agrostis

From New Latin, via the genus name Agrostis.

agrostis (usually uncountable, plural agrostises)

1. Any grass of the genus Agrostis, bentgrass.
   • 1891, Katharine Prescott Wormeley, The Lily of the Valley‎, translation of original by Honore de Balzac:

     Above, see those delicate threads of the purple amoret, with its flood of anthers that are nearly yellow; the snowy pyramids of the meadow-sweet, the green tresses of the wild oats, the slender plumes of the agrostis, which we call wind-ear; roseate hopes, decking love's earliest dream and standing forth against the gray surroundings.

   • 1894, John Muir, The Mountains of California‎:

     The ground is littered with fallen trunks that lie crossed and recrossed like storm-lodged wheat; and besides this close forest of pines, the rich moraine soil supports a luxuriant growth of ribbon-leaved grasses--bromus, triticum, calamagrostis, agrostis, etc., which rear their handsome spikes and panicles above your waist.

• Rastogis, agistors, agorists, orgiasts

From Ancient Greek ἄγρωστις (ágrōstis)

agrōstis f (genitive agrōstidis); third declension

1. Couchgrass; quitch grass.
2. (New Latin) Used as a species epithet.

Third declension.

• agrostis in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• agrostis in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire Illustré Latin-Français, Hachette