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Tendril   Listen
Tendril

noun
1.
Slender stem-like structure by which some twining plants attach themselves to an object for support.



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"Tendril" Quotes from Famous Books



... The blazing of the resinous fuel lights up the forest for long distances in every direction, and, as may easily be imagined, the effect is wonderfully beautiful. When the fire blazes high the scene is like an illuminated lacework of tree-trunks, vines, leaves, and twigs, the smallest tendril shining out bright and distinct; while through it all the river gleams like a band of glittering silver. Then, as the pine-knots gradually burn out, the illumination fades and fades away until we ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... which caught at her crinkling dress sometimes, and then he liberated her and they laughed. A trailing bough of deadly nightshade was hanging from the broken head of an old ash stump, whose wasted feet were overgrown by two scarlet-tipped toadstools, and she plucked a long tendril of it and wound it about her head, tipping her sun-bonnet back, and letting the red berries droop over her dark hair to her face. Then ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... sing Narcissus pining o'er the untainted spring? In some delicious ramble, he had found A little space, with boughs all woven round; And in the midst of all, a clearer pool Than e'er reflected in its pleasant cool, The blue sky here, and there, serenely peeping Through tendril wreaths fantastically creeping. And on the bank a lonely flower he spied, A meek and forlorn flower, with naught of pride, Drooping its beauty o'er the watery clearness, To woo its own sad image into nearness: Deaf to light Zephyrus it would not move; But still would seem to droop, ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats

... days later the Squash put forth a new tendril. It had invaded his home, and now it invaded his pulpit, so to speak. Exacerbated by persecution, Dr. Gowdy had thrown off all restraint. His one real weakness, his inability to keep from talking when talking was going on, grew plainer every hour ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... with Madeline leaning on her elbow near at hand, they two separated from the rest of the world by wide waters, was like a brief experience of Paradise. Ellery watched the light tendril of hair that touched her cheek, lifted itself and touched again, near that lovely curve above her ear. The cheek was warm and creamy but untouched by deeper color. He fell into that mood of blessed silence that, as a rule, comes only when one ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... strong, and the masses of stone hewn into leafage so large, that, notwithstanding the depth of the undercutting, the work remains nearly uninjured; not so at the Vine angle, where the natural delicacy of the vine-leaf and tendril having tempted the sculptor to greater effort, he has passed the proper limits of his art, and cut the upper stems so delicately that half of them have been broken away by the casualties to which the situation ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... neighbourhood of the grotto in which the fairy had been imprisoned a park of incomparable beauty grew into view, where brooks whispered and fountains played, and shady pergolas appeared, formed of gold and silver trellises, over which a thousand luxuriant creepers clambered, holding by their little tendril hands. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... her lovely face Peep from the thickets; shy, She hides behind the leaves her golden buds Till, bolder grown, on high She curls a tendril, throws a spray, then flings Herself aloft in glee, And, bursting into thousand blossoms, swings In ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... bareheaded, dressed in white, stood a girl, so amazingly beautiful, that Sam wondered for a few moments whether he was asleep or awake. Her hat, which she had just taken off, hung on her left arm, and with her delicate right hand she arranged a vagrant tendril of the passion-flower, which in its luxuriant growth had broken bounds and fallen from its place above.—A girl so beautiful that I in all my life never saw her superior. They showed me the other day, in a carriage in the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... ivy-wood, too, I will give thee, rubbed with sweet bees'-wax, a twy-eared bowl newly wrought, smacking still of the knife of the graver. Round its upper edges goes the ivy winding, ivy besprent with golden flowers; and about it is a tendril twisted that joys in its saffron fruit. Within is designed a maiden, as fair a thing as the gods could fashion, arrayed in a sweeping robe, and a snood on her head. Beside her two youths with fair love- locks are contending from either ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... pedestal comes a minor one, bearing in front of it a tendril of vine which completes the floral symbolism of the whole. The plant which I have called a lily is not the Fleur de Lys, nor the Madonna's, but an ideal one with bells like the crown Imperial (Shakespeare's type of 'lilies of all kinds'), representing ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... the vines took deep hold of the treasure in the storehouse beneath, spending it prodigally for sap to be poured into these waiting goblets of emerald and pearl. All the hoarded strength of leaf and tendril was caught up by the current, and swept blindly onward to ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... it lie—the lovelier for that tendril of sunny brown hair upon it. How it falls and rises! Which is the hair? which ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... unfurrow'd bring For her the unnam'd progeny of spring; 565 Attendant Nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers 570 With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers antarctic, bending o'er his tides; Drinks the new tints, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... a ragged cleft of the desert, with shelving rock and giant bowlder on every side, without a sign of leaf, or sprig of grass, or tendril of tiny creeping plant, a little party of haggard, hunted men lay in hiding and in the silence of exhaustion and despond, awaiting the inevitable. Bulging outward overhead, like the counter of some huge battleship, a great mass of solid granite heaved unbroken above ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, tense, tension, pretence, intense, intensive, ostensible, tent, tenterhook, portent, attention, intention, tenuous, attenuate, extenuate, antenna, tone, tonic, standard. The form of the key-syllable ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... was the Doctor's wife busy in the garden with a basket and a pair of scissors, snipping off bunch and cluster ready for filling vase and basin in the shaded rooms; the other was standing upon a chair helping climber to twine and tendril to catch hold of trellis and wire which made the front of the cottage-like ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... eyes to wide, laughing pools, plowed through the rear-counter debris of pasteboard boxes and tissue-paper, reached for her jacket and tan, boyish hat. A blowy, corn-colored curl caught like a tendril and curled round ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... on the whole, most advantageous and economical, and this, in the vegetable kingdom, being led up to by degrees—we reach, through numerous gradations, the highest style of climbing plants in the tendril-climber. A tendril morphologically, is either a leaf or branch of stem, or a portion of one, specially organized for climbing. Some tendrils simply turn away from light, as do those of grape-vines, thus taking the direction in which some supporting ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... handed him, set on his big nose a pair of spectacles with round glasses for all the world like the two wheels of a miniature silver chariot, and proceeded to read the letter, holding it out at the full stretch of his arm. The windows giving on the garden stood open, and a tendril of wild vine hung down on to the desk at the foot of a crucifix of old ivory, while a light breeze set the papers on it ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France

... hiding my face in Celestino's tendril-like curls, I replied, "Yes, but I wonder whether he would have been hungry enough to eat crumbs that he knew to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... admitted to the big Infirmary in Piccadilly. There he had lain for some six or eight weeks now, toiling no more, fretting no more, living on his mother's and Dora's visits, and quietly loosening one life-tendril after another. During all this time Dora had thought of him, prayed for him, taught him—the wasted, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward



Words linked to "Tendril" :   cirrus, plant structure, plant part, cirrhus



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