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Agave   Listen
proper noun
Agave  n.  (Bot.) A genus of plants (order Amaryllidaceae) of which the chief species is the maguey or century plant (Agave Americana), wrongly called Aloe. It takes from ten to seventy years, according to climate, to attain maturity, when it produces a gigantic flower stem, sometimes forty feet in height, and perishes. The juice has purgative and diuretic properties. The fermented juice is the pulque of the Mexicans; distilled, it yields mescal. A strong thread and a tough paper are made from the leaves, and the wood has many uses.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Agave" Quotes from Famous Books



... to the cordage used in the fabrication of articles of apparel, household utensils, and for the hafting of tools, the cave contained the usual miscellany of prepared fibers and knots (139544) usually of agave fiber. There is also a bundle of unspun hair tied in the center with an overhand knot (139543). The bulk of the miscellaneous cordage is 2-ply cord—each single S-twisted with a final Z-twist. Since the spinning is so uniformly of this twisting, it is ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey

... them, even after they have abandoned their worship, and to be driven in their frenzy to the working of the greatest crimes. Thus, among other instances, he told me that a Greek poet named Theocritus sets out in one of his idyls how a woman called Agave, being engaged in a secret religious orgie in honour of a demon named Dionysus, perceived her own son Pentheus watching the celebration of the mysteries, and thereon becoming possessed by the demon she fell on him and murdered ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... gathered to the great earthen colanders through which it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still, etc., used in making pulque and in preparing and weaving the fibre of the agave. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... voices; spirits walked the earth: And dead men's ashes muttered from the urn. Those who live near the walls desert their homes, For lo! with hissing serpents in her hair, Waving in downward whirl a blazing pine, A fiend patrols the town, like that which erst At Thebes urged on Agave (24), or which hurled Lycurgus' bolts, or that which as he came From Hades seen, at haughty Juno's word, Brought terror to the soul of Hercules. Trumpets like those that summon armies forth Were heard re-echoing in the silent ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... Corinth Demetrius the Cynic found some illiterate person reading aloud from a very handsome volume, the Bacchae of Euripides, I think it was. He had got to the place where the messenger is relating the destruction of Pentheus by Agave, when Demetrius snatched the book from him and tore it in two: 'Better,' he exclaimed, 'that Pentheus should suffer one rending at my hands than many ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... abundant in others. Plants containing volatile oils, which are readily converted into resins by the action of oxygen, or those containing tannin or other readily oxidizable substances, take up the largest quantity. This is remarkably illustrated by an experiment in which the leaves of the Agave americana, after twenty-four hours' exposure in the dark, were found to have absorbed only 0.3 of their volume of oxygen, while those of the fir, in which volatile oil is abundant, had taken up twice, and those of the oak, ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson



Words linked to "Agave" :   desert plant, bear grass, Agave atrovirens, Nolina microcarpa, century plant, xerophyte, maguey, dracaena, xerophilous plant, family Agavaceae, genus Agave, agave family, American aloe, bowstring hemp, xerophytic plant, sisal family, Agave sisalana, Agave tequilana, sansevieria, xerophile, American agave, Agave americana, cantala



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