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Having the nature or appearance of a bract.

Having a bract or bracts.

Furnished with bracts.

Furnished with bracteoles or bractlets.

Same as Bractlet.

Destitute of bracts.

A bract on the stalk of a single flower, which is itself on a main stalk that support several flowers. Gray.

The breech mechanism in breech-loading small arms and certain special guns, as automatic and machine guns; --used frequently in referring to the method by which the movable barrels of breech- loading shotguns are locked, unlocked, or rotated to loading position.

Belonging to, or like, the family of plants of which the prickly pear is a common example.

Any plant of the order Cactacæ, as the prickly pear and the night-blooming cereus. See Cereus. They usually have leafless stems and branches, often beset with clustered thorns, and are mostly natives of the warmer parts of America. Cactus wren (Zoöl.), an American wren of the genus Campylorhynchus, of several species.…

The act of warming or heating; the production of heat in a body by the action of fire, or by communication of heat from other bodies.

See Calefactory. [R.]

A heater; one who, or that which, makes hot, as a stove, etc.

Making hot; producing or communicating heat.

A division of Protozoa, of which Magosphæra is the type. They exist both in a myxopod state, with branched pseudopodia, and in the form of ciliated bodies united in free, spherical colonies.

The science of exchanges, a branch of political economy.

A horseman covered with a cataphract. Archers and slingers, cataphracts, and spears. Milton.

Covered with a cataphract, or armor of plates, scales, etc.; or with that which corresponds to this, as horny or bony plates, hard, callous skin, etc.

Of, pertaining to, or resembling, a cataphract.

A kind of hydraulic brake for regulating the action of pumping engines and other machines; -- sometimes called dashpot.