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Cuticle   /kjˈutəkəl/  /kjˈutɪkəl/   Listen
Cuticle

noun
1.
The dead skin at the base of a fingernail or toenail.
2.
The outer layer of the skin covering the exterior body surface of vertebrates.  Synonym: epidermis.
3.
Hard outer covering or case of certain organisms such as arthropods and turtles.  Synonyms: carapace, shell, shield.






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"Cuticle" Quotes from Famous Books



... epidermis or cuticle. This covering is extremely light, and offers nothing remarkable; 100 lb. of wheat contain ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... expressive of the true character of the Cow Pox, as it commonly appears upon the hand, that I have given a representation of it in the annexed plate. The two small pustules on the wrists arose also from the application of the virus to some minute abrasions of the cuticle, but the livid tint, if they ever had any, was not conspicuous at the time I saw the patient. The pustule on the fore finger shews the disease in an earlier stage. It did not actually appear on the hand ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner

... tell you what it is, boys," said he at length, "if ever you catch me going on an expedition of this sort again, flay me alive—that's all; don't spare me. Pull off the cuticle as if it were a glove; and if I roar don't ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne

... the stone called aqua marina. One of the arms had been taken off a little above the elbow; the flesh at the end of the stump appeared bloodless, and bleached to the colour of the skin; and limpets and other kinds of small shell-fish lay on or adhered to the cuticle. My feelings recoil from the recollections of the horrors of that apparition; and I fear I may incur the charge of endeavouring to produce an effect by the vulgar mode of harassing the mind with a minute description, too ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... the inhabitants were clothed in robes of bongo, a species of cloth made from the delicate cuticle of palm leaflets, which are stripped off and ornamented with feathers. These are woven very neatly, many of them are striped, and some made even with check pattern. The pieces of cloth are then stitched together in a regular way with needles, also manufactured ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston

... value, return. Fecket, waistcoat; sleeve waistcoat (used by farm-servants as both vest and jacket). Feckless, weak, pithless, feeble. Feckly, mostly. Feg, a fig. Fegs, faith! Feide, feud. Feint, v. fient. Feirrie, lusty. Fell, keen, cruel, dreadful, deadly; pungent. Fell, the cuticle under the skin. Felly, relentless. Fen', a shift. Fen', fend, to look after; to care for; keep off. Fenceless, defenseless. Ferlie, ferly, a wonder. Ferlie, to marvel. Fetches, catches, gurgles. Fetch't, stopped suddenly. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... retrace it, lost my way. However, my pocket-compass stood me in good stead; and by it I steered for the open plain, in the centre of which stood the camp. But it was terribly hard work—this of plunging through an African jungle, ruinous to clothes, and trying to the cuticle. In order to travel quickly, I had donned a pair of flannel pyjamas, and my feet were encased in canvas shoes. As might be expected, before I had gone a few paces a branch of the acacia horrida—only one of a hundred such ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... or Geordie "wag his pow in the pou'pit," produces, when realized, salutary effects in the whole family connection. These effects, which Mr. Froude would doubtless allow and commend in their case, he finds it creditable to ignore the very possibility of in the experience of people whose cuticle is not white. It is, however, but bare justice to say that, as Negroes are by no means deficient in self-love and the tenderness of natural affection, such gratifying fulfilment of a family's hopes exerts an elevating and, in many cases, an ennobling ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... hygiene were given to the 382:6 study of Christian Science and to the spiritualization of thought, this alone would usher in the millen- inium. Constant bathing and rubbing to alter 382:9 the secretions or to remove unhealthy exhalations from the cuticle receive a useful rebuke from Jesus' precept, "Take no thought . . . for the body." We must beware 382:12 of making clean merely the outside ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... fidelity to his friends, reckless of everything except his own safety in any transaction calculated to damage the cause to which he was opposed; indifferent to what might happen to an adversary, He was a most valiant "brave"—with his mouth; the noble quality had never penetrated his cuticle. His passion when bloviating was furious and terrible to look upon; but there was nothing to it more than sound and pretense. His face would redden to congestive hue, his voice swell to sonorous volume; but the simple kindly invitation in quiet tone: "Never ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara

