Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Same as nudibranchiate.
  • noun A member of the Nudibranchiata.

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

  • adjective (Zoöl.) Of or pertaining to the Nudibranchiata.

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

  • noun A term for any sea slug; specifically the animals belonging to the suborder Nudibranchia, the largest suborder of the order Opisthobranchia.

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

  • noun any of various marine gastropods of the suborder Nudibranchia having a shell-less and often beautifully colored body

Etymologies

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

[From New Latin Nūdibranchia, order name : nudi– + branchia.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Circa 19th Century, from Latin nudus ("naked") + branchia ("gills")

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Examples

Comments

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  • O, nudibranchs! Dream-spun mollusks!

    You look like flowers, and forests! And psychedelic bonnets! Like hippopotamus gardens, and—and this! With sproingy things!

    You lay egg-spirals. You masquerade as the world's teensiest whales! I would build for us a house with walls made out of fishtanks..!

    But I have garden slugs. :<

    August 22, 2008

  • Lovely, she! :-)

    August 22, 2008

  • Prettiest comment ever on Wordie, she.

    August 22, 2008

  • The word coloratura is apt for such beauty. . ..

    August 22, 2008

  • Wonderful associations, she!

    The front sproingy things are rhinophores and the rear sproingy things are gills, as modeled by this Chromodoris. Some nudibranchs also have cerata in between, which are more balloony than sproingy.

    August 24, 2008

  • I love "sproingy." :-)

    August 24, 2008

  • :D

    I love sproingy rhinophores, evidently. (You wouldn't happen to be a hypothetical nudibranch, would you, mollusque?)

    August 25, 2008

  • Nope. I'm a gill-less wonder.

    August 27, 2008

  • "Twirling and whirling in a crimson leotard and white tutu, the Spanish dancer (a large nudibranch, or seaslug) emerges to feed at night..."

    --BBC North Yorkshire

    August 16, 2009

  • I would just like to relate that on yesterday's (Nov 13th 2009) advanced proficiency test administered by the Cervantes Institute, one of the 'comprehension texts' was totally given over to the nudibranch. O, mejor dicho, el nudibranquio.

    Who said hanging out on Wordie wasn't edumacational in a practical sense?

    November 15, 2009

  • Heard recently on the "Epic Win FTW" site, in regards to a sea creature that looks like a tiny alien. The species depicted there was identified by a commenter as glaucus atlanticus:

    “Glaucus atlanticus is a species of medium-sized, floating, blue sea slug, a pelagic aeolid nudibranch, a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusk in the family Glaucidae.”

    August 4, 2010