byssus

From New Latin byssus (“sea silk”), from Latin byssus (“fine cotton or cotton stuff, silk”), from Ancient Greek βύσσος (bússos, “a very fine yellowish flax and the linen woven from it”), from Hebrew בּוּץ (búts), Aramaic בּוּצָא (būṣā).

• IPA^(key): /ˈbɪsəs/
• Rhymes: -ɪsəs

byssus (usually uncountable, plural byssi or byssuses)

1. 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.
2. Sea silk manufactured from these filaments.
3. (mycology) The stipe or stem of some fungi which are particularly thin and thread-like.

• 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

• bissus

From Ancient Greek βύσσος (bússos, “a very fine yellowish flax and the linen woven from it”), from Biblical Hebrew בּוּץ (búts), Aramaic בּוש (bus).

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /ˈbys.sus/, [ˈbʏs̠ːʊs̠]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /ˈbis.sus/, [ˈbisːus]

byssus f (genitive byssī); second declension

1. byssus or sea silk

Second-declension noun.

• Translingual: Byssus

• “byssus”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• byssus in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s 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