byssus

See also: Byssus

English

From Latin byssus, from Ancient Greek βύσσος (bússos, “flax; flax cotton”), from a Semitic source cognate to Hebrew בּוּץ (būṣ, “byssus”) and Aramaic בּוּצָא (būṣā, “byssus”)

byssus (usually uncountable, plural byssi or byssuses)

The long fine silky filaments excreted by several mollusks (particularly Pinna nobilis) by which they attach themselves to the sea bed, and from which sea silk is manufactured.
Sea silk manufactured from these filaments.
- 2014, Theodore Gray, photography by Nick Mann, Molecules: The Elements and the Architecture of Everything, 2018 Paperback Edition, page 123:
  This peculiar material is called byssus, and it's a counterexample, sort of, to the claim that no commercial fibers come from mollusks. Byssus is the fiber made by clams and mussels to glue themselves to rocks underwater.
(mycology) The stipe or stem of some fungi which are particularly thin and thread-like.

filaments of molluscs

historic fiber

The Compact edition of the Oxford English dictionary: complete text reproduced micrographically and Supplement, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1987
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged), G. & C. Merriam Co., 1976

From Ancient Greek βῠ́σσος (bŭ́ssos, “flax; flax cotton”), from a Semitic source cognate to Hebrew בּוּץ (būṣ, “byssus”) and Aramaic בּוּצָא (būṣā, “byssus”).

byssus f (genitive byssī); second declension

Second-declension noun.

“byssus”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
"byssus", in Charles du Fresne du Cange, Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
“byssus”, in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898), Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
“byssus”, in William Smith et al., editor (1890), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London: William Wayte. G. E. Marindin