Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Plural form of
plumule .
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Imagine what beautiful passages could have been written about plumules and radicules!
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Imagine what beautiful passages could have been written about plumules and radicules!
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A difficult sexual character seems to me the plumules or battledore scales on the wings of certain families and genera of butterflies, almost invariably changing in form with the species and genera in proportion to other changes, and always constant in each species yet confined to the males, and so small and mixed up with the other scales as to produce no effect on the colour or marking of the wings.
Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 James Marchant
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Now and then he will let down the little black tendrils of legs and feet on some bare twig, and there be rests and preens those already smooth plumules with the long slender bodkin you lent him.
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A difficult sexual character seems to me the plumules or battledore scales on the wings of certain families and genera of butterflies, almost invariably changing in form with the species and genera in proportion to other changes, and always constant in each species yet confined to the males, and so small and mixed up with the other scales as to produce no effect on the colour or marking of the wings.
Alfred Russel Wallace Letters and Reminiscences Marchant, James 1916
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The former is a large black and white bird with the head and the upper part of the neck unfeathered, except for numerous short, almost bristle-like plumules.
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The plumules were blowing off freely now, like snow from the eaves on a windy day in winter.
The Lilac Sunbonnet 1887
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Action spectra C-glucosylflavone accumulation Hordeum vulgare plumules
xml's Blinklist.com 2008
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The word "plumule" struck me; it turns out it's pronounced PLOOM-yule /"plu:myu:l/, and it means 'rudimentary shoot, bud, or bunch of undeveloped leaves in a seed' (it's from Latin plūmula, the diminutive of plūma 'small soft feather, down'), so that "shoots and plumules of one's experience" is a very tasty phrase, incorporating both the visible (as it were) and the embryonic shoots sprouting up from the depths of our lived lives and mulish memories.
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"A few or many of the next following leaves are often already present in the seed, and lie enclosed between the cotyledons; in their folded state they are known by the name of plumules.
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