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pineapple

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pineapple, common name for one member of and for the Bromeliaceae, a family of chiefly epiphytic herbs and small shrubs native to the American tropics and subtropics. The spiny leaves of various species of the genus Ananas yield a hard fiber called gravata in South America and piña, or pineapple cloth, in the Philippines. A. sativa is the cultivated pineapple. The fruit, whose spiny skin is yellowish brown when ripe, is sweet and juicy; it is topped by a distinctive rosette of green leaves. It is grown throughout warmer regions. Thailand, the Philippines, and Brazil are the largest producers of canned pineapple. A compound derived from pineapple, branelain, is used as an anti-inflammatory. Species of Ananas, Tillsandia, and other genera are sometimes cultivated as ornamentals. Spanish moss Spanish moss, fibrous grayish-green epiphyte (Tillandsia usneoides) that hangs on trees of tropical America and the Southern states, also called Florida, southern, or long moss.
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 (T. usenoides) is a member of this family. Many epiphytic bromeliads, growing in moist tropical American forests, have become highly modified for retaining water between rainfalls. The pineapple family is classified in the division Magnoliophyta Magnoliophyta , division of the plant kingdom consisting of those organisms commonly called the flowering plants, or angiosperms. The angiosperms have leaves, stems, and roots, and vascular, or conducting, tissue (xylem and phloem).
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, class Liliopsida, order Bromeliales.

pineapple

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Pineapple (Ananas comosus)
(credit: Courtesy of Dole Company)
Fruit-bearing plant (Ananas comosus) of the family Bromeliaceae, native to the New World tropics and subtropics but introduced elsewhere. Pineapple is served fresh where available and in canned form worldwide. It is a key ingredient in Polynesian cuisine. Like agave and some yuccas, the plant has a rosette of 30–40 stiff, succulent leaves on a thick, fleshy stem. A determinate inflorescence forms 15–20 months after planting. After fertilization, the many lavender flowers fuse and become fleshy to form the 2–4 lb (1–2 kg) fruit. Ripening takes 5–6 months.


pineapple
1. a tropical American bromeliaceous plant, Ananas comosus, cultivated in the tropics for its large fleshy edible fruit
2. the fruit of this plant, consisting of an inflorescence clustered around a fleshy axis and surmounted by a tuft of leaves

pineapple [′pī‚napĀ·əl]
(botany)
Ananas sativus.A perennial plant of the order Bromeliales with long, swordlike, usually rough-edged leaves and a dense head of small abortive flowers; the fruit is a sorosis that develops from the fleshy inflorescence and ripens into a solid mass, covered by the persistent bracts and crowned by a tuft of leaves.

pineapple
1. An ovoid, imbricated finial.
2. A decorative molding.


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He hurled a pineapple at the ancient enemy of his people.
On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at "Billy's" restaurant, at a cost of twenty-five cents--and tipped the waitress ten cents.
I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house--afterwards I found the front door was on the latch--nor how I ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, I found a rat- gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple.
 
 
 
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