spurge family

American  

noun

1. the large plant family Euphorbiaceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having milky juice, simple alternate leaves or no leaves, usually petalless flowers often with showy bracts, and capsular fruit, and including cassava, croton, crown-of-thorns, poinsettia, snow-on-the-mountain, spurge, and the plants that produce castor oil, rubber, and tung oil.

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Example Sentences

Manihot, man′i-hot, n. a genus of tropical American, mainly Brazilian, herbs of the spurge family—two species yielding the bitter and the sweet cassava respectively.

From Project Gutenberg