from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A natural outer covering; an integument.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. Something which covers; a covering or coating.
- n. A natural covering of the body or of a bodily organ; an integument.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A cover or covering; an integument.
- n. Especially, the covering of a living body, or of some part or organ of such a body; skin; hide.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A cover; an envelop; a natural covering or protection of the body or a part of it; a tegmen or tegmentum.
- n. Specifically— In zoology and anatomy, skin; the general covering of the body; the integument.
- n. In entomology: A tegmen; the wing-cover or elytrum of orthopterous insects: an erroneous use, apparently by confusion with tegmen, 5.
- n. Properly, the crust, or chitinous integument, of the body, as distinguished from the hairs, scales, etc., which may grow upon it.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. a natural protective body covering and site of the sense of touch
People climbed the trees to shake down the nuts, many still sheathed in the bright-green fleshy tegument, while other family members and relations combed the forest floor and picked them up.
Such evidences of his unceasing ardour, both for ‘divine and human lore,’ when advanced into his sixty-fifth year, and notwithstanding his many disturbances from disease, must make us at once honour his spirit, and lament that it should be so grievously clogged by its material tegument.
Hide was a misnomer, of course, since the scrapes reported that the creature's tegument wasn't any more multicellular than the rest of it.
He very much wanted to, having seen the first part of the tegument report.
"Hmm," he said again, scrolling past the obscure serology results and looking at the tegument test and scrape instead.
I'm going to be down there in ten minutes, and if you haven't got waiting there for me a group serology analysis, a tegument series with scrapes, a neural series with pertinent EEG, and a percussion-and-auscultation set—
It was incredibly thick, dry, pliable; filled minutely with cells of a liquid-gaseous something which she knew to be a more perfect insulator even than the fibres of the tegument itself.
After all what is this mortal tegument but a shell which a man sloughs off in eternal evolution.
Every variation was observed, generally the more leafy the outer tegument the greater was the degree of straightness of the funicle, and the abortion of the nucleus.
Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to man should receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes.