SAP • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Sap

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noun

Sap n.

The juice of plants of any kind, especially the ascending and descending juices or circulating fluid essential to nutrition. Note: The ascending is the crude sap, the assimilation of which takes place in the leaves, when it becomes the elaborated sap suited to the growth of the plant.

The sapwood, or alburnum, of a tree.

A simpleton; a saphead; a milksop. (Slang)

Sap ball (Bot.), any large fungus of the genus Polyporus. See Polyporus.

Sap green, a dull light green pigment prepared from the juice of the ripe berries of the Rhamnus catharticus, or buckthorn. It is used especially by water-color artists.

Sap rot, the dry rot. See under Dry.

Sap sucker (Zool.), any one of several species of small American woodpeckers of the genus Sphyrapicus, especially the yellow-bellied woodpecker (Sphyrapicus varius) of the Eastern United States. They are so named because they puncture the bark of trees and feed upon the sap. The name is loosely applied to other woodpeckers.

Sap tube (Bot.), a vessel that conveys sap.

Sap n. (Mil.) A narrow ditch or trench made from the foremost parallel toward the glacis or covert way of a besieged place by digging under cover of gabions, etc.

Sap fagot (Mil.), a fascine about three feet long, used in sapping, to close the crevices between the gabions before the parapet is made.

Sap roller (Mil.), a large gabion, six or seven feet long, filled with fascines, which the sapper sometimes rolls along before him for protection from the fire of an enemy.

verb

Sap v. t. (past & past part. sapped; pres. part. sapping)

To subvert by digging or wearing away; to mine; to undermine; to destroy the foundation of. "Nor safe their dwellings were, for sapped by floods, Their houses fell upon their household gods."

(Mil.) To pierce with saps.

To make unstable or infirm; to unsettle; to weaken. "Ring out the grief that saps the mind."

Sap v. i. To proceed by mining, or by secretly undermining; to execute saps. "Both assaults are carried on by sapping."

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Etymology of 'Sap'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Sap" Quotes from Famous Books

... along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves to sap their life and ...

— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... electrical air and the beauty of the country had induced. After all, he was but forty-two. Life on the whole had been very kind to him. And, although he did not realize it as yet, his frame, blighted by the rigors of the past three years, was already sensible to a renewal of juice and sap. He admitted that he was more interested than he had been for many years, and that if he was not in love, he tingled with a very natural masculine desire for an ...

— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... not be a deed, or a work, but a growth—a growth like a tree's, always rising higher from its own inward strength and sap. ...

— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks

... to run to the house to tell me about every little thing you do," the young wife explained patiently, "but these debts will not be little things when they come to be paid off, dear. Really, you don't know how they will sap you and me later on; they may even take the farm right out from under our feet. There are so many things that can happen to cattle—and interest has to be paid. That's the ...

— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... awa, and about a' the ill he had ever dune or said for a' the forepart o' his life, that Patie says he looked mair like ane dead than living; and they cou'dna get a word o' sense out o' him, for downright fright at their growling and routing. He maun be a saft sap, wi' a head nae better than a fozy frosted turnip—it wad hae ta'en a hantle o' them to scaur Andrew ...

— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

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