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Sensitive plant   /sˈɛnsətɪv plænt/   Listen
adjective
Sensitive  adj.  
1.
Having sense of feeling; possessing or exhibiting the capacity of receiving impressions from external objects; as, a sensitive soul.
2.
Having quick and acute sensibility, either to the action of external objects, or to impressions upon the mind and feelings; highly susceptible; easily and acutely affected. "She was too sensitive to abuse and calumny."
3.
(a)
(Mech.) Having a capacity of being easily affected or moved; as, a sensitive thermometer; sensitive scales.
(b)
(Chem. & Photog.) Readily affected or changed by certain appropriate agents; as, silver chloride or bromide, when in contact with certain organic substances, is extremely sensitive to actinic rays.
4.
Serving to affect the sense; sensible. (R.) "A sensitive love of some sensitive objects."
5.
Of or pertaining to sensation; depending on sensation; as, sensitive motions; sensitive muscular motions excited by irritation.
Sensitive fern (Bot.), an American fern (Onoclea sensibilis), the leaves of which, when plucked, show a slight tendency to fold together.
Sensitive flame (Physics), a gas flame so arranged that under a suitable adjustment of pressure it is exceedingly sensitive to sounds, being caused to roar, flare, or become suddenly shortened or extinguished, by slight sounds of the proper pitch.
Sensitive joint vetch (Bot.), an annual leguminous herb (Aeschynomene hispida), with sensitive foliage.
Sensitive paper, paper prepared for photographic purpose by being rendered sensitive to the effect of light.
Sensitive plant. (Bot.)
(a)
A leguminous plant (Mimosa pudica, or Mimosa sensitiva, and other allied species), the leaves of which close at the slightest touch.
(b)
Any plant showing motions after irritation, as the sensitive brier (Schrankia) of the Southern States, two common American species of Cassia (Cassia nictitans, and Cassia Chamaecrista), a kind of sorrel (Oxalis sensitiva), etc.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sensitive plant" Quotes from Famous Books



... sensitive plant which nourishes only under the fairest conditions. Sam's had perished in the bleak east wind of Billie's note. In other circumstances he might have resented this intrusion of a stranger into his most intimate concerns. His only emotion now, was one ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... her cheek. She drew back as if she had been stung, as a sensitive plant shrinks from ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... have told him that another female woman, Doria Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he might not have come. Jaffery was always a queer fish where women were concerned. Not a chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean fish, now hot, now cold. I have seen him shrink like a sensitive plant in the presence of an ingenue of nineteen and royster in Pantagruelian fashion with a mature member of the chorus of the Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly, a scared Joseph, from the allurements of the charming wife of a Right Honourable Sir Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... am! Here's just what I was wishing for last night come about, and I'm spoiling it all," and in another five minutes has swallowed the last mouthful of his bile, and is repaid by seeing his little sensitive plant expand again and sun ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of ducdame to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... spikes has a gentle rhythmical, swaying movement. A touch, and by magic the colour is gone—naught remains but a dingy brown lump on the rock, whence water oozes. Another form of plant-like life takes the colour of rich green—the green of parsley, and faints at the touch, as does the sensitive plant of the land. Another strange creature, roughly saucer-shaped, but deep grey mottled with white and brown, continuously waves its serrated edges and pulsates at the centre. It starts and stops, contracts and withdraws steadily into the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... her kind mamma and uncle had planned for her benefit, and with what Pansy called a kiss, a very butterfly kiss it was, for the little girl was as afraid of hurting the pansy as if it had been a sensitive plant, the flower-pot was placed on the ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth

... pride and want of confidence in his friends, than in a certain morbid feeling of delicacy, and a peculiar diffidence, that he was sensible of, but wanted energy to overcome. His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind. And, upon the whole, our intimacy was rather a mutual predilection than a deep and solid friendship, such as has since ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... becomes intensely congested with the juices of the plant, and sometimes even acquires an uncommon and most remarkable degree of contractility. This is the case with the stigma of the tulip and one variety of sensitive plant, and is in these plants observed to occur not only after the application of the pollen to the stigma, but when excited by any other means of stimulation. The flowers of some plants, during and after fecundation, also show an increase ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg



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