hamadryad
Americannoun
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Classical Mythology. a dryad who is the spirit of a particular tree.
noun
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classical myth one of a class of nymphs, each of which inhabits a tree and dies with it
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another name for king cobra
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of hamadryad
< Latin, stem of Hamādryas wood nymph < Greek, equivalent to hama together with (cognate with same ) + dryás dryad
Vocabulary lists containing hamadryad
Example Sentences
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“A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon,” Hermes points out.
From New York Times ● Apr. 4, 2010
"A barb steeped in the venom of a hamadryad went in there!"
From The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Rohmer, Sax
Many monstrous tribes of enemies supervene; also a Forest of Maidens, kind but of hamadryad nature—"flower-women," as they have been poetically called.
From The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) by Saintsbury, George
His informant was a hamadryad, whom Jurgen encountered upon the outskirts of a forest overlooking the city from the west.
From Jurgen A Comedy of Justice by Cabell, James Branch
From its size and the fact that it was attacking the elephant it could only be that most dreadful and almost legendary denizen of the forest, the hamadryad, or king-cobra.
From The Elephant God by Casserly, Gordon
My friend killed all the hamadryads on the spot, and gave the boys some coppers, and we went on.
From The Soul of a People by Fielding, H. (Harold)
In entire consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads or tritons.
From The Writings of John Burroughs — Volume 05: Pepacton by Burroughs, John
I have just sent people to Abyssinia to fetch me some big silver-gray lion-monkeys, sometimes called hamadryads.
From McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1 by Various
The ladies and gentlemen had been transformed, therefore, into gods and goddesses, nymphs, and hamadryads, fauns, satyrs, and wood-spirits.
From Frederick the Great and His Family by Coleman, Chapman, Mrs.
It was thus that the ancients believed that the dryads, hamadryads, satyrs, pans, nereids, watched over the fountains, forests, and seas, attributing to each force in nature a presiding divinity.
From De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera by MacNutt, Francis Augustus
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
