Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Parasite   /pˈɛrəsˌaɪt/   Listen
Parasite

noun
1.
An animal or plant that lives in or on a host (another animal or plant); it obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host.
2.
A follower who hangs around a host (without benefit to the host) in hope of gain or advantage.  Synonyms: leech, sponge, sponger.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Parasite" Quotes from Famous Books



... have just quoted, says, but he says it in the person of Gnatho,[Footnote: A parasite in Terence's play of Eunuchus, from which these verses are quoted.]—a sort of friend which only a frivolous mind can tolerate. But as there are many like Gnatho, who stand higher than he did in place, fortune, and reputation, then subserviency is ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis

... had borne him, she desired quite as passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her passing caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She fully realized that in England no woman has fallen who is self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her way. Given those guarantees, all else that she does which is not actually criminal is eventually ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... from a parasite, some ointment should be used, and is best applied under the immediate direction of a specialist in Diseases ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... similar experience. In the beginning we have been vastly diverted by the quips and cranks and merry wiles of the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at meeting our new-found friends in other plays, clothed in different names to be sure and supplied in part with a fresh stock of jests, but ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... bitter attack upon Caesar and his parasite Mamurra was notwithdrawn, but remains to us as No. 29 of the Poems of Catullus. The doubtful authority for Caesar's answer to it is the statement in the Life of Julius Caesar by Suetonius that, on the day of its appearance, Catullus apologized ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... Keeper, had pressed the claims of Sir John Trevor. Trevor had been bred half a pettifogger and half a gambler, had brought to political life sentiments and principles worthy of both his callings, had become a parasite of the Chief Justice, and could, on occasion, imitate, not unsuccessfully, the vituperative style of his patron. The minion of Jeffreys was, as might have been expected, preferred by James, was proposed by Middleton, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the characters in the New Inn is Fly, 'the Parasite of the Inn'; and in the Virgin Martyr (ii. 2) we also find the word 'fly' used (like Lat. musca) for an inquisitive person. In the text I suspect we should read ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... from the great dream of those seers, the poets, Nicolas, like a practical man, whatever his enthusiasm, gayly gave his reasons for departing. He did not wish to be a parasite; he was setting off to the conquest of another land, where he would grow the bread he needed, since his own country had no field left for him. Besides, he took his country with him in his blood; she it was that he wished to enlarge afar off with unlimited increase ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... not court the society of those he did not respect. He was not a parasite or a flatterer even of the great, but met them apparently on equal terms, as a monarch of the mind. He was at home in any circle that was not ignorant or frivolous. He was more easy than genial, for his prejudices or intellectual pride made him unkind to persons ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... was recited in the Pope's room, and the Slave, the Parasite, the Pandor, and the wife of Menaechmus performed their parts well. The Menaechmi themselves, however, played badly. They had no masks, and there was no scenery, for the room was too small. In the scene where Menaechmus, seized ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... wealth is a fierce temptation to the artist, because it gives him liberty, freedom of motion, comfort, things of beauty and consideration. The result is that too many of the artists who appear among us fall victims to the temptations of the world, and become a kind of superior parasite and prostitute, believing in their dignity because they ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... now, but we had never heard those singular growths called "witches' brooms" before. Unlike mistletoe, the broom is not a plant parasite, but a growth from the fir itself, like an oak gall, or a gnarl on a maple or a yellow birch; but instead of being a solid growth on the tree trunk, it is a dense, abnormal growth of little twigs on a small bough of the fir, generally high ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... Occasionally the vegetable parasite aspergillus is present in the external meatus, and produces a condition that is liable to be mistaken for eczema. Strong antiseptic lotions are required to ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... evening, or at the grey dawn, the swamp was indeed dismal in the extreme; but when the morning advanced towards noon all that was changed, as if magically, by the action of the sun. Black, repulsive waters reflected patches of the bright blue sky, and every leaf, and spray, and parasite, and tendril, that grew in the world above was faithfully mirrored in the world below. Vistas of gnarled roots and graceful stems and drooping boughs were seen on right and left, before and behind, extending as if into infinite space, while innumerable insects, engaged in the business ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne

... lateral pushing. A connection with literature may be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them. Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... admit that it is the plant itself which has taught man to spin. Look right into the heart of the flower and you will find the filaments wound round the style like flax round a spindle. And to make her meaning even more plain, nature has planted a parasite, the bind-weed by its side, which winds itself round and round the plant up and down, to and fro, like a weaver's shuttle. And isn't it wonderful that not a man, but a butterfly, first thought of spinning the flax? People call it 'flax-spinner,' for with its own silk and the leaves ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg

... facto power. The comedies of Moliere, who lived at the time of Louis XIV., show us, as an extremely interesting phenomenon, the nobles of the times despising the rich middle class and at the same time playing the parasite at its tables. Louis XIV. himself, this proudest of monarchs, takes off his hat in his palace at Versailles and humbles himself before the Jew, Samuel Bernard, the Rothschild of the times, in order to influence him in favor of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... microbe peculiar to the rinderpest. In the potato disease, again, all the varieties are not affected with the same degree of violence; it is more marked in its action on the round yellows than the reds, and on the latter rather than the pink. But the symptoms even of the same malady differ, the parasite's attacks on the tissues being dissimilar. Oak galls are produced from the prickings of insects; now around the same larva often four varieties of galls are recognized. In the case of consumption in cattle, the disease marches slowly; in that of pigs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various

... to stand up and dance to the flute player, etc. There are all kinds of guessing of riddles—often very ingenious as become the possessors of "Attic salt." Another diversion is to compare every guest present to some mythical monster, a process which infallibly ends by getting the "Parasite" likened to Cerberus, the Hydra, or some such dragon, amid the laughter of all the rest. At some point in the amusement the company is sure to get to singing songs:—"Scolia"—drinking songs indeed, ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... the social sparrow, the snow-bird, the vireos, and the wood-warblers, and as a rule it is the only egg in the nest that issues successfully. Either the eggs of the rightful owner of the nest are not hatched, or else the young are overridden and overreached by the parasite and ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... and devouring them. Not a single plant, not even a lichen, grows on this islet; yet it is inhabited by several insects and spiders. The following list completes, I believe, the terrestrial fauna: a fly (Olfersia) living on the booby, and a tick which must have come here as a parasite on the birds; a small brown moth, belonging to a genus that feeds on feathers; a beetle (Quedius) and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and lastly, numerous spiders, which I suppose prey on these small attendants and scavengers of the water-fowl. The often repeated description of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... makomako, a yellow-flowered shrub, and many others none of us could name, carpeted the farther mountain-sides with brilliant colors. Everywhere were cocoanuts, guavas, and mangos. In the tree-tops over our heads the bindweed shook its feathery seed-pods, the parasite kouna dripped its deeply serrated leaves and crimson umbels, and thousands of orchids ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... superstructure of it is madness. If there was an occasion for the experiment, I would not question to make a proud man a lunatic in three weeks' time, provided I had it in my power to ripen his frenzy with proper applications. It is an admirable reflection in Terence, where it is said of a parasite, "Hic homines ex stultis facit insanos." "This fellow," says he, "has an art of converting fools into madmen." When I was in France, the region of complaisance and vanity, I have often observed that a great man who has entered a levee of flatterers ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... be remembered that the malarial fevers are contracted as a result of inoculation by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, and that the malarial parasite has been demonstrated not only in the blood of those suffering from malarial infection, but also in the stomach and salivary glands of the mosquito. If the yellow fever parasite resembled that of the malarial fevers, it would no doubt have been discovered long ago. But, as a matter of fact, this ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... as Found." In those two works he drew the portrait of an American editor in the person of Steadfast Dodge of the Active Inquirer. All the baser qualities of human nature were united in this ideal representative of the press. He was a sneak, a spy, a coward, a demagogue, a parasite, a lickspittle, a fawner upon all from whom he hoped help, a slanderer of all who did not care to endure his society. Such a picture did not rise even to the dignity of caricature. Nor is it relieved ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... painter!—a contemptible little humbug, a parasite of the great! He has painted Mrs. Bumpsher younger every year for these last ten years—and you see in the advertisements of all her parties his odious little name stuck in at the end of the list. I'm sure, for my part, I'd ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... curious bastard English advertisements at the backs of native newspapers. St Xavier's boys sometimes brought them in by stealth to snigger over among their mates; for the language of the grateful patient recounting his symptoms is most simple and revealing. The Oorya, not unanxious to play off one parasite against the other, slunk ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... every side the old cry of the courtier and the parasite. At every new aggression, at every additional outrage, new advocates rise to defend the source of patronage, wealth and fame—the department of the Executive! Such assistance has always waited on the malignant efforts of tyranny. Nero had his ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... man, sir," replied the parasite, "but your skill has no bounds. Your plan, sir, at once, that I may co-operate and not thwart your great skill ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... of Mengs and Winkelmann, become the oracles of antiquaries, dilettanti, and artists, from the Pyrenees to the utmost north of Europe, have been detailed, and are not without their influence here. Winkelmann was the parasite of the fragments that fell from the conversation or the tablets of Mengs—a deep scholar, and better fitted to comment on a classic than to give lessons on art and style, he reasoned himself into frigid reveries and Platonic dreams on beauty. As far as the taste or the instruction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... the [Greek: kakozaelian] of our times, a man bend all his forces, means, time, fortunes, to be a favorite's favorite's favorite, &c., a parasite's parasite's parasite, that may scorn the servile ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... man on brother man bestows; See stern oppression's iron grip, Or mad ambition's gory hand, Sending, like blood-hounds from the slip, Woe, want, and murder o'er a land! Even in the peaceful rural vale, Truth, weeping, tells the mournful tale, How pamper'd luxury, flattery by her side, The parasite empoisoning her ear. With all the servile wretches in the rear, Looks o'er proud property, extended wide; And eyes the simple rustic hind, Whose toil upholds the glittering show, A creature of another kind, Some coarser substance, unrefin'd, Placed for her lordly use thus far, thus vile, below. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... parasite—I'm a parasite," and he ran off screaming, making a detour in order to avoid the street where Cecilia's father had a second-hand store. Oh, if she had seen him running through the street crying like a baby—that would have been worse ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... Edward II., compelled by his English barons to banish his minion, Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, had created him his lieutenant of Ireland, endowed him with a grant of the royalties of the whole island, to the prejudice of the Earl and other noblemen. The sojourn of this brilliant parasite in Ireland lasted but a year—from June, 1308, till the June following. He displayed both vigour and munificence, and acquired friends. But the Red Earl, sharing to the full the antipathy of the great barons of England, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... began to crawl. The wind favored his position, so that neither coyotes nor horses could scent him. The nearer he approached the head of the arroyo, where the well was located, the thicker grew the desert vegetation. At length a dead palo verde, with huge black clumps of its parasite mistletoe thick in the branches, marked a distance from the well that Gale considered close enough. Noiselessly he crawled here and there until he secured a favorable position, and then rose to peep ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... a man in Paris in 1530, quite forty years of age, who carried about a parasite without a head, which hung pendant from his belly. This individual was exhibited and drew great crowds. Pare appends an illustration, which is, perhaps, one of the most familiar in all teratology. He also gives a portrait of a man who had a parasitic head proceeding from his epigastrium, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... wide spreader. Then it has one very great objection owing to its being so peculiarly liable, when about thirty years old, to be severely attacked, and often killed, by parasites, and as it is so liable to be attacked, and therefore supplies a large quantity of parasite seed, the tree is the means of spreading these parasites to other shade trees. I have found that if you even remove every branch that is attacked, and quite below each parasite, the parasite will spring out again, and even more vigorously ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... to win my hand by Austria's favor; Fain would they lay their grasp on my estates, To swell the vast domains which now they hold. The selfsame lust of conquest that would rob You of your liberty endangers mine. Oh, friend, I'm marked for sacrifice;—to be The guerdon of some parasite, perchance! They'll drag me hence to the imperial court That hateful haunt of falsehood and intrigue; There do detested marriage bonds await me. Love, love alone,—your love ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... frequently did, combine to fix prices which the farmer had no alternative but to pay. What irked the farmer most in connection with these "extortions" was that the middleman seemed to be a nonproducer, a parasite who lived by chaining the agricultural classes of the wealth which they produced. Even those farmers who recognized the middleman as a necessity had little conception of the intricacy and value ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck

... The animal cell can absorb its carbohydrate and proteid food only in the form of carbohydrate and proteid; it is dependent, in fact, on the pre-existence of these organic substances, themselves the products of living matter, and in this respect the animal is essentially a parasite on existing animal and plant life. The plant, on the other hand, if it be a green plant, containing chlorophyll, is capable, in the presence of light, of building up both carbohydrate material and proteid ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... a common parasite on Pinus, oaks occurred but the species was changed; this had small leaves, white underneath; and descending we continued through pine woods, Artemisia minor, together with the usual grasses and ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... drove home to many minds the conviction, the strange conviction, that our greatest biography was written by one of the very smallest men that ever lived, 'a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect'—by a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb; by one 'who, if he had not been a great fool, would never have been a great writer.' So far Macaulay, anno Domini 1831, in the vigorous pages of the Edinburgh Review. A year later appears in Fraser's Magazine another theory by another hand, not then ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... eager questioner, "if it has a shell and is able to look out for itself, why doesn't it? Yet the book says that it always attacks a fish and lives as a parasite for ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... Doctor Johnson used to tell us of; who being advised to take subscriptions for a new Geographical Dictionary, hastened to Bolt Court and begged advice. There having listened carefully for half-an-hour, 'Ah, but dear Sir,' exclaimed the admiring parasite, 'if I am to make all this eloquent ado about Athens and Rome, where shall we find place, do you think, for Richmond, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi

... valves, carapace, or capitulum, and is attached to the Cirripede, in the sack of which it is parasitic, by two distinct threads, terminating in the usual larval, prehensile antennae. I intend to call this Cirripede, Proteolepas. I mention it here for the sake of calling attention to any parasite at all ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... Italian mind. When the old Greek Art revived again in modern Europe, though at first it seemed to add richness and grace to this peculiar development, it smothered and killed it at last, as some brilliant tropical parasite exhausts the life of the tree it seems at first to adorn. Raphael and Michel Angelo mark both the perfected splendor and the commenced decline of original Italian Art; and just in proportion as their ideas grew less Christian and more Greek did the peculiar vividness and intense flavor of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... prostituted on windows, nor carved on the barks of trees in public places: but it smells sweet to every nostril, dwells on every tongue, and is engraven on every heart. She meets with no address but from men of honour and probity: the fluttering coxcomb, the inveigling parasite, the insidious deceiver, the mercenary fortune-hunter, spread no snares for a heart guarded by discretion and prudence, as hers is. They see, that all her amiable virtues are the happy result of an uniform judgment, and the effects of her own wisdom, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... until at last they would dwindle to the smallest possible size compatible with the exercise of their generative functions,— in fact, probably to the size we now see them, i.e., so small as to be a sort of parasite upon the female, and either beneath her notice, or too agile and too small for her to catch ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... a parasite," he sighed, "living off my bounty. But even that did not invite him when he neared the peril of this city. So he turned back. I—I do not blame him," he added with ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... hundreds and thousands of individuals, of which, however, only one acts as master, while the others, in perpetual captivity, provide nourishment for themselves and their master. This master is a fungus of the order Ascomycetes, a parasite which is accustomed to live upon the work of others; its slaves are green algae, which it has sought out, or indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service. It surrounds them, as a spider does its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow meshes, which is gradually converted into an ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... the sward round their roots was dotted with clusters of wild flowers, like a garden. A rustic bridge spanned the water, and graceful willows dipped their tresses into the spray. Aquatic plants clung about the rocks—parasite tendrils climbed the ancient wood; and there was altogether a feeling of solitude and repose in the scene, that rendered it the most fitting seclusion on earth to ripen into a new life of love two ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... milieu des champs que tous ses inconvenients et toutes ses laideurs revoltent.... Au milieu de ce cadre austere et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poesie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le monsieur aux habits noirs, au menton rase, aux mains gantees, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la societe n'est plus qu'un accident ridicule, une tache importune dans le tableau. Votre costume genant et disparate inspire alors la pitie plus que les ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... dog means another year. He should have thought of the time for repaying when he was borrowing. Another week—not another day. Start proceedings at once. Mind, I say it. Didn't I hear him call me a 'parasite from the pavement' one night at a ball? Screens have ears, Mr. Wilson, and parasites have memories. Sell him up—do ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... the Louvre, and the arrest, trial, and execution of Eleonora (upon the charge of sorcery), he completed the work by banishing his mother, only to fall immediately into the power of Albert de Luynes, himself an intriguing parasite, who intended to play the very same role as ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... seemed to show that the mosquito could only be infected by sucking blood of a yellow-fever patient during the first three days of the disease; to prove that the parasite was present in the circulating blood at that time we therefore injected some of this fluid taken from a different case each time, under the skin of five men: four of these suffered an attack of yellow fever as the result of the injection. The other one, a Spaniard, could not be infected either ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... iron-work, and through that we entered a court, or patio, as they I called it. Nothing could be more lovely or deliciously cool than was this small court. The building on each side was covered by trellis-work; and beautiful creepers, vines, and parasite flowers, now in the full magnificence of the early summer, grew up and clustered round the windows. Every inch of wall was covered, so that none of the glaring whitewash wounded the eye. In the four corners of the patio were four large orange-trees, covered with fruit. ...
— John Bull on the Guadalquivir from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope

... a small parasite that attacks this insect and helps to keep it in check. The insect has been known in Europe over a hundred years. It is not certain when it was introduced into America, but it is now found from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various

... clothes louse, the Pediculus vestimenti. The filthy, crowded condition in which the prisoners were kept, and (let us well remember and reflect thereon) the personal want of cleanliness of judge, jury, barristers and ushers, rendered the existence of the little parasite and its effective transference from man to man possible. Those pompous emblems of authority, the horsehair wigs—those musty robes of unctuous dignity—were full of dirt, and harboured the wandering bearer of typhus infection. Gaol-fever was due to dirt; its infecting ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... transformations which belong to all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals of an insect called the "paper-louse," an insect of really marvellous ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... in the pipe connection between the main reservoir and parasite reservoir, and its purpose is to control the flow of air from the main ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous

... and all of them think I'm just a parasite," she muttered. "You don't have to do anything for me! Just let me ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... instead of chasten and render pure, the humanity it was instructed to elevate. So has that school, and so have those individuals, lost their own power and descended from their high seat, fallen from the priest to the mere parasite, from the law-giver to ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... away with a frown he met Gwynne's eyes traveling from the same direction. "I didn't ask him," he said apologetically. "Hate men too well dressed. Looks as if he posed for tailors' ads in the weeklies. Never could stand the social parasite anyhow, but Aileen Lawton asked Isabel to let her bring him, as they are going to open the ball to-night with some new kind of ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... room, in order to be able there quietly to question her of all that she wished to know. This lady belonged to that class (scattered in every country of the world) which has a resemblance to the parasite growth, inasmuch as it grows and flourishes by the nourishment which it seeks from the plants on which it fixes itself. As this lady wore a brown dress, and had brown ribbons in her cap, we find it very appropriate to call ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer

... degradation and effeminization of music? Was art a woman's sigh? A new, selfish goddess was about to be placed upon high and worshipped—soon the rustling of silk would betray her sex. Released from the wise bonds imposed upon her by Mother Church, music is a novel parasite of the emotions, a modern Circe whose feet "take hold on hell," whose wand transforms men into listening swine. Gigantic as antediluvian ferns, as evil-smelling and as dangerous, music in the hands of this magician is dowered with ambiguous attitudes, with anonymous ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... his education, surnamed the Cappadocian, was born at Epiphania in Cilicia, in a fuller's shop. From this obscure and servile origin he raised himself by the talents of a parasite; and the patrons, whom he assiduously flattered, procured for their worthless dependent a lucrative commission, or contract, to supply the army with bacon. His employment was mean; he rendered it infamous. He accumulated wealth by the basest arts of fraud and corruption; but his malversations ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... adopted this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily to what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no, because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... Well, then, mayn't Evelyn be kind to me, though I am what I am? I reminded Lady Henry, but she only thought me a mean parasite, sponging on a duchess for presents above my station. She said things hardly to be forgiven. I was silent. But I have never ceased ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a parasite and mighty flatterer of James V.; but one of the greatest enemies to God and his people (that then began to profess the true religion) that was in all the court, being such a bigotted papist, that, one day in a large audience, he renounced his ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... start out the Day by finding in the Paper what a Professor connected with the University of Chicago had said about the American Woman being a vain and shallow Parasite with a Cerebrum about the size ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade

... a contagious disease, produced by the presence of a small parasite that varies in length from a fiftieth to a hundredth of an inch, according to the species, of which there are three: Sarcoptes, which generally affects the withers; Symbiotes Communis, affecting the legs, and the ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek

... and pride! and honour! come and see To what a depth your visions tumble down! Behold your wearer,—who shall say if he Were monarch, warrior, parasite, or clown! And ye, who talk of glory and renown, And call them bright and deathless! and who break Each dearer tie to grasp fame's gilded crown, Come, hear instruction from this shadow speak, And learn how valueless the prize ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands

... conversations with Baron Hirsch's deputy. White reported afterwards that the functionaries of St. Petersburg had painted to him the Russian Jew as "a compound of thief and usurer." Pobyedonostzev delivered himself of the following malicious observation: "The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in which and and on which he exists and put this parasite on a rock—and he will die." While thus justifying before the distinguished foreigner their system of destroying ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... is supposed to represent somewhat the character of the Parasite of the Greek comedy. It is possible that he was retained about the person of the wealthy and dissipated as a kind of private instructor, as ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana

... is pursued by all those who would arrive at, or remain in place and power: and what must be the consequence? that the straight-forward, honourable, upright man is rejected by the people, while the parasite, the adulator, the demagogue, who flatters their opinions, asserts their supremacy, and yields to their arbitrary demands, is the one selected by them for place and power. Thus do they demoralise each other; and ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... and is frequently followed by the women. Attempt is seldom made to comb the hair, but frequent vermin-catching onslaughts are made, the person performing the work using a sharp piece of bamboo to separate the tangled kinks and to mash the offending parasite against the thumb nail. In Bataan the Negritos sometimes shave a circular place on the crown, but I am not informed as to the reason. The practice ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed

... a parasite on the back of an ox ... having found out by actual measurement the circumference of the ox, and by mathematical calculation, the diameter of the ox, and having ascertained that as he inserted his proboscis ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... followed suit, at the same time glancing toward their last night's halting-place to see if their men were within reach to come and row and enable him to make an effort to obtain some of the green, bulbous-looking stems and flowers of the lovely parasite which had taken his attention. But they were as unobtainable as if they were a hundred miles away, for it would have taken them days to cut a way to opposite where the boat was now being held against the swift stream, and even when they had reached the spot it would have been impossible to force ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn

... Another floung his armes lyke cudgelles at a peare tree, in so much as it was mightily dreaded that hee woulde strike the candles that hung aboue theyr heades out of their sockets, and leaue them all darke. Another did nothing but winke and make faces. There was a parasite, & he with clapping his hands and thripping his fingers seemed to dance an antike to and fro The onely thing they did well, was the prodigal childes hunger, most of their schollers being hungerly kept, and surely you would haue sayd they had ben brought vp in hogs academie to learne to eate acornes, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... of an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproof, without fear controlling the world's abuses. One whom no servile hope of gain, or frosty apprehension of danger, can make to be a parasite, either to time, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... attacked by muscardine, a disease proved by Bassi to be caused by a vegetable parasite. This malady was propagated annually by the parasitic spores. Wafted by winds they often sowed the disease in places far removed from the centre of infection. Muscardine is now said to be very rare, a deadlier malady having taken its place. This new disease is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... [That is, "He says, I say, he denies, I deny." It is the parasite Gnatho that is referred to. Terence makes the shameless sycophant proclaim his ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... architecture, and medieval iron work, and brasses which contributed hints for adornment; and not content with mere pictures he sought in the woods and hedges, scanning the strange forms of trees, and the poisonous growth of great water-plants, and the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony. In one of these rambles he discovered a red earth which he made into a pigment, and he found in the unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which he thought made his black ink still more glossy. His book was written all in ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... lightning it all came up in his excited brain. Time after time, since he heard Methuselah's strange message from the grave, had he passed Tu-Kila-Kila's temple enclosure and looked up with vague awe at that sacred parasite that grew so conspicuously in a fork of the branches. It was easy to secure it, if no man guarded. There still remained one night. In that one short night he must do his best—and worst. If all then failed, he must ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... white. Prominent yellowish threads or veins are a sign that the mycelium had started to grow and been killed. Distinct white mold patches on the surface of the bricks indicate the presence of some other fungous parasite on the mushroom mycelium; the absence of any mushroom smell in the spawn indicates its worthlessness and that the mycelium is dead. One familiar with mushroom spawn can tell with considerable certainty "very living" spawn ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer

... yet been refuted by the sermons of cowardly bourgeois or fat priests. For instance: a father accumulates a million by energetic and clever exploitation, and leaves it to his son—a rickety, lazy, ignorant, degenerate idiot, a brainless maggot, a true parasite. Potentially a million rubles is a million working days, the absolutely irrational right to labour, sweat, life, and blood of a terrible number of men. Why? What is the ground of reason? Utterly unknown. Then why not agree with the proposition, gentlemen, that our profession ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... descended from a possibly very much higher type of organization than that which they now exhibit. Having for innumerable generations ceased to require their legs, their eyes, and so forth, all such organs of high elaboration have either disappeared or become vestigial, leaving the parasite as a more or less ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... of manual labour about him—his virtues else be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo—is carefully contradistinguished from the 'gentleman.' The 'gentleman' may be a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee, a parasite, a helpless potterer; he may be a man of spotless life, able and honest; but he must on no account be a man with broad palms, a workman amongst workmen. The 'gentleman' is not necessarily gentle; but he is necessarily genteel. Etymology ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... FitzHenrys should have grown to man's estate and man's privilege of quarrelling with his female relatives about the youthful female relative of some other person. But it would come, surely. Mrs. Ingham-Baker, the parasite, knew her victim, Mrs. Harrington, well enough ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... ones at their base, spreading out into fans of emerald green. Again, as the forest giants which far overhead were the arches of a watercourse, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. And even the parasite vines were of the same Titan designing, for they bound the girders of the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... not, if she placed value upon success, fall into the class of parasite wives who suffer their own independence of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... Ford, making a halting-place for rafts and logs, barges and floats, coming down from the vast forests above when rains and snow-thaws raised the river and its tributaries; but now a long stretch of boom catches what it can of Elk's commerce and is a chartered parasite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... of midnight risings, scourgings of the flesh, dirges in vast cathedrals, and the miracle of the Host solemnly veiled in a glory of painted light—such a nation would never have accepted Christian Science as a religion. No! Religion in America is a parasite without roots. The questions that have occupied Europe from the dawn of her history, for which she has fought more fiercely than for empire or liberty, for which she has fasted in deserts, agonized in cells, suffered on the cross, and at the stake, for which she ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... his soul. He did not know it; he did not willingly put her away. But as each plant of the field was destined to grow its own way, side by side with its fellows, so human souls grew singly by themselves from some irresistible inner force. And she was but the parasite that ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... this were a good order to take with vagabonds. But a certain parasite sayeth in jest that this were then an excellent order to take with the friars, seeing that they were the veriest vagabonds that be; a friar thereupon took the jest in very ill part, and could not refrain himself from calling the fellow ribald, villain, and the son of perdition; ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... new supply of beer and "whiskey", and while they took care not to make noise enough to awaken the new recruit to the army of professional beggars, they drank to Kansas Shorty's health and congratulated him upon the successful culmination of the first step necessary to make a good-for-nothing parasite of society out of a respectable boy. This inhuman brutality is administered to every boy who falls into the clutches of a plinger, as it not only deadens the spirit of pride and honor, but makes the boy obedient to the ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... specimen first examined there were no other indications of the growth of any parasite; but from the interior of the abdomen of a second bee I obtained an abundance of well-defined globular bodies resembling the spores of a fungus, varying in size from .00016 to .00012 in. Three out of four specimens subsequently examined contained ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various

