed past Yalnis in a quick blast; the wind fell still as her ship clenched its pilus and resorbed it.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘pilus’.
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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Words from freerice.com
foolscap, tabor, pilus, carom, pomelo, pluton, bulbul, dhole, duenna, poniard, breviary, bollix and 88 more...
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FreeRice Words
interdiction, comely, spume, dote, remit, raring, culvert, dolorous, postern, fusillade, salvo, alate and 57 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for pilus.
chained_bear "There are two key components to the bacteria's assault on a human body: the TCP pilus that allows it to replicate with such exponential fury in the small intestine, and the cholera toxin that actually triggers the rapid dehydration of the host. Mekalanos and Waldor discovered that the gene for cholera toxin is actually supplied by an outside source: a virus called CTX phage.... As unlikely as it sounds, V. cholerae is not a born killer. It needs the CTX phage to switch over to the dark side."
—Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map (New York: Penguin, 2006), 246 Oct 4, 2008