Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A tropical American tree (Crescentia cujete) bearing hard-shelled, gourdlike fruits on the trunk and main branches.
  • noun The fruit of either of these or related plants.
  • noun A utensil, container, or musical instrument made from the dried, hollowed-out shell of these fruits.
  • noun A smoking pipe with a curved stem and a large bowl made from the shell of a gourd.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The head, with an implication of emptiness.
  • noun A fruit of the tree Crescentia Cujete hollowed out, dried, and used as a vessel to contain liquids.
  • noun A gourd of any kind used in the same way.
  • noun A popular name of the gourd-plant, Lagenaria vulgaris.
  • noun A name given to the red cap or tarboosh of Tunis.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The common gourd (plant or fruit).
  • noun The fruit of the calabash tree.
  • noun A water dipper, bottle, bascket, or other utensil, made from the dry shell of a calabash or gourd.
  • noun (Bot.) a tree of tropical America (Crescentia cujete), producing a large gourdlike fruit, containing a purgative pulp. Its hard shell, after the removal of the pulp, is used for cups, bottles, etc. The African calabash tree is the baobab.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A vine grown for its fruit, which can either be harvested young and used as a vegetable or harvested mature, dried and used as a container, like a gourd.
  • noun originally That fruit
  • noun A utensil traditionally made of the dried shell of a calabash and used as a bottle, dipper, utensil or pipe, etc.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun round gourd of the calabash tree
  • noun bottle made from the dried shell of a bottle gourd
  • noun tropical American evergreen that produces large round gourds
  • noun Old World climbing plant with hard-shelled bottle-shaped gourds as fruits
  • noun a pipe for smoking; has a curved stem and a large bowl made from a calabash gourd

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French calebasse, gourd, from Spanish calabaza; perhaps akin to Spanish carapacho, tortoise shell, shell of a crab or other arthropod, and galápago, tortoise, and of pre-Roman origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Spanish calabaza ("pumpkin, gourd"), possibly from Arabic قرعة يابسة (qárʕa yābisa, "dry gourd") or directly from Persian خربزه (xarboza, xarboze, "melon"), or from a pre-Roman Iberian word *calapaccia; cognate with French calebasse ("gourd").

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Examples

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  • The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl.

    - Melville, Moby-Dick, ch. 13

    July 24, 2008

  • See citation on bund.

    September 1, 2008

  • From "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" by Guy Davenport

    January 19, 2010

  • ...the ngomi, a plucked lute made from a combinaton of wood or calabash and goatskin, used by griots in northwest Africa...

    March 19, 2010