Crossword clues for prickly
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Prickly \Prick"ly\,
Full of sharp points or prickles; armed or covered with prickles; as, a prickly shru
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Prickly heat (Med.), a noncontagious cutaneous eruption of red pimples, attended with intense itching and tingling of the parts affected. It is due to inflammation of the sweat glands, and is often brought on by overheating the skin in hot weather.
Prickly pear (Bot.), a name given to several plants of the cactaceous genus Opuntia, American plants consisting of fleshy, leafless, usually flattened, and often prickly joints inserted upon each other. The sessile flowers have many petals and numerous stamens. The edible fruit is a large pear-shaped berry containing many flattish seeds. The common species of the Northern Atlantic States is Opuntia vulgaris. In the South and West are many others, and in tropical America more than a hundred more. Opuntia vulgaris, Opuntia Ficus-Indica, and Opuntia Tuna are abundantly introduced in the Mediterranean region, and Opuntia Dillenii has become common in India.
Prickly pole (Bot.), a West Indian palm ( Bactris Plumierana), the slender trunk of which bears many rings of long black prickles.
Prickly withe (Bot.), a West Indian cactaceous plant ( Cereus triangularis) having prickly, slender, climbing, triangular stems.
Prickly rat (Zo["o]l.), any one of several species of South American burrowing rodents belonging to Ctenomys and allied genera. The hair is usually intermingled with sharp spines.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1570s, "spiny, armed with prickles" (originally of holly leaves), from prickle (n.) + -y (2). Figurative sense of "irritable" first recorded 1862. Prickly heat is from 1736, so called for the sensation; prickly pear is from 1760 (earlier prickle pear, 1610s). Related: Prickliness.
Wiktionary
a. 1 Covered with sharp points. 2 Easily irritated. 3 difficult, hairy, complicated
WordNet
adj. very irritable; "bristly exchanges between the White House and the press"; "he became prickly and spiteful"; "witty and waspish about his colleagues" [syn: bristly, splenetic, waspish]
having or covered with protective barbs or quills or spines or thorns or setae etc.; "a horse with a short bristly mane"; "bristly shrubs"; "burred fruits"; "setaceous whiskers" [syn: barbed, barbellate, briary, briery, bristled, bristly, burred, burry, setose, setaceous, spiny, thorny]
[also: prickliest, pricklier]
Wikipedia
Usage examples of "prickly".
So inventing by the light of inner consciousness alone, he worked up tiny doses of the grey ambergris into mutton fat, coloured it faintly pink with cochineal insects he caught on the prickly pear hedges, added a little crude borax as a preservative, and so produced a cosmetic that was no better and little worse than the thousand other nostrums of its kind in daily use elsewhere.
Beyond the true garrigue, with its cistus, its broom, its prickly dwarf oak, there lie a series of false garrigues, vegetably speaking worse than the true.
The river was running swift and high and clumps of prickly bush and snag were growing out into the rush of water.
Weasel and I were the first to run forward and clear the grave of the clumps of prickly eryngium, still green goose-foot, young plantains, and wormwood.
Sharina and her escort came around a high wall of prickly euonymus to see a low brick residence set near the wall of the palace compound.
No sign that human life had ever existed out here between the thorny lechuguilla and prickly pear flats encouraged her.
That and the orangish daylight filtering in, revealing a grouping of large prickly plants and an assortment of rocks and heaps of red sand just outside.
He imagined a serpent with eyes all along its back and belly and sides: gigantic, looking down at them from concealment in those prickly tree branches, or invisibly from the orangish sky.
Long, prickly fingers of pyracantha poked through the iron bars, and its fiery thorns grabbed at her clothes as she passed, as if warning her to stay away.
Sebastian Reyne was so prickly and standoffish, he could give lessons to a thistle!
Ascending, the bud of the furze, The broom, and all blue-berried shoots Of stubborn and prickly kind, The juniper flat on its roots, The dwarf rhododaphne, behind She left, and the mountain sheep Far behind, goat, herbage and flower.
The bajada here was all thorn and spine as they wound their way between ocotillo, cholla, prickly pear, barrel, and saguaro cacti.
But the humans had the slidy itch, and the scratchy itch, and the prickly or tingly or titillative paraesthetic fornication.
Mesquite and prickly pear, agave and tall, bloomed-out stalks of sotol gave a sparse shade for the baking land.
The mecheita he was on gave a squalling challenge and charged through prickly brush, raking his leg, catching his jacket, breaking off bits against his trousers on its way to murder.