April 29, 2008
Monday, 28th April 2008 : Today's Word is ...
Nettle
Pronunciation : nétt'l
Past and past participle : nettled
Present participle : nettling
3rd person present singular : nettles
1. a wild plant with serrated-edged leaves covered with fine hairs or spines that sting when touched. Native to: found worldwide. Genus Urtica.
2. a wild plant with serrated leaves like a stinging nettle, but without the stinging hairs, especially a dead nettle. Native to: northern temperate regions. Genus Lamium.
3. to irritate or annoy somebody ( informal )
4. to sting somebody with a nettle leaf
NOTE : The young leaves of the stinging nettle Urtica dioica can be cooked as a vegetable and used to make nettle beer. The common name nettle is taken from the Anglo-Saxon word noedl meaning needle.
Old English netele - Indo-European - to tie
aggravate, annoy, bother, bug, chafe, disturb, exasperate, fret, gall2, get, irk, irritate, peeve, provoke
appease, mollify, please
• Her loud singing of television commercials soon began to nettle him.
• The sensation was as bad as that from a nettle, but more like that caused by the Physalia or Portuguese man-of-war.
• Then he shot the arrow and fell back and would have died, but he lit on a nettle and sprang up too gaily for a corpse.
• nettlelike : Adjective
• nettler : Noun
• nettly : Adjective