barnacle
pronunciation
How to pronounce barnacle in British English:
UK [ˈbɑ:nəkl]
How to pronounce barnacle in American English:
US [ˈbɑrnəkl]
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- Noun:
- marine crustaceans with feathery food-catching appendages; free-swimming as larvae; as adults form a hard shell and live attached to submerged surfaces
- European goose smaller than the brant; breeds in the far north
Word Origin
- barnacle
- barnacle: [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore.Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.
- barnacle (n.)
- early 13c., "species of wild goose;" as a type of "shellfish," first recorded 1580s. Often derived from a Celtic source (compare Breton bernik, a kind of shellfish), but the application to the goose predates that of the shellfish in English. The goose nests in the Arctic in summer and returns to Europe in the winter, hence the mystery surrounding its reproduction. It was believed in ancient superstition to hatch from barnacle's shell, possibly because the crustacean's feathery stalks resemble goose down. The scientific name of the crustacean, Cirripedes, is from Greek cirri "curls of hair" + pedes "feet."
Example
- 1. Barnacle glue is equally special .
- 2. A barnacle that runs into the chemical finds it cannot bind as strongly to the surface .
- 3. The proteins of barnacle glue , they discovered , are dominated by amino acids called proline and isoleucine .
- 4. They also , according to hans elwing of the university of gothenburg , prevent barnacle colonies from taking hold by stunting their growth .
- 5. To others he is a barnacle that has fastened itself to the underside of our patent system so tenaciously that the most powerful corporations in the world cannot pry it off .