Crossword clues for animalcule
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Animalcule \An`i*mal"cule\, n. [As if fr. a L. animalculum, dim. of animal.]
A small animal, as a fly, spider, etc. [Obs.]
--Ray.-
(Zo["o]l.) An animal, invisible, or nearly so, to the naked eye. See Infusoria.
Note: Many of the so-called animalcules have been shown to be plants, having locomotive powers something like those of animals. Among these are Volvox, the Desmidiac[ae], and the siliceous Diatomace[ae].
Spermatic animalcules. See Spermatozoa.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"very small animal," especially a microscopic one, 1590s, from Late Latin animalculum, diminutive of Latin animal (see animal (n.)). Related: Animalcular.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (cx obsolete English) A small animal. (16th-19th c.) 2 A microscopic aquatic animal or protozoan. (from 17th c.) 3 (cx now historical English) A spermatozoon. (from 17th c.)
WordNet
n. microscopic organism such as an amoeba or paramecium [syn: animalculum]
Wikipedia
Animalcule ("little animal", from Latin animal + the diminutive suffix -culum) is an older term for a microscopic animal or protozoan. The concept appears to have been understood at least as early as c. 30 BC, as evidenced by the following translation from Marcus Varro's Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres.
"Like precautions must be taken against swampy places for the same reasons and particularly because as they dry, swamps breed certain animalculae which cannot be seen with the eyes and which we breathe through the nose and mouth into the body where they cause grave maladies."
Some better-known animalcules include:
- Actinophrys, and other heliozoa, called sun animalcules
- Amoeba, called Proteus animalcule
- Noctiluca scintillans, commonly called the 'Sea Sparkles'
- Paramecium, called slipper animalcules
- Rotifers, called wheel animalcules
- Stentor, called trumpet animalcules
- Vorticella, and other peritrichs, called bell animalcules
The term was also used by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th-century preformationist and the discoverer of microorganisms, to describe them.
The word appears in adjectival form in the Major-General's Song, in which Major-General Stanley sings, "I know the scientific names of beings animalculous..."
Usage examples of "animalcule".
It will also cure consumption, pneumonia, diphtheria, smallpox, trichinosis, tape worm, the common cold and almost anything caused by invasion of your bodies by foreign animalcules.
Venus teemed with life, ranging from the microscopic, unicellular animalcules to gigantic, four-footed reptiles, which roamed through her great forests of fern and fungi, some of them feeding on these and other primordial thallophytic growths, some preying on these herbivora or on the lesser creatures coexistent with them on that planet.
But we may speculate that the Phoebeans have emerged from some simpler animalcule, a spore perhaps, which was hardy enough to survive the impact.
Cugel dispatched several hundred animalcules which presently returned with twenty small ingots of the precious metal.
No sound is allowed and meaning is conveyed by animalcules, which also procure the necessities of life.
Only sluggish things, worms and slimes and animalcules, things that needed no more energy than bacteria and yeast and other organisms that lived without oxygen, would survive.
A grain of gold or a blade of grass, the sands of the sea or the equally numerous animalcules inhabiting the endless fishy waters - the difference is there in the twilight zone of matter.
Animalcules shoving through the depths of the regolith, like trillions of tiny moles, turning nitrites into nitrogen, oxides into oxygen.