sedge

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Insects now enrich the air, frogs pipe cheerily in the shallows, soon followed by the ouzel, which is the first bird to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is the first of plants So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly lovable from century to century.

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Definitions (11)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. noun Any of numerous grasslike plants of the family Cyperaceae, having solid stems, leaves in three vertical rows, and spikelets of inconspicuous flowers, with each flower subtended by a scalelike bract.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (8)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • Great flats of mud, submerged at high water, stretched to his feet over the Strand, and at the margin of mud and sedge was a cluster of huts, built on poles; inaccessible because their careful householders had drawn up the ladders at sunset. —  The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
  • Already it had cleared the sedge, and was floating out in open water. —  The Hunters' Feast Conversations Around the Camp Fire
  • A fishery that gave poor and diminishing results, even with the Mayfly, sedge, and Welshman's button, was not suitable for dry-fly experts, and the Ramsbury experiment was abandoned. —  Lines in Pleasant Places Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler
  • He had crept in among the sedge, and no doubt was lying with only his head, or part of it, above the water, his body concealed by the broad leaves of the nymphae_, while the head itself could not be distinguished among the white flowers that lay thickly along the surface. —  The Young Voyageurs Boy Hunters in the North
  • Moreover, the sedge was so thick, that it was with difficulty they could use their oars. —  The Young Voyageurs Boy Hunters in the North
 

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Words tagged sedge

indian grass · cord grass · big bluestem · sideoats grama · porcupine grass · prairie dropseed · little bluestem · rip gut · buffalo grass · blue joint · prairie brome

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Etymologies (3)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English segge, from Old English secg; see sek- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (2)

  1. Also dial, (common in early modern English use) seg; from Middle English segge, segg, from Anglo-Saxon secg = MD), segghe = Middle Low German Low German segge, sedge, literally ‘cutter,’ so called from the shape of the leaves; from Teutonicseg, sag, cut: see saw. Cf. Irish seasg, seisg = Welsh hesg, sedge. For the sense, cf. English sword-grass; F. glaïeul, from Latin gladiolus, a small sword, sword-lily, flag (see gladiolus); German schwertel, sword-lily, schwertel-gras, sedge, from schwert, a sword.
  2. A variant of siege (Middle English sege), seat, sitting: see siege.
 

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/sɛdʒ/
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