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Pith   /pɪθ/   Listen
noun
Pith  n.  
1.
(Bot.) The soft spongy substance in the center of the stems of many plants and trees, especially those of the dicotyledonous or exogenous classes. It consists of cellular tissue.
2.
(a)
(Zool.) The spongy interior substance of a feather.
(b)
(Anat.) The spinal cord; the marrow.
3.
Hence: The which contains the strength of life; the vital or essential part; concentrated force; vigor; strength; importance; as, the speech lacked pith. "Enterprises of great pith and moment."
Pith paper. Same as Rice paper, under Rice.



verb
Pith  v. t.  (Physiol.) To destroy the central nervous system of (an animal, as a frog), as by passing a stout wire or needle up and down the vertebral canal.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pith" Quotes from Famous Books



... the top of your head you must have a sun helmet. Get it of cork, not of pith. The latter has a habit of melting unobtrusively about your ears when it rains. A helmet in brush is the next noisiest thing to a circus band, so it is always well to have, also, a double terai. This is not something to eat. It is a wide felt hat, and then ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... bones this night! and where are the sheep's trotters to deny him entry? Where are the walnuts or the peach stones whose kernels are removed from him? Ahi, signori! do you think, if Signor Dives had had so wholesome a mouth he would have left to Lazarus the bones? Not he—but the pith of every one of them had gone to make him sleeker. Avanti, signori, avanti! Let the next in torment come up." He had abundant custom, and seemed never to tire; but my turn came at last, introduced by a string of panegyric which spoke of me as the Nerve-Acrobat, the Lodestone ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... it would be to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the transfer. In Multitude and Solitude, the author has given us more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought. In Captain Margaret, we have a remarkable combination of the love of romance ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... Tom, well done! That's the right spirit, and I never refuse to help anybody if they've a mind to do themselves justice. There's a young man of two-and-twenty I've got my eye on now. I shall do what I can for that young man; he's got some pith in him. But then, you see, he's made good use of his time,—a first-rate calculator,— can tell you the cubic contents of anything in no time, and put me up the other day to a new market for Swedish bark; he's ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... proceeding a little way over it, she came to a large oak-tree,—a memorial of antiquity, whose fruit (a mouthful which Time gives to this bitter age of its lost sweetness) tasted like sweetmeats to the maiden, who was satisfied with little. Then the oak, making lips of its bark and a tongue of its pith, said to Cianna, "Whither are you going so sad, my little daughter? Come and rest under my shade." Cianna thanked him much, but excused herself, saying that she was going in haste to find the Mother of Time. And when the oak heard this he ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile


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