Emily Dickinson Lexicon

POL'YPE, or POL'Y-PUS, n. [Gr. πολυπους; πολυς, many, and πους, foot.]

1. Something that has many feet or roots.
2. In zoology, the animal of a zoophyte in contradistinction from the polypier, when there is one. A polype is a globular or cylindrical body of small size, of a homogeneous gelatinous consistence, very contractile, in the center of which there is a cavity for the reception and digestion of its food. The aperture of this cavity is placed on the upper disk of the body, and is encircled by one or two series of filaments or tentacula, which are used to capture the necessary prey, while the opposite end serves the purpose of a sucker to fix the creature in its site, or being prolonged like a thread down the hollow sheath, to connect it with its fellow polypes of the same polypier, which by this means become compound animals, the whole of whose parts are animated by one common principle of life and growth. The polype has no proper organs of sense, no limbs appropriate to locomotion, no circulating vessels, no nerves, no lungs nor gills, no chylopoietic viscera, no intestines, and even no generative organs. The individuals of the species of the genus Hydra, are capable of being multiplied in a very singular way; for, if one is minced into forty pieces, each piece continues alive and grows into a perfect animal, capable of being again divided in the same manner. – George Johnston. The polypes are the animals which form the coral rocks in the sea.
3. A concretion of blood in the heart and blood-vessels. – Parr.
4. A tumor with a narrow base, somewhat resembling a pear; found in the nose, uterus, &c. – Cooper.