peritropal

English

Etymology

From Ancient Greek περί (perí, “around”) + τρόπος (trópos, “turn”) + -al.

Adjective

peritropal (not comparable)

1. (rare) Involving turning oneself around: rotating or circuitous.
   • 1872, William Henry Thomes, chapter IV, in Life in the East Indies, Boston: Lee & Shepard, page 142:

     “Suppose I should get up a ballet, drill the girls myself, and learn ’em all the peritropal movements; see that their skirts are short enough, and that they are graceful while dancing. […]”

   • 1888 October 27, The Columbus Citizen, quotee, “The State Press”, in The Galveston Daily News, volume 47, number 183, page 10:

     Our three-decade friend, Joe A. Kirgan, late of the Milford Gazette, has established a paper at Frost, Navarro county. Joe is a regular peritropal and peripatetic genius, never lasting more than three months in one place.

   • 2008, Peter Quinn, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America, Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, →ISBN, page 145:

     My peritropal jaunts were propelled by the sad and dreary loneliness of my hotel room in a downtown that was a shrunken shadow of what it was when Billy Phelan “made a right turn into the warmth of the stairs to Louie’s pool room, […]”

2. (botany, archaic) Having the axis of the seed perpendicular to the axis of the pericarp to which it is attached.

References

• “peritropal”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “peritropal”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

Anagrams

• periportal