Word: spawns
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Comparatively sprightly spawn of this leviathan of lexicons is The Shorter Oxford Dictionary. In two fat volumes, together weighing 14½ lb., it lists some 250,000 words, "covers not only the history of the general English vocabulary from the days of King Alfred down to the present time, but includes also a large number of obsolete, archaic, provincial, and foreign words and phrases, and a multitude of terms of art and science." Begun in 1902, it is more up-to-date than its parent, less unwieldy, and has all the parental authority behind...
...grunion come out on the beaches to spawn. . . . After the female fish has been washed up with a high wave she buries her tail in sand that is light and all but dry. In this position she lays her eggs. The male lies arched beside her ready to fertilize the eggs. It is when the females are struggling to extricate themselves from their half-buried positions that they seem to 'stand on their tails and dance to the rhythm of the surf...
Because the cold waters make phlegmatic British oysters disinclined to spawn, thousands of yearling U. S. oysters are imported to British waters annually, planted in British beds. U. S. oysters will not procreate in British waters. Like eunuchs they fatten but remain sterile...