Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A natural outer covering; an integument.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A cover; an envelop; a natural covering or protection of the body or a part of it; a tegmen or tegmentum.
  • noun Specifically— In zoology and anatomy, skin; the general covering of the body; the integument.
  • noun In entomology: A tegmen; the wing-cover or elytrum of orthopterous insects: an erroneous use, apparently by confusion with tegmen, 5.
  • noun Properly, the crust, or chitinous integument, of the body, as distinguished from the hairs, scales, etc., which may grow upon it.

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

  • noun A cover or covering; an integument.
  • noun Especially, the covering of a living body, or of some part or organ of such a body; skin; hide.

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

  • noun Something which covers; a covering or coating.
  • noun anatomy, obsolete A natural covering of the body or of a bodily organ; an integument.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a natural protective body covering and site of the sense of touch

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Latin tegumentum, from tegere, to cover; see (s)teg- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin tegumentum, from tegere ‘to cover’.

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Examples

  • People climbed the trees to shake down the nuts, many still sheathed in the bright-green fleshy tegument, while other family members and relations combed the forest floor and picked them up.

    Wildwood Roger Deakin 2009

  • People climbed the trees to shake down the nuts, many still sheathed in the bright-green fleshy tegument, while other family members and relations combed the forest floor and picked them up.

    Wildwood Roger Deakin 2009

  • Such evidences of his unceasing ardour, both for ‘divine and human lore,’ when advanced into his sixty-fifth year, and notwithstanding his many disturbances from disease, must make us at once honour his spirit, and lament that it should be so grievously clogged by its material tegument.

    The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. 2004

  • Hide was a misnomer, of course, since the scrapes reported that the creature's tegument wasn't any more multicellular than the rest of it.

    Doctor’s Orders Diane Duane 2000

  • He very much wanted to, having seen the first part of the tegument report.

    Doctor’s Orders Diane Duane 2000

  • "Hmm," he said again, scrolling past the obscure serology results and looking at the tegument test and scrape instead.

    Doctor’s Orders Diane Duane 2000

  • I'm going to be down there in ten minutes, and if you haven't got waiting there for me a group serology analysis, a tegument series with scrapes, a neural series with pertinent EEG, and a percussion-and-auscultation set—

    Doctor’s Orders Diane Duane 2000

  • It was incredibly thick, dry, pliable; filled minutely with cells of a liquid-gaseous something which she knew to be a more perfect insulator even than the fibres of the tegument itself.

    Children of the Lens Smith, E. E. 1954

  • After all what is this mortal tegument but a shell which a man sloughs off in eternal evolution.

    Diane of the Green Van Leona Dalrymple

  • Every variation was observed, generally the more leafy the outer tegument the greater was the degree of straightness of the funicle, and the abortion of the nucleus.

    Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries William Griffith

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