Entry lacking or displaced in some mss.
The neuter plural headword is found only here and twice in the scholia on Aristophanes, Clouds 187ff., where the characters discuss people groveling in the earth for bulbs to eat. The scholiast says that they were looking for bolboi [beta 361], which it defines as onion-shaped and very similar to small onions. (If the Greeks did not know truffles, it might refer to shallots or wild garlic.) It continues that some erroneously called them oi)=dna, either because they cause the earth to swell (oi)dai/nein: omicroniota 27, omicroniota 28) as the plant emerges (citing Tzetzes, but not found there) or because they are wet (here rejecting an implausible etymology from u(/w 'be wet'). The word is not otherwise found in the sense attributed to it in this entry.