BYSSUS • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Byssus

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noun

Byssus n. (pl. E. byssuses; L. byssi)

A cloth of exceedingly fine texture, used by the ancients. It is disputed whether it was of cotton, linen, or silk. (Written also byss and byssin)

(Zool.) A tuft of long, tough filaments which are formed in a groove of the foot, and issue from between the valves of certain bivalve mollusks, as the Pinna and Mytilus, by which they attach themselves to rocks, etc.

(Bot.) An obsolete name for certain fungi composed of slender threads.

Asbestus.

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Etymology of 'Byssus'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Byssus" Quotes from Famous Books

... is apt, for the expanded valves are not unlike the form of a bird in flight. The illustration shows a rare species, several specimens of which were found attached to the mooring-chain of a buoy by what is known as the "byssus," a bunch of tough fibres which passes through an hiatus in the margins of the valves. Like the king's daughter of the Psalmist, PTERIA PEASEI is "all glorious within," the nacreous surface, margined with lustrous black, shining like silver with a ...

— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... Plantarum for a sub-class of Cryptogamia, the members of which presented this character in a greater or less degree. Of the fifteen genera included by Linnaeus among algae, not more than six—viz. Chara, Fucus, Diva and Conferva, and in part Tremella and Byssus—would to-day, in any sense in which the term is employed, be regarded as algae. The excluded genera are distributed among the liverworts, lichens and fungi; but notwithstanding the great advance in knowledge since the time of Linnaeus, the difficulty of deciding ...

— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... of any of the bivalved molluscs which adhere to rocks, as the Pinna, Mytilus, &c. The silken byssus of the great pinna, or wing-shell, is woven into dresses. In the Chama gigas it will sustain 1000 lbs. Also, the woolly substance found in ...

— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... inspectors and overseers to the turquoise desert (i.e. Sinai) of my mother, the goddess Hathor, the lady of the turquoise. [They] carried to her silver, gold, byssus, fine (?) linen, and many things as numerous as the sand-grains, and laid them before her. And there were brought unto me most wonderfully fine turquoises, real stones, in large numbers of bags, and laid out before ...

— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge