faex

plural faeces

1. singularuncommonsciencessingular of faeces

   I, the last of the Ducases, I, the strider across millennia, I, the brilliant Courier in the style of Metaxes, I … I, to these veteran Couriers here, was simply an upright mass of perambulating dreck. A faex that walks like a man. Which is the singular of faeces. Which is to say, a shit.

   1969, Robert Silverberg, Up the Line, Ballantine Books

   3 more examples

   In some cases he has identified the plant parasites also in the intestine of insects (Hemiptera and Muscidae) living on the plants and presumably distributing infection either by bite or by faex.[…]It gives a concise and coherent general account of the biology, the Protozoa, group by group, as exemplified by representative species and deals in well digested detail, and in their taxonomic setting, with the species found in the intestine and faex and blood and tissues of man

   1924, Bureau of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases, Tropical Diseases Bulletin, volume 21, pages 135, 243

   The colour of the faeces presumably depends on that of the sand on which the worm happens to be feeding. It would be difficult to explain the following laboratory observation in any other way. A worm, which was setting up a new head shaft, produced a cylinder consisting of 4 cm. of yellow matter followed by 3 cm. of black, the two separated by a sharp boundary though both forming parts of the same faex.

   1944, Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, Journal, volume 26, page 201

   When > 120 sand eel otoliths were present in a faex, a random subsample of at least 25 % of the total number was measured.[…]Table 3. Mean numbers of fish otoliths and cephalopod beaks per faex containing prey (n) for each geographical area (I. Inverness Firth; D. Dornoch Firth; B. Beauly Firth) in summer and winter for those prey species contributing > 3.5 % to the overall diet composition, by mass.[…]Table 4. Results of one-way Kruskal – Wallis ANOVAs (df = 3) to test for between-year differences in summer diet composition in 1989 – 1992, measured by numbers of otoliths or beaks per faex (see the text for details).

   1996, Canadian Journal of Zoology, volume 74, pages 1111, 1115, 1116