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Banyan   Listen
noun
Banyan  n.  (Bot.) A tree of the same genus as the common fig, and called the Indian fig (Ficus Indica), whose branches send shoots to the ground, which take root and become additional trunks, until it may be the tree covers some acres of ground and is able to shelter thousands of men.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Banyan" Quotes from Famous Books



... manners of most other Canadians. They seem to me to have a lot of virtues,—cleanliness, good-humour, good-nature,—and I like their habit of living altogether, children settled round the parent tree like branches of a banyan. We would give a trifle to be able to do it ourselves, Bob;' and the smile with which the brothers met each ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... bosk^, ceja [Sp.], chaparal, motte [U.S.]; arboretum &c 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary^; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva^, mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria^, banyan; blow, blowth^; floret^, petiole; pin grass, timothy, yam, yew, zinnia. foliage, branch, bough, ramage^, stem, tigella^; spray &c 51; leaf. flower, blossom, bine^; flowering plant; timber tree, fruit tree; pulse, legume. Adj. vegetable, vegetal, vegetive^, vegitous^; herbaceous, herbal; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but the most imposing piece in nature's repertory? Heine wished to lie like Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande. I should not be satisfied with one tree; but if the wood grew together like a banyan grove, I would be buried under the tap-root of the whole; my parts should circulate from oak to oak; and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so that ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Ganges. The ghat was deserted; I stood still for awhile, enjoying the sunny peace. After a dip in the sparkling waters, I started for home. The only sound in the silence was that of my Ganges-drenched cloth, swish-swashing with every step. As I passed beyond the site of the large banyan tree near the river bank, a strong impulse urged me to look back. There, under the shade of the banyan, and surrounded by a few disciples, sat the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... animals, old, older, and oldest, has a remarkable resemblance to the Tettira Jataka (ed. Fausboell, No. 37, transl. Rhys Davids, i. p. 310 seq.) in which the partridge, monkey, and elephant dispute as to their relative age, and the partridge turns out to have voided the seed of the Banyan-tree under which they were sheltered, whereas the elephant only knew it when a mere bush, and the monkey had nibbled the topmost shoots. This apologue got to England at the end of the twelfth century as the ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... mansions, parks, pleasure resorts, great worlds of train-yards and manufacturing areas. In the commercial heart of this world Frank Algernon Cowperwood had truly become a figure of giant significance. How wonderful it is that men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or, like banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a forest—a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand material aspects are the evidence. His street-railway properties were like a net—the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... and the prospect bright before us, we voyaged through those Indian seas, down the long coast of Malabar and up the long coast of Coromandel, past the Isle of Serendib, and the reefs and foaming seas, to where the tangled banyan roots overgrow the ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward

... that every known tree and shrub is grown there; and when one considers that every foot of its soil has been carried to its place, the wonder is how it has all been done. The blossoms seem to say, "The whole world is here and in bloom." The banyan tree grows here luxuriantly and is a great curiosity. The main trunk of the tree grows to the height of about thirty or forty feet. The first branches, and indeed many of the upper branches, strike down into the ground. These give the trees the appearance of being supported on huge sticks. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... teeth and mouth with orris, then to bathe, half asleep still; and yet again to lie a-thinking in my arm-chair, robed in a banyan, cheeks all suds and nose sniffing the scented water in the chin-basin which I held none too steady; and I said, peevishly, "What a fool a man is to play the fool! ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers

