Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Pertaining to myotomes or muscle segments in Amphioxus or embryos.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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The view displayed hills for miles in all directions, amongst which were many bare rocks of red colour heaped into the most fantastically tossed mounds imaginable, with here and there an odd shrub growing from the interstices of the rocks; some small miniature creeks, with only myal and mulga growing in them, ran through the valleys -- all of these had recently been running.
Australia Twice Traversed, Illustrated, Ernest Giles 1866
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Up to this point we had been continually in dense scrubs, but here the country became a little more open; myal timber, acacia, generally took the places of the mallee and the casuarinas; the spinifex disappeared, and real grass grew in its place.
Australia Twice Traversed, Illustrated, Ernest Giles 1866
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This has helped in 1 other user's post. michelle. myal is a verified member
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For about twenty-five miles we traversed an entirely open plain, similar to that just described, and mostly covered with the waving broom bushes; but now upon our right hand, to the north, and stretching also to the west, was a dark line of higher ground formed of sandhills and fringed with low scrub, and timber of various kinds, such as cypress pines (callitris), black oak (casuarinas) stunted mallee (eucalyptus), and a kind of acacia called myal.
Australia Twice Traversed, Illustrated, Ernest Giles 1866
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The Preacher (hews at once his moderationt his good fenfe, and his urbanity, in this City fermon, which, for elegance of compoiition, would not difgrace a dhapei-myal.
The Monthly Review 1776
chained_bear commented on the word myal
"The nineteenth-century absentee owner of a Jamaican plantation found his slaves doing a myal dance, probably derived from an initiation rite of the Azande people of Africa, and described them as engaged in 'a great variety of grotesque actions, and chanting all the while something between a song and a howl.'"
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2006), 3
And,
"In the mid-nineteenth century, a Presbyterian missionary found black Jamaicans engaged in what they called a myal dance, and rushed out to stop them, only to be told that the dancers were not, as he supposed, 'mad.' 'You must be mad yourself,' they told him, 'and had best go away.'" (159)
February 18, 2009