Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Having the power to excrete.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Having the power of excreting, or promoting excretion.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Having the power of
excreting , or promotingexcretion .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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She clearly, for the past sixteen years, has not had human reproductive or excretive systems.
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The excessive exercise of the whole body is setting free from the tissues such an amount of excretive matter, and carbon more largely than all the others, that, without a relative action of the lungs to admit the air that oxygen may be absorbed, carbonic acid gas cannot be liberated through the lungs as fast as the waste carbon of the overworked tissues is being made by disassimilation from this excess of respiration.
Scientific American Supplement, No. 275, April 9, 1881 Various
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We have assumed that the preparation and serving of food and the removal of dirt, the nutritive and excretive processes of the family, are feminine functions; and we have also assumed that these processes must go on in what we call the home, which is the external expression of the family.
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The orphan, the bachelor, the childless widower, have as much need of these nutritive and excretive processes as any patriarchal parent.
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Of the faculty of nutrition, then, there are four forces: an attractive force which attracts nourishment: a retentive force by which nourishment is retained and not suffered to be immediately excreted: an alternative force by which the food is resolved into the humours: and an excretive force, by which the excess of food is excreted into the draught and cast forth.
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Whether, granting that the function of the skin is purely protective, absorbent, excretive, and tactile, the circulation of the blood and all its mechanism would not correspond with the transsubstantiation of our Will, as the circulation of the nerve fluid corresponds to that of the Mind?
Louis Lambert Honor�� de Balzac 1824
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