HAMADRYAD • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Hamadryad

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Hamadryad

noun

(pl. E. hamadryads, L. hamadryades)

The nymph or spirit of a particular tree.

Large cobra of southeastern Asia and the East Indies; the largest venomous snake; sometimes placed in genus Naja. Synonyms: king cobra, Naja hannah, Ophiophagus hannah.

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Etymology of 'Hamadryad'

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"Hamadryad" Quotes from Famous Books

... old belonged, by birthright, all the regions of the woods. On—on—on!—further into the Forest!—and let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus! Sylvanus!—Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself is dead, or here he would set up his reign. But what right has such a dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets ...

— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... needs of life, ever growing more and more, would waste him, and day after day ever dawned more wretched, nor was there any respite to his toil. But he was paying the sad penalty of his father's sin. For he when alone on the mountains, felling trees, once slighted the prayers of a Hamadryad, who wept and sought to soften him with plaintive words, not to cut down the stump of an oak tree coeval with herself, wherein for a long time she had lived continually; but he in the arrogance of youth recklessly cut it down. So to him the nymph thereafter made her ...

— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

Words linked to "Hamadryad" : dryad, genus Ophiophagus, Ophiophagus, cobra, wood nymph