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Contractile   Listen
adjective
Contractile  adj.  Tending to contract; having the power or property of contracting, or of shrinking into shorter or smaller dimensions; as, the contractile tissues. "The heart's contractile force." "Each cilium seems to be composed of contractile substance."
Contractile vacuole (Zool.), a pulsating cavity in the interior of a protozoan, supposed to be excretory in function. There may be one, two, or more.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Contractile" Quotes from Famous Books



... which, abounding in almost every pond, has been long known to naturalists. It consists of a single dilated gelatinous vesicle, which is terminated at one extremity by a sucker, and at the other by a number of contractile filaments, which serve as the tentaculae, by which it seizes its prey. This is all that represents the animal, the dilated portion of the tube being the part in which the process of digestion is carried on, and where the food ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... its highest sense, is a vast capacity for God. It is like a curious chamber added on to being, and somehow involving being, a chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can be expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God's image is left without God's Spirit. One cannot call what is left a soul; it is a shrunken, useless organ, a capacity sentenced ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... is not the sole direction in which nervous excitement expends itself. Viscera as well as muscles may receive the discharge. That the heart and blood-vessels (which, indeed, being all contractile, may in a restricted sense be classed with the muscular system) are quickly affected by pleasures and pains, we have daily proved to us. Every sensation of any acuteness accelerates the pulse; and how sensitive the heart is to emotions, is testified by the familiar ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer



Words linked to "Contractile" :   contractility, contractile organ, contracted



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