agave

plural agaves

1. Any plant in the large, variable genus Agave of succulent plants, commonly armed with formidable prickles, flowering at maturity after several years, and generally dying thereafter; large species, such as the maguey or century plant, (Agave americana), produce gigantic inflorescences. Several are of economic importance as sources of fibre such as sisal, and alcoholic beverages such as tequila.

   On the mountains a few junipers and piñons are found, and cactuses, agave, and yuccas, low, fleshy plants with bayonets and thorns.

   1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 22

   3 more examples

   1893 Charles Richards Dodge, A Report on the Leaf Fibers of the United States. Pub: Govt. print. office Washington The work of cutting the leaves, even from these isolated plants, was in the nature of an ordeal. Every member of the party took a knife and attacked the thicket, no one escaping the experience of bleeding hands and arms and of more or less injured clothing. If there is any place where strong language is halfway excusable it is in a thicket of 'Agave' decipiens.

   It was one of the large, vicious varieties of agave, each individual plant an upturned rosette of stiff, fibrous, fleshy leaves, some of them over a meter long on the big parent plants.

   1998, Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents, HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP (2019), pages 25–26

   This agave plant, species agave sisalana, is the source of sisal fibers used to make ropes, paper, and almost all the world's cat scratching posts.

   2014, Theodore Gray, photography by Nick Mann, Molecules: The Elements and the Architecture of Everything, 2018 Paperback Edition, page 118

   Synonyms: century plant