The Collaborative International Dictionary
Spongiform \Spon"gi*form\ (sp[u^]n"j[i^]*f[^o]rm), a. Resembling a sponge; soft and porous; porous.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. Like a sponge, porous, full of holes.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Usage examples of "spongiform".
Mad Cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but even more rare.
Reynolds had mentioned it in his letter: bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or more commonly, mad cow disease.
Helena, only her gorgeous eyes visible now above her nightmares of BSE and a spongiform future.
If anything, the symptomology here is closer to transmittable spongiform encephalopaly, a disease that incubates silently over dozens of years.
Some silicates in the collapsed thermal vent near the recovered material also exhibit stratified spongiform structures highly stromatolitic in appearance, the strata two magnitudes finer than that observed in Terran samples.
It was the first light of day now and in that first light, Will viewed the full grotesquery of Mr Joseph Carey Merrick: the horrible pendulous flaps and folds of skin, the spongiform eruptions, the grubby underwear.
This new protein bears a striking similarity to the protein that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Some silicates in the collapsed thermal vent near the recovered material also exhibit stratified spongiform structures highly stromatolitic in appearance, the strata two magnitudes finer than that observed in Terran samples.
For instance when that vegetarian grazing animal, the cow, was fed meat and offal, bovine spongiform encephalitis infected herds and spread to the perpetrators of the crime.
We found entries about all kinds of human prion diseases-kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Gerstmann-Straussler syndrome-and the veterinary syndromes, scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but it's all old, old stuff.