Spot the Frippet: something dolabriform.

 This is another biologists' word, and it's bizarre, even for them.

It means in the shape of a hatchet or axe head.

There are plants with hairs that spit into two and look like tiny hatchets; there are plants which have axe-head-shaped bracts.

Here are some words of great wisdom from the introduction to the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website Version 14 Glossary (yes, I do read some odd things):

The most important thing to remember when using this (or any other) glossary is that just because some aspect of an organism is dignified by a sesquipedalian term, this by no means signifies that the term refers to an interesting part of "reality". As Hesse et al. (2009b: p. 27) noted "Nature itself neither needs categories nor has any knowledge of them" and "categories are artificial and always delimited by an individual or collective convention". Humans make and define botanical terms, and we use them to facilitate communication, although all too often they seem to be as much an impediment to our understanding as anything else.

As this is the case, I would suggest that today we just all go out and try to find, er, an axe:

photo by KingaNBM

Good hunting!

Spot the Frippet: something dolabriform. This word comes from the Latin dolābra, pickaxe.