Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having the form of a crescent.
  • In geology, noting certain crescentiform marks or ‘gouges’ attributed to the action of glacial ice.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Crescent-shaped.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective growing, increasing, gaining size etc.
  • adjective Crescent-shaped.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From crescent '(growing) half moon' + -ic; from Anglo-Norman cressaunt, from Old French creissant, from Latin crēscēns ("waxing"), present active participle of crēscō ("come forth, grow").

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Examples

  • (An amphitheater with crescentic tumuli as seatings, by Hargreaves Associates.)

    Agro Park 2008

  • An amphitheater with crescentic tumuli as seatings, by Hargreaves Associates.

    Archive 2008-03-01 2008

  • The Seychelles Bank and Mauritius form the ends of the crescentic Mascarene Plateau where the ocean shoals to less than 200 meters (m).

    Western Indian Ocean Islands and coastal and marine environments 2008

  • They are covered with reddish brown hair, and the sides of the face, in adult males, are commonly produced into two crescentic, flexible excrescences, like fatty tumours.

    Essays 2007

  • Dr.W. E. Roth describes crescentic hooks of coco-nut shell and wooden hooks with bone barb, and also barbs improvised from one of the spines of the catfish.

    Tropic Days 2003

  • The crescentic sweep of the wavelets rolled fragments of shell or coral in the mud, successive revolutions adding to the respective bulks by accretion.

    My Tropic Isle 2003

  • As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.

    Moby Dick; or the Whale 2002

  • In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.

    Moby Dick; or the Whale 2002

  • The body protoplasm is generally crescentic; there are two chromatin masses, the larger one, the nucleus, on the side of the convexity, the other narrower, more deeply stained situated usually on the edge of the concavity, the centrosome.

    Alphonse Laveran - Nobel Lecture 1967

  • I found in the blood, leucocytes more or less loaded with pigment, but in addition to these melaniferous leucocytes, pigmented spherical bodies of variable size possessing amoeboid movement, free or adherent to the red cells; non-pigmented corpuscles forming clear spots in the red cells; finally pigmented elements, crescentic in shape attracted my attention, and from then on I supposed they were parasites.

    Alphonse Laveran - Nobel Lecture 1967

Comments

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  • "...it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail..."

    - Melville, Moby-Dick, ch. 54

    July 25, 2008

  • ... "Steelkilt"?! ... *dreams*

    July 25, 2008

  • Told you that you'd like Moby-Dick. :-)

    July 29, 2008

  • "In geology, noting certain crescentiform marks or ‘gouges’ attributed to the action of glacial ice. They are thought to be due to localized pressure, as in the process of gouging, and are therefore sometimes called crescentic gouges. G. K. Gilbert, in Science, Dec. 23, 1904, p. 894."

    --Cent. Dict.

    December 15, 2012