Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A small needlelike structure or part, such as one of the silicate or calcium carbonate processes supporting the soft tissue of certain invertebrates, especially sponges.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A fine-pointed body resembling a needle: as, ice -spicules.
- n. In botany:
- n. A spikelet.
- n. One of the small projections or points on the basidia of hymenomycetous fungi which bear the spores. There are usually four to each basidium. See sterigma.
- n. In zoology, a hard, sharp body like a little spike, straight or curved, rod-like, or branched, or diversiform; a spiculum; a sclere: variously applied, without special reference to size or Shape. Specifically— One of the skeletal elements, scleres, or spicula of the protozoans, as radiolarians, either calcareous or silicious, coherent or detached. See cuts under
Radiolaria and Sphærozoum. - n. In botany, the empty frustule of a diatom.
Wiktionary
- n. A sharp, needle-like piece
- n. biology Any of many needle-like crystalline structures that provide skeletal support in marine invertebrates like sponges
- n. astronomy A jet of matter ejected from the photosphere of the sun
- n. A small spike of flowers
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A minute, slender granule, or point.
- n. (Bot.) Same as Spicula.
- n. (Zoöl.) Any small calcareous or siliceous body found in the tissues of various invertebrate animals, especially in sponges and in most Alcyonaria.
WordNet 3.0
- n. small pointed structure serving as a skeletal element in various marine and freshwater invertebrates e.g. sponges and corals
Etymologies
- Latin spīculum; see spiculum. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“But now, as he threaded his way down, that flicker of light was the faint spicule of a star that burned with the hot roar of a nova.”
“The sea urchin larval spicule is a model system for biominerals, and the first one in which the amorphous calcium carbonate precursor was discovered in 1997 by the same Israeli group co-authoring the current PNAS paper.”
“Any spicule, any prominence, would long since have either fallen back into the chromosphere, or blown away entirely…but not this thing.”
“Any spicule, any prominence, would long since have either fallen back into the chromosphere, or blown away entirely… but not this thing.”
“The ice storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, highspeed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand.”
“_ -- Early interference was only warranted by positive knowledge that some source of irritation or pressure could be removed; thus a bone spicule, or a bullet, or part of one, particularly portions of mantles.”
“The two strongest indications for operation are (1) signs pointing to the secondary implication of the nerve in a cicatrix, especially when these are of such a nature as to indicate local tension, fixation, or pressure; (2) the possibility of the irritation being the result of the presence of some foreign body, such as a bone spicule, or portions of a bullet mantle; in such cases the X rays will often give useful help.”
“In other cases secondary hæmorrhage was the result of perforation of the vessel by a sharp spicule of bone, but in the large majority sepsis and suppuration were the cause.”
“I will now give you recipes for some messes made with these fresh, crushed, spicule-stripped blossoms; however, dried blossoms were often used in these messes instead, and were just as good.”
“One of these giant cells may be found lying in a Howships foveola at the free end of each spicule.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘spicule’.
-
party animals
animal parts
anal fork, electric organ, faecal parasol, sublingua, toothcomb, dewclaw, pope's nose, nerve net, oral sucker, oral arm, squid giant synapse, squid giant axon and 99 more...
-
Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
-
Phonestheme: SP-, the Pointy Object
Grateful credit to http://reocities.com/SoHo/Studios/9783/phond1.html.
spear, spire, spine, spike, spur, spit, spork, spindle, rasp, spar, spicule, spiny and 16 more...
-
I do not like them, Sam I Am
Words that, for various reasons, I wish we could do without.
copacetic, gamut, horehound, lewd, membrane, metrics, mucous, mucus, negligee, nostril, odious, odor and 143 more...
-
Words for ice and snow
Environmental Ice and Snow
(excluding all the food ice)ice, icicle, frazil, frasil, sleet, slush, snow, flurry, snowfall, freeze, flash-freeze, quick-freeze and 618 more...
-
I Can't Believe It's Not Listed
Words that, at the I put them here, weren't being listed by anyone else in the entire universe.
vagus, neoplanet, fadiddy, cazique, catastroika, circumciser, commonplace book, danseuse, ecopod, dichloroacetate, underlay, overlay and 374 more...
-
Outlander series words
A place for me to keep words I found (or found anew) while reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. (Culling my enormous "Learned (or Encountered) in Reading" list.)
gralloch, yeuk, corpse-candle, saprophytic, baldachin, Kermanshah, celandine, tynchal, quaich, mesentery, basidium, dittany and 244 more...
-
June 2010
subsidence, infauna, epifauna, taxa, macrofauna, megafauna, meiofauna, microfauna, biota, ikaite, pelagic, demersal and 16 more...
-
Music of the Spheres
Italian jargon for sound notation and astronomy stuff.
cosmos, azimuth, appoggiatura, sotto voce, messa di voce, mezza voce, acciacatura, a cappella, da capo aria, tremolo, basso profundo, cislunar and 9 more...
-
Malfeas notes
Descriptive words for an upcoming project.
stippled, tumid, turgid, putrescent, primeval, moiety, musk, prolix, excrescence, septentrion, wherry, jumentous and 44 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for spicule.
chained_bear "I remembered what Fergus had said, in answer to Jamie's instructions: 'I remember how this game is played.' So did I, and spicules of ice began to form in my blood."
—Diana Gabaldon, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), 688 Feb 3, 2010
vanishedone NASA: 'Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun.' Nov 3, 2008