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Any product or offspring; -- used contemptuously.

A small sac connected with the female reproductive organs of insects and many other invertebrates, serving to receive and retain the spermatozoa.

A vegetable production of many kinds, fragrant or aromatic and pungent to the taste, as pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, allspice, ginger, cloves, etc., which are used in cookery and to flavor sauces, pickles, etc. Hast thou aught in thy purse [bag] any hot spices Piers Plowman.

formed in certain organisms, and by germination giving rise to a new organism; as, the reproductive spores of bacteria, etc.

An asexual zooid, usually forming one of a series of larval forms in the agamic reproduction of various trematodes and other parasitic worms. The sporocyst generally develops from an egg, but in its turn produces other larvæ by internal budding, or by the subdivision of a part or all of its contents into a number of mi…

reproduction by spores.

A hydrozoan reproductive zooid or gonophore which does not become medusoid in form or structure. See Illust. under Athecata.

Done in jest, or for mere play; sportive. They are no sportful productions of the soil. Bentley. -- Sport"ful*ly, adv. -- Sport"ful*ness, n.

Interrupted by unproductive spots; -- said of a flied of turnips or grain. [Prov. Eng.] Halliwell.

The product of a number or quantity multiplied by itself; thus, 64 is the square of 8, for 8 × 8 = 64; the square of a + b is a2 + 2ab + b2.

One who prepares a play for production. He arranges the details of the stage settings, the business to be used, all stage effects, and instructs the actors, excepting usually the star, in the general interpretation of their parts.

One in control of the stage during the production of a play. He directs the stage hands, property man, etc., has charge of all details behind the curtain, except the acting, and has a general oversight of the actors. Sometimes he is also the stage director.

The principal commodity of traffic in a market; a principal commodity or production of a country or district; as, wheat, maize, and cotton are great staples of the United States. We should now say, Cotton is the great staple, that is, the established merchandize, of Manchester. Trench.

ery peculiar creaking sound when rubbed between the fingers. It is used as a food, in the production of commercial grape sugar, for stiffening linen in laundries, in making paste, etc.

A production of stenography; anything written in shorthand. I saw the reporters' room, in which they redact their hasty stenographs. Emerson.

A coloring matter found in the fæces, a product of the alteration of the bile pigments in the intestinal canal, -- identical with hydrobilirubin.

Producing little or no crop; barren; unfruitful; unproductive; not fertile; as, sterile land; a sterile desert; a sterile year.

To make sterile or unproductive; to impoverish, as land; to exhaust of fertility. [R.] "Sterilizing the earth." Woodward.

The production of stigmata upon the body. See Stigma, 8.

t go about to extenuate the latitude of the curse upon the earth, or stint it only to the production of weeds. Woodward. She stints them in their meals. Law.