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ossifrage. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
ossifrage, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
ossifrage in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
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English
Etymology
From Middle French ossifrage, from Latin ossifraga (“osprey”), ossifragus (“osprey”), from ossifragus (“bone breaking”).
Pronunciation
Noun
ossifrage (plural ossifrages)
- (archaic) Gypaetus barbatus, the diet of which is almost exclusively bone marrow.
- 1880, , The Man who Laughs by Victor Hugo, Book the Third, Chapter I:
- Calcareous lies, slate, and trap are still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and leveled those bristling, rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage.
1885–1888, Richard F[rancis] Burton, transl. and editor, “The Spider and the Wind. ”, in A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night , Shammar edition, volume (please specify the volume), : Burton Club , →OCLC:Yes; for these two passions, when they enter into a man, alter his wisdom and understanding and judgment and wit, and he is like the Ossifrage which, for precaution against the hunters, abode in the upper air, of the excess of his subtlety […]
1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 14]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, , →OCLC:The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage.
- (obsolete) The young of the sea eagle or bald eagle.
- (British) The osprey.
1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “ 3.”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. , (please specify |tome=1 or 2), London: Adam Islip, published 1635, →OCLC:And their young Ospraies bee counted a kind of Ossifragi: from them come the lesser Geires, they againe breed the greater, which engender not at all. Some reckon yet another kind of Ægle, which they cal Barbatæ; and the Tuscanes, Ossifrage.
- 1871 Robert Browning,Balustrion's Adventure: A Transcript from Euripides, line 117–24:
- And we were just about
- To turn and face the foe, as some tire bird
- Barbarians pelt at, drive with shouts away
- From shelter in what rocks, however rude,
- She makes for, to escape the kindled eye,
- Split beak, crook'd claw o' the creature, cormorant
- Or ossifrage, that, hardly baffled, hangs
- Afloat i' the foam, to take her if she turn.
References
For use of the term to refer to ospreys in England as well as the misidentification of sea eagles as ossifrage, see Theodore Gill, "The Osprey or Fishhawk: Its Characteristic and Habits," The Osprey: An Illustrated Magazine of Popular Ornithology, Volume V, no. 2, pp. 25–26 (Nov.-Dec. 1901).
Anagrams
Latin
Noun
ossifrage
- vocative singular of ossifragus