... life. At that time, it may be premised, the dietary of Christ's Hospital was of the lowest: breakfast consisting of a "quarter of penny loaf, moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from," and the weekly rule giving "three banyan-days to four meat days." ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... to act in accordance with his assumption, and after taking an inventory of whatever had been overlooked in the foray, which was little else than the premises, he seated himself upon a mat beneath a banyan tree in the garden, which concluded the rear of his dwelling, and was presently ells-deep in a profound reflection, which was not only ominous in its outward calm, but ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... met with. I have frequently travelled over this road. The road from Fuchau to Chinchew, which also takes five days to travel over, is bleak and barren, lying chiefly along the sea-coast, and in winter a most uncomfortable journey. But few trees are met with; a banyan here and there, but no camphor-trees along this route; but there is one extremely interesting feature on it that would strike the most unobservant traveller, viz.; the Loyang bridge, one of the wonders ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... warmest and softest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a whole tiny body, but it soon reenters in another quarter, and at length the stir and chirr grow still. You see only a collection of little legs, as if the hen were a banyan-tree, and presently even they disappear, she settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence. And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the steps of this sleepy subsidence, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... crowd of servants were waiting to touch the feet of our hosts who had travelled with us. They accompanied us through a tangle of palms, bananas, mangoes, canes, past bamboo huts raised on platforms of hard, dry mud, to the central place where a great banyan stood in front of the temple. We took off our shoes and entered the enclosure, followed by half the village, silent, dignified, and deferential. Over ruined shrines of red brick, elaborately carved, clambered and twined the ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... beneath the banyan trees, and cattle graze on the slope by the river, while my days will pass ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore

... and knitted their branches together in the most inextricable fashion, the lianas rooting themselves down into the earth and then springing up again for fresh entanglements, in the same way as the banyan-tree of India spreads itself. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... plantations were generally neatly fenced and often extensive; as much as twenty or thirty acres in one plot. Every now and then they passed on the roadside a noble tree, with wide-spread, drooping branches, a species of banyan tree, under which was often seen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... unto thee, New England, still Thy wandering sons shall stretch their arms, And thy rude chart of rock and hill Seem dearer than the land of palms! Thy massy oak and mountain pine More welcome than the banyan's shade, And every free, blue stream of thine Seem richer than the golden bed Of Oriental waves, which glow And sparkle with ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... butter scooped from an old gallipot, and a handful of onions shorn, with some pounded pepper. I was not very much tempted with the appearance of this dish, of which, nevertheless, my messmates ate heartily, advising me to follow their example, as it was banyan day and we could have no meat till next noon. But I had already laid in sufficient for the occasion, and therefore desired to be excused: expressing a curiosity to know the meaning of banyan day. They told me, that, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... of the great banyan of India; that wonderful tree, whose branches, after spreading out from the main trunk, send down roots to the earth, and form fresh stems, until a space of ground is covered with a single tree, under whose shade a whole regiment of cavalry may bivouac, or a great ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid

... jack it was poured from. On Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease-soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of 'extraordinary bread and butter,' from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant—(we had three banyan to four meat-days in the week)—was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger, (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our 'half-pickled' Sundays, or 'quite fresh' boiled beef on Thursdays, (strong as caro equina), ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... cheery little bird that chirps at sunset; Kabo was an ugly black fowl that croaks in the darkness. One day Pivi and Kabo thought that they would make slings, and practise slinging, as the people of the island still do. So they went to a banyan tree, and stripped the bark to make strings for their slings, and next they repaired to the river bank to find stones. Kabo stood on the bank of the river, and Pivi went into the water. The game was for Kabo to sling at Pivi, and for Pivi to dodge ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang

... found in possession of the avoided spot. India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to. And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox, or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied upon the tree or some rude symbolic ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... bamboo, shooting to the height of sixty feet and upward, with branches gracefully drooping; the generous, kind banana; fairy forests of ferns of a thousand forms; tall grasses, with their pale and plumy blossoms; the many-trunked and many-rooted banyan; the boh, sacred to Buddha,—all combine to form a garden that Adam might have dressed and kept, and only ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... accordingly to preach in the hearing of men the truths by which alone they could climb into Nirwana. When he was expiring, invisible gods, with huge and splendid bodies, came and stood, as thick as they could be packed, for a hundred and twenty miles around the banyan tree under which he awaited Nirwana, to gaze on him who had broken the circle ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... This Baboo is a banyan of solid substance, and the Mullicks all are citizens of credit and renown; while Ramee Durwan gets five rupees a month, and makes his bed at the gate. Last year, they say, when little Dwarkanath Mullick, the Baboo's adopted son, nine years old, was married to the tender child Vinda, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various



Words linked to "Banyan" :   banian, East Indian fig tree, fig tree, banyan tree



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