Barometz

Quick meaning: Barometz is a noun meaning (mythology) A purported zoophyte, half-animal and half-plant, said to grow in the form of a sheep.

Meaning

(mythology) A purported zoophyte, half-animal and half-plant, said to grow in the form of a sheep.

More Meanings

1. A golden chicken fern or woolly fern (Cibotium barometz), the rhizomes of which are covered in furry brown hair; the legend (sense 1) is supposed to have arisen because, when inverted, the rhizomes with stalks growing out of them resemble lambs.

Example Sentences

[...] I say to you what I should say if any little Barometzes should come under my care. It is more on the imaginary side than the matter of fact.

One has only to consult [Jorge Luis] Borges's own "Book of Imaginary Beings" to encounter chimeras, phoenixes, basilisks, barometzes (the last a kind of vegetable lamb) and the like.

Cradled in ſnow and fann'd by arctic air / Shines, gentle Barometz! thy golden hair; / Rooted in earth each cloven hood deſcends, / And round and round her flexile neck ſhe bends; / Crops the grey coral moſs, and hoary thyme, / Or laps with roſy tongue the melting rime; [...]

However, one night when I was hard at work in one of the powder mills outside the fortress, I was captured along with some others by a band of Tartars and carried off so deep into their territory that I not only saw borametz, the legendary sheep-shaped melon, growing, I ate it.

Word Forms

• barometzes
• baromez

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include metazoon, zoomorph, bucentaur, therianthrope, zoist, satyral.

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