... the left arm; but dare he try?—In a moment of calmness and deliberation he dares not, but when for a while he has writhed under the torture of suspense, a sudden strength of will drives him to seek and know his fate. He touches the gland, and finds the skin sane and sound, but under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a pistol-bullet, that moves as he pushes it. Oh! but is this for all certainty, is this the sentence of death? Feel the gland of the other arm; there is not the same lump exactly, yet something a little like it: have not some people glands naturally enlarged?—would ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... would be able to send his first charge straight into the heart of Bruin, so as to bring him down immediately. That would save them all from a rough-and-tumble encounter where claws and teeth would be apt to play havoc with their cuticle, and render their faces far less attractive than when ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton

... led to believe that the roller skate is certainly a great civilizer and a wonderful leveler of mankind. If we so skate that when the summons comes to seek our ward in the general hospital, where each shall heal his busted cuticle within the walls where rinkists squirm, we go not like the moral wreck, morally paralyzed, but like a hired man taking his medicine, and so forth—we may skate with perfect impunity, or anyone else to whom we may be properly introduced ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... washing in soap and water, he found, to his great dismay, that the skin of his face was peeling off rather than the colour disappearing! The cork had been too hot by a great deal, and had injured his cuticle considerably. With the utmost haste, although announced to play Hamlet on the following evening, the actor—who then styled himself Mr. Hulsingham, a name he forthwith abandoned—hired a post-chaise and eloped ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... into requisition, and the whole party most mercilessly thrashed. From that day forward the old buckhorn-headed cane was an awful reminder of my sufferings. She was careful not to injure the clothing of her victims, and made her appeals to the unshielded cuticle, and with a heavy hand ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... to ascertain the point in question: for it appeared afterwards that the Cuticle, when divided according to this discovery from the other lamina, was semi-transparent; that the cuticle of the blackest negroe was of the same transparency and colour, as that of the purest white; and hence, the true skins of both being invariably the same, that the mucosum corpus was the ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson

... that people of her high attainments must beware of spiritual pride. And Mrs. Anderson took the warning with beautiful meekness, sinking into forty fathoms of undisguised and rather ostentatious humility, heaving solemn sighs in token of self-reproach—a self-reproach that did not penetrate the cuticle. ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... illustrated a fragment of a leaf of Senecio pulcher, natural size, and covered with the orange-coloured fungus; at B a small part of a Uredo pustule as seen bursting through the cuticle ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... a thick, tough viscid cuticle, cortina or veil viscid, and collapsing on the stem, forming coarse, walnut-brown or dark vinaceous reticulations, terminating abruptly near the gills, or ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... Naught remains of the Locust but his skin, hardly altered in shape, but utterly drained and perforated in several places. The method, therefore, was changed during the night. To extract the non-fluent residue, the viscera and muscles, the stiff cuticle had to be tapped here, there and elsewhere, after which the tattered husk, placed bodily in the press of the mandibles, would have been chewed, rechewed and finally reduced to a pill, which the sated Spider throws up. This would have been the end of the victim, had I not taken ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... embrace, from the love spots it left on your cuticle; 'tis a thousand pities that you cannot find where the tattling rascal ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... by the proper membrane or cuticle of the Nucleus, from whose substance in the unimpregnated ovulum it is never, I believe, separable, and at that period is very rarely visible. In the ripe seed it is indistinguishable from the inner membrane only by its apex, which is never perforated, is ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... have for ages hidden their bodies most carefully from sun and air, which are so necessary to their well-being. Is it any wonder that the human cuticle has become withered, enervated and atrophied, that it has lost the power to perform freely and efficiently its functions of elimination and absorption? Undoubtedly, this has much to do ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids now. Buxom negro ones, with pale palms, white eyes, and the beat of kettledrums somewhere close to the cuticle of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... your canting fools call a mission; and his mission is to take care of number one. Not dishonestly, mind you, nor violently, nor rudely, but doucely and calmly. The care a brute like me takes of his vitals, that care Lusignan takes of his outer cuticle. His number one is a sensitive plant. No scenes, no noise; nothing painful—by-the-by, the little creature that writes in the papers, and calls calamities PAINFUL, is of Lusignan's breed. Out to-day! of course he was out, ma'am: he knew from me his daughter would ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... accustomed St. George to his valet's gift of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St. George, Rollo had said: "I ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... the light and quenched the meek luminary,—breaking through the plate-glass, of course, to reach it. Now I don't want to go into minutiae at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle, to say the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a sausage-machine without looking the worse for it. The Professor gathered up the fragments of glass, and with them certain very minute but entirely ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... a shrimp a certain deftness and delicacy of manipulation are needed to effect the neat extraction of the creature from its unpalatable cuticle. Not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various

... forty-eight pulsations to the minute; the blood of the whole system seemed to be driven to the extremities of the body; my face had become greatly flushed; the fingers were grown to the size of thumbs, while they, together with the palms of the hands and the breast, parted with their cuticle in long strips. The lower extremities had become hard, as through the agency of some compressed fluid. A prickling sensation over the body, as if surcharged with electricity, and accompanied with an apparent flow of some hot liquid down ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... spots an' blemishes of the skin. I speak the language of flowers. I know one hundred and eighty-seven weather signs, and I interpet dreams. Now, ladies and gents, this is no idle boast. Triflin' incidents, little marks on the cuticle, although they appear to be the effect of chance, are nevertheless of the utmost consequence, an' to the skilled interpeter they foretell the temper of, an' the events that will happen to, the person bearin' 'em. Now let us take this ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... plants are generally herbs with a much shortened stem bearing a rosette of leaves and a spike or panicle of flowers. They are eminently dry-country plants (xerophytes); the narrow leaves are protected from loss of water by a thick cuticle, and have a well-developed sheath which embraces the stem and forms, with the sheaths of the other leaves of the rosette, a basin in which water collects, with fragments of rotting leaves and the like. Peculiar hairs are developed on the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... enough to wear out a wash-board, yet there doesn't a bit of brass come to the surface yet. Beauty may be only skin-deep; modesty, like mine, pervades the grain. If I really believed my bashfulness was only cuticle-deep, I'd be flayed to-day, and try and grow a hardier complexion without any Bloom of Youth in it. No use! I could pave a ten-thousand-acre prairie with the "good intentions" I have wasted, the firm resolutions I have broken. Born to be bashful is only another ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... communication, "I am credibly informed that in England they actually cut off the epiderme. Now, mon Dieu," continued he, turning up his eyes, and raising his soap-brush in an attitude of invocation, "who is there in France that will be ignorant that, in the destruction of this invaluable cuticle, the chin of the individual is tortured, and the first principles of our ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... the person undergoing this operation. The reader may judge for himself, at least so far as idea goes. "A greater degree of amusement (than what their music and dancing yield) seems to be derived by the women from the practice of tatooing, or, marking the body, by raising the epidermis from the cuticle; a custom that has been found to exist among most of the uncivilized nations inhibiting warm countries, and which probably owes its origin to a total want of mental resources, and of the employment of time. By slightly irritating, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... white or slightly tinted. A. Plants fleshy, more or less firm, decaying soon. a. Stem fleshy, pileus easily separating from the stem. Volva present and ring on the stem. Pileus bearing warts or patches free from the cuticle Amanita. Volva present, ring wanting Amanitopsis. Pileus scaly, scales concrete with cuticle, Volva wanting, ring present Lepiota. Hymenophore confluent, Without cartilaginous bark, b. Stem central, ring present (sometimes vague), Volva wanting, gills ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... Lon's look of surprise and pride as he looks over the outer battlements of the New Jerusalem and watches me paint the town. Little did Lon think when I pulled out across the flat with my whiskers full of alkali dust and my cuticle full of raw agency whisky, that inside of a year I would be a nabob, wearing biled shirts every single day of my life, and ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... changing its shape, the pigmy concerns itself, like the others, with future and present needs. To assist the perfect insect, the grub first gnaws the under side of the bark, leaving a thin screen of cuticle untouched, and then sinks in the wood a perpendicular well, blocked with unresisting sawdust. That is on behalf of the future: the frail Buprestis will be able to leave without hindrance. The bottom of the well, better wrought than the rest and ceiled with the aid of an adhesive ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... cloth, blanket cloth; tidy; tilpah [obs3][U.S.], apishamore [obs3][U.S.]. integument , tegument; skin, pellicle, fleece, fell, fur, leather, shagreen[obs3], hide; pelt, peltry[obs3]; cordwain[obs3]; derm[obs3]; robe, buffalo robe [U.S.]; cuticle, scarfskin, epidermis. clothing &c. 225; mask &c. (concealment) 530. peel, crust, bark, rind, cortex, husk, shell, coat; eggshell, glume[obs3]. capsule; sheath, sheathing; pod, cod; casing, case, theca[obs3]; elytron[obs3]; elytrum[obs3]; involucrum[Lat]; wrapping, wrapper; envelope, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... inadequate to the ejection of that person from the car of which he occupied a conspicuous fraction. The obese fellow declined to have his ticket punched, and defied the officers of the road to come on and punch his head. It is for the expulsion of such blisters upon the social cuticle that PUNCHINELLO'S ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various

... hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What's in those hampers over them again, I don't quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That's ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... support of animal life. The ferns and their allies remain untouched by the grazing animals. Our native club mosses, though once used in medicine, are positively deleterious; the horse tails, though harmless, so abound in silex, which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that they are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern which cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and green in their season, scarce support the existence of a single creature, and remain untouched in stem and leaf, from their first appearance in spring, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... upon the surface, bright scarlet patches, in some cases extending over the whole limbs, the skin smooth and shining, and somewhat bloated or swollen; upon pressure with the finger, a white spot is seen, which soon disappears on removal of the pressure. As the disease subsides, the cuticle comes off (desquamates) in patches. In the simple form of this disease, the throat, though often more or less sore, does not ulcerate. In some cases, notwithstanding the fever is high, the pulse frequent, and the throat sore, there may be no external redness, but the mouth and ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill

... perhaps, from the Orientals. We hear a good deal of Russian baths, especially from enthusiastic travelers, and are apt to suppose that where such a thorough system of scrubbing and boiling prevails, the human cuticle must present a very extraordinary aspect of cleanliness. Perhaps this is so in certain cases, but it is not a national characteristic. A Russian bath, in the genuine style, is rather a costly luxury. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... it into them that the Enemy Allies will give them a square deal as a Republic and put them under the steam-roller with the Hohenzollerns if they stand pat, and you'll get them. No more hungry and tubercular babies, no more babies born with a cuticle short in theirs. They'd rise as one man—I ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton

... an acrid and salt humor, derived from the blood; which as it naturally ought, partly to have turned into nutriment, and partly to have perspired through the skin, it now lodges, and corrodes the little scales of the cuticle; and these becoming dry and white, sometimes even as white as snow, are separated from the skin, and fall off like bran. Now, altho' this disease is very uncommon in our colder climate; yet I have ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead

... not half enough," he continued as if unaware of the interruption. "I had to get it into the papers and ask for volunteers, for you know that an average of only one in three pieces of cuticle adheres when set into a wound, especially a burn. The papers made a good deal of it, and I couldn't keep my name out, of course. Well, enough school-children came forward to patch up three or four girls, ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... soberly quoted—not meaning thereby to scratch the cuticle, or ruffle the temper, of a single Roxburgher. And now, my friend, as we are about to quit this magnificent assemblage of books, I owe it to myself—but much more to your own inextinguishable love of bibliographical history—to say "one little word, or two"—ere we quit the threshold—respecting ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Bibliotaph, 'gave me a vivid sense of the possibility of determining a man's profession by a cursory examination of his cuticle.' Lowell's conviction about N. P. Willis was well-founded: namely, that if it had been proper to do so, Willis could have worn his own plain bare skin in a way to suggest that it was a representative Broadway ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent



Words linked to "Cuticle" :   epidermis, mollusk, shellfish, cuticula, arthropod, corneum, tegument, horny layer, shell, scute, stratum lucidum, cutis, cuticular, stratum, stratum basale, stratum corneum, skin, pallium, stratum granulosum, mollusc, epidermal cell, malpighian layer, mantle, turtle, stratum germinativum, rete Malpighii



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