Lycopodium definition

līkə-pōdē-əm
A plant of the genus Lycopodium, which includes many of the club mosses.
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The yellowish powdery spores of certain club mosses, especially Lycopodium clavatum, formerly used in fireworks and explosives and as a covering for pills.
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Any of a genus (Lycopodium) of usually creeping, often evergreen, lycopods popular as Christmas decorations.
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The flammable yellow powder found in the spore cases of these plants, used in making fireworks and in medicine.
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Club moss.
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A taxonomic genus within the family Lycopodiaceae "” the club mosses.
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Other Word Forms

Noun

Singular:
lycopodium
Plural:
lycopodia, lycopodiums

Origin of lycopodium

  • New Latin Lycopodium genus name Greek lukos wolf wl̥kwo- in Indo-European roots Greek podion diminutive of pous foot ped- in Indo-European roots

    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

  • From Ancient Greek λύκος (lukos, “wolf") + πούς (pous, “foot")

    From Wiktionary

Lycopodium Sentence Examples

  • The leaves of the true mosses and those of the club-mosses (Lycopodium, Selaginella) being somewhat alike in general appearance and in ontogeny, might be, and indeed have been, regarded as homologous on that ground.

  • In his experiments upon this subject Fraunhofer employed plates of glass dusted over with lycopodium, or studded with small metallic disks of uniform size; and he found that the diameters of the rings were proportional to the length of the waves and inversely as the diameter of the disks.

  • Stationary waves are formed in the air in the dust-tube if the length is rightly adjusted by the closely-fitting piston, and the lycopodium dust collects at the nodes in little heaps, the first being at the fixed end and the last just in front of the piston on the sounder.

  • If after the deposition of the drop, a little lycopodium be scattered over the surface, it is seen that a circular space surrounding the drop, of about the size of a shilling, remains bare, and this, however often the dusting be repeated, so long as any of the carbon bisulphide remains.

  • Small tuberous shoots, comparable on a large scale with the bulbils of Lycopodium Selago, are occasionally produced in the axils of some of the persistent leaf-bases; these are characteristic of sickly plants, and serve as a means of vegetative reproduction.

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Words near lycopodium in the Dictionary