... experience, yet the aim of the modern school is to base practice on facts. For example, for many years physicians were aware that quinine cured malaria, in some unexplainable way. Now they not only know that malaria is caused by an animal parasite living and breeding in the blood and that quinine destroys the foe, but they know about the parasite's habits and mode of development and when it most readily succumbs to the drug. Thus a great discovery taught them to give quinine understandingly, at the right time, and in the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... feel his patriot's pride suppressed by local jealousy? Type of the men, the event, the purpose, it commemorates, that column rises, stern, even severe in its simplicity; neither niche nor molding for parasite or creeping thing to rest on; composed of material that defies the waves of time, and pointing like a finger to the source of noblest thought. Beacon of freedom, it guides the present generation to retrace the fountain ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... the train of victory there appeared its parasite, discord. The re-conquest of Italy was so brilliant and easy as to arouse disputes about the spoils; and when the Imperialists began to treat Suvoroff and his heroes cavalierly, the feud became acute. His complaints ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... away the more degrading myths; myths as degrading were suggested to dark and servile hearts by unscientific etymologies. Over the whole mass of ancient mythology the new mythology of a debased Brahmanic ritualism grew like some luxurious and baneful parasite. It is enough for our purpose if we can show that even in the purest and most antique mythology of India the element of traditional savagery survived and played its part, and that the irrational legends ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... his last visits, expressions of joy to escape him because recovery was impossible. Barbezieux used to annoy people very much by answering aloud when they spoke to him in whispers, and by keeping visitors waiting whilst he was playing with his dogs or some base parasite. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... place may be in the Customs—it is, I think, in that or the Excise—besides another at Lord Lonsdale's table, where this poetical charlatan and political parasite licks up the crumbs with a hardened alacrity; the converted Jacobin having long subsided into the clownish sycophant [despised retainer,—MS. erased] of the worst ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... herds and those wild creatures to which Man's domesticated productions have communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and horses into contact with the parasite, that it is found to have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases which in Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in some regions ...
— Progress and History • Various

