toadstool

[ tohd-stool ]

/ ˈtoʊdˌstul /

any of various mushrooms having a stalk with an umbrellalike cap, especially the agarics.

a poisonous mushroom, as distinguished from an edible one.

any of various other fleshy fungi, as the puffballs and coral fungi.

Origin of toadstool

First recorded in 1350–1400, toadstool is from the Middle English word tadstol. See toad, stool

The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy like the toadstool.

Robert Browning |G. K. Chesterton
Here and there a toadstool thrust up its speckled top, flaming its red all unashamed.

Wanderers |Knut Hamsun
I thought maybe it had growed up from the soil like a toadstool.

The Boy Scouts Book of Stories |Various
Popular discrimination between "toadstool" and "mushroom," 16-22; popular distrust of fungi, 15.

Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms and How to Distinguish Them |William Hamilton Gibson

But the conquest of the Toadstool was harder than she expected.

The Jolliest Term on Record |Angela Brazil

toadstool

/ (ˈtəʊdˌstuːl) /

(not in technical use) any basidiomycetous fungus with a capped spore-producing body that is not edible Compare mushroom (def. 1a)

C14: from toad + stool