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One of the curved ends of a crescent; esp., an extremity or cusp of the moon when crescent-shaped. The moon Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. Thomson.

Crescent-shaped; as, a lunate leaf; a lunate beak; a lunated cross. Gray.

Anything crescent-shaped; a crescent-shaped part or mark; a lunula, a lune.

A black pigment found in the pigment-bearing cells of the skin (particularly in the skin of the negro), in the epithelial cells of the external layer of the retina (then called fuscin), in the outer layer of the choroid, and elsewhere. It is supposed to be derived from the decomposition of hemoglobin.…

Any fern of the genus Botrychium, esp. B. Lunaria; -- so named from the crescent-shaped segments of its frond.

A dreamer; an absent-minded person. [Obs.] Rom. of R.

Absent-minded; dazed; muddled; stupid. The whole company stared at me with a whimsical, muzzy look, like men whose senses were a little obfuscated by beer rather then wine. W. Irving.

A mamber of a Gnostic serpent-worshiping sect of the second century.

A small shield, especially one of an approximately elliptic form, or crescent-shaped.

Penned or shut up; confined; -- often with up. Here in the body pent. J. Montgomery. No pent-up Utica contracts your powers. J. M. Sewall.

tive to plums, nectarines cherries, and many other stone fruits. It lays its eggs in crescent-shaped incisions made with its jaws. The larva lives upon the pulp around the stone. Called also turk, and plum curculio. See Illust. under Curculio.

ecies of shark (Lamna cornubica), about eight feet long, having a pointed nose and a crescent-shaped tail; -- called also mackerel shark. [Written also probeagle.]

A loose, bent-up end of one of the strap rails, or flat rails, formerly used on American railroads. It was sometimes so bent by the passage of a train as to slip over a wheel and pierce the bottom of a car.

[Broker's Cant] Crescent spot (Zoöl.), any butterfly of the family Melitæidæ having crescent-shaped white spots along the margins of the red or brown wings. -- Spot lens (Microscopy), a condensing lens in which the light is confined to an annular pencil by means of a small, round diaphragm (the spot), and used in dar…

Hence, absent-mindedness; abstraction.