... state of things to which they corresponded had become intolerable. The French revolution meant (among other things) that in the mind of the French peasant there had accumulated a vast deposit of bitter enmity against the noble who had become a mere parasite upon the labouring population, retaining, as Arthur Young said, privileges for himself, and leaving poverty to the lower classes. The peasant had not read Rousseau; he had read nothing. But when his discontent began to affect the educated classes, men who had read ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... The study of early, barbaric, savage, classical, Egyptian, or Indian religions should not be one-sided. Men have always been men, for good as well as for evil; and religion, almost everywhere, is allied with ethics no less than it is overrun by the parasite of myth, and the survival of magic in ritual. The Mother and the Maid were "Saviours" ([Greek text]), "holy" and "pure," despite contradictory legends. {77} The tales of incest, as between Zeus and Persephone, are the result of the genealogical mania. ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... of too affectionate a home training, too assertive parenthood, is to dwarf the individuality of the child and make him a sort of parasite, out of contact with his contemporaries, seclusive and odd. There is a certain brand of goody-goody boy, brought up tied to his mother's apron strings, who has lost the essential capacities of mixing with varied types of boys and girls, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... point in this connection is that Agaricus melleus becomes in these cases a true parasite, producing fatal disease in the attacked timber trees, and, as Hartig has conclusively proved, spreading from one tree to another by means of the rhizomorphs under ground. Only the last summer I had an opportunity of witnessing, on a large scale, the damage that can ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... were merry and played at Tab;[FN118] and we made one of us Wazir and another Sultan and a third Torchbearer or Headsman.[FN119] Presently, there came in upon us a spunger, without bidding, and we went on playing, whilst he played with us. Then quoth the Sultan to the Wazir, "Bring the Parasite who cometh in to the folk, without leave or license, that we may enquire into his case; after which I will cut off his head;" so the headsmen arose and dragged the spunger before the Sultan who bade cut off his head. Now there was with them a sword, that would not cut clotted ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... other hand, Beatrice had any number of activities to take up her time. Her period of being a romantic parasite—the world called it a sweet bride—was ended. She was now bent on becoming as mad and ruthless a butterfly as there ever was, and to the accomplishment of her aim she did not purpose to stint herself in any way. She still drew her own allowance from her father and accepted ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... and branches of our best apple-trees; it clears our early cabbages of a pestilent little insect, that left unchecked would utterly destroy the crop; it visits our gardens and devours another swarming parasite that covers ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... ruinous waste has set in before which not only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I have read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is the same, and until a parasite for the germ is found the loss must go on, and the work of Giotto, of Benozzo Gozzoli, of Memmi, must perish with that of the Orgagnas, which may indeed go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles, allegories—they are all hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... destructive; whole orchards were enfeebled, and no way was discovered of staying its progress, which threatened also the olive and every other tree, shrub, and flower. Science was called on to discover its parasite. This was found to be the Australian lady-bug (vedolia cardinalis), and in 1888-89 quantities of this insect were imported and spread throughout Los Angeles County, and sent to Santa Barbara and other afflicted districts. The ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... hundred years ago were now," assented the parasite, "I'd begin with Dick, the tollman! He's a regular Goliath and,"—his face becoming purple—"when I threatened him with the law, threw me out of the barn on an obnoxious heap ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... a pity for a clever man to be tied to an ignorant wife, that I bored him to death; and Lady Martin said I was a parasite, clinging to him for money and food, and that I had spoilt his life ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed copied from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring of the boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were garlanded often enough, like the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery of parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copied from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even the flatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that highest level of the forest aisles where the trees, having ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... parasite," and he ran off screaming, making a detour in order to avoid the street where Cecilia's father had a second-hand store. Oh, if she had seen him running through the street crying like a baby—that would have been worse than the breeches pulled ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... game alone, for it is equally applicable to all gallinaceous birds troubled with this disease. The pamphlet in question is a very valuable work, and gives very clearly the methods by which the parasite develops. But for our purpose it will be sufficient to narrate what M. Megnin recommends for the cure of it. These are various, as will be seen, and comprise the experience of other inquirers as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various

... in their walk, but at the end of the stage; just as though, in walking with a fellow, we should never speak but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where a man can go no further. I was once at a comedy in Cambridge, and there I saw a parasite make faces and mouths of all ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... feeling safe for the moment, Lane opened the breech of his piece, threw away the empty cartridge, and replaced it with one containing heavy shot before stepping up to the tree, and climbing up the trunk easily enough by the help of the cable-like parasite ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn

... Love in their Way. In Twelfth-Night there is something singularly Ridiculous and Pleasant in the fantastical Steward Malvolio. The Parasite and the Vain-glorious in Parolles, in All's Well that ends Well is as good as any thing of that Kind in Plautus or Terence. Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, is an uncommon Piece of Humour. The Conversation of Benedick ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe

... sheep-dog, because he has lived closer to man and has served him every day of his life with all his powers, all his intelligence, in the one useful and necessary work he is fitted for or which we have found for him to do. The hunting and the pet, or parasite, dogs—the "dogs for sport and pleasure"—though one in species with him are not like beings of the same order; they are like professional athletes and performers, and smart or fashionable people compared to those who do the work ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... ivy there is one preliminary. Be sure you are not one of the people readily susceptible to its poison. If you are, leave this luxuriant parasite alone and let some one else struggle with it. Its poison is most virulent in the spring when the leaves are just unfolding. Later in the summer it is not so treacherous. Tearing it up by the roots, burning over old stone fences infected with it, ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley



Words linked to "Parasite" :   entozoan, parasite yew, plant, entozoon, ectozoon, leech, epizoon, epizoan, plant life, parasitic plant, being, parasitical, ectozoan, host, endozoan, organism, parasitic, flora, follower



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com