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A small, unmanned balloon sent up to indicate the direction of air currents.

Formerly, a body of men who fired together; also, a small square body of soldiers to strengthen the angles of a hollow square.

An arrant coward; a dastard; a craven; a mean-spirited wretch. Shak.

Cowardice; want of spirit; pusillanimity.

Resembling a poltroon; cowardly.

One of the individual zooids forming the compound organism of a polyzoan.

ships, raising weights, drawing piles, etc., chiefly in the Mediterranean; a lighter. Pontoon bridge, a bridge formed with pontoons. -- Pontoon train, the carriages of the pontoons, and the materials they carry for making a pontoon bridge.

The act, art, or process of constructing pontoon bridges. "Army instruction in pontooning." Gen. W. T. Shermah.

A name for several East Indian, or their wood, used for the masts and spars of vessels, as Calophyllum angustifolium, C. inophullum, and Sterculia foetida; -- called also peon.

A kind of oil cake prepared from the cocoanut. See Oil cake, under Cake.

ng, to thin paper, producing flowers, birds, etc., in imitation of Oriental work. Hence: Poonah brush, paper, painter, etc.

A kind of oil used in India for lamps, and for boiling with dammar for pitching vessels. It is pressed from the seeds of a leguminous tree (Pongamia glabra).

One of the Protozoa.

One of the primary, or first-formed, segments of an embryonic arthropod.

Any one of several plants yielding a red pigment which is used by the North American Indians, as the bloodroot and two species of Lithospermum (L. hirtum, and L. canescens); also, the pigment itself.

A kind of delicate confectionery or cake, perhaps made from the pulp of fruit. [Obs.] Nares.

f a mulatto and a white person; a person quarter-blooded. [Written also quarteron, quarteroon, and quateron.]

A quadroon.

The off-spring of an octoroon and a white person.

, banded with black and gray. Its body is gray, varied with black and white. Called also coon, and mapach.