agaric

Definition

Any of various fungi, principally of the order Agaricales, having fruiting bodies consisting of umbrella-like caps, on stalks, with numerous gills beneath.

Etymology

From Latin agaricum, from Ancient Greek ἀγαρικόν (agarikón, “a tree fungus (Phellinus pomaceus”)), from the country of Agaria, in Sarmatia.

Example Sentences

• "[…] these [commentators] were slight excrescences, mushrooms, champignons, that perished as the smoke of the dunghil evaporated, which reared them. A modern editor of Shakespeare is, on the contrary, a fungus attached to an oak; a male agaric of the most astringent kind, that, while it disfigures its form, may last for ages to disgrace the parent of its being."
• "Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day."
• "1872, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Gareth and Lynette” in Gareth and Lynette, Etc. London: Strahan & Co., p. 47, She thereat, as one / That smells a foul-flesh’d agaric in the holt, / And deems it carrion of some woodland thing, / Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose / With petulant thumb and finger,"