Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A deciduous Asian tree (Melia azedarach), widely cultivated and naturalized in the southern United States, having bipinnately compound leaves, lavender flowers, and poisonous yellow fruit.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun an evergreen of tropical America having pulpy fruit containing saponin which was used as soap by native Americans.
- noun a tree of N India and China having purple blossoms and small inedible yellow fruits; naturalized in the southern US as a shade tree.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun botany Melia azedarach, a
deciduous tree in the mahogany familyMeliaceae , native toIndia , southernChina andAustralia . - noun The fruit of such a tree.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun tree of northern India and China having purple blossoms and small inedible yellow fruits; naturalized in the southern United States as a shade tree
- noun evergreen of tropical America having pulpy fruit containing saponin which was used as soap by Native Americans
Etymologies
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Examples
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The chinaberry is a warm-weather shade tree that was brought to the United States a couple of centuries ago and has flourished in the South.
Childhood in a minor key Jonathan Yardley 2011
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The chinaberry is a warm-weather shade tree that was brought to the United States a couple of centuries ago and has flourished in the South.
Childhood in a minor key Jonathan Yardley 2011
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Melia azedarach, called chinaberry or West Indian lilac, contained a number of toxic alkaloids.
Jurassic Park Crichton, Michael, 1942- 1991
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A tree-snapping wind storm in May and a worsening drought have dealt more blows, and invasive species such as chinaberry, nandina and ligustrum are choking out native plants.
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While the store now seemed small to him, the trees—pecan and chinaberry and the occasional spiny-trunked palm—seemed enormous.
Calling Up Ghosts on the Ten-Mile Straight Eleanor Henderson 2011
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I skirt the shade of the chinaberry, move steadily away from Jimmy's fistful of asps.
South Oak Cliff Barry Basden 2012
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In Midland, where the sky arced over us in one enormous dome of blistering blue and where people doggedly imported acres of elm seedlings and chinaberry trees to plant the green ribbons of shade that lined their streets at the edge of the desert, we were quite literally an ocean and almost a continent removed.
Spoken from the Heart Laura Bush 2010
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In Midland, where the sky arced over us in one enormous dome of blistering blue and where people doggedly imported acres of elm seedlings and chinaberry trees to plant the green ribbons of shade that lined their streets at the edge of the desert, we were quite literally an ocean and almost a continent removed.
Spoken from the Heart Laura Bush 2010
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It is green all year long, but in the summertime it throws off a nasty, staining black fruit about the size of a chinaberry that keeps our gardener busy with the chlorine and brush.
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A car went by, then a truck, the illumination of their headlights falling outside the pool of shadow under the chinaberry tree.
Rain Gods James Lee Burke 2009
bilby commented on the word chinaberry
Vine leaves tap my window,
The snail-track shines on the stones,
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree
Repeating two clear tones.
- Conrad Aiken, 'Morning Song of Senlin'.
October 4, 2008
Prolagus commented on the word chinaberry
Don't swallow the shardpit.
October 4, 2008
