Botany. any of several araceous plants, as Arisaema dracontium(green dragon or dragonroot), the flowers of which have a long, slender spadix and a green, shorter spathe.
9.
a short musket carried by a mounted infantryman in the 16th and 17th centuries.
10.
a soldier armed with such a musket.
11.
(initial capital letter) Astronomy. the constellation Draco.
[Origin: 1175–1225; ME < OF < L dracōn- (s. of dracō) < Gk drákōn kind of serpent, prob. orig. epithet, the (sharp-)sighted one, akin to dérkesthai to look]
Dra·co 2Audio Help (drā'kō) Pronunciation Key
n.
A constellation in the polar region of the Northern Hemisphere near Cepheus and Ursa Major. Also called Dragon.
c.1220, from O.Fr. dragon, from L. draconem (nom. draco) "serpent, dragon," from Gk. drakon (gen. drakontos) "serpent, seafish," from drak-, strong aorist stem of derkesthai "to see clearly." But perhaps the lit. sense is "the one with the (deadly) glance." The young are dragonets (14c.). Obsolete drake "dragon" is an older borrowing of the same word. Used in the Bible to translate Heb. tannin "a great sea-monster," and tan, a desert mammal now believed to be the jackal. Dragonfly is from 1626.
dragon [MIT] A program similar to a daemon, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy or the Enterprise), which was generated by the "name dragon". Use is rare outside MIT, under Unix and most other operating systems this would be called a "background demon" or daemon. The best-known Unix example of a dragon is cron. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a "phantom". [The Jargon File]
Dra"co\, n. [L. See Dragon.]1. (Astron.) The Dragon, a northern constellation within which is the north pole of the ecliptic. 2. A luminous exhalation from marshy grounds. 3. (Zo["o]l.) A genus of lizards. See Dragon, 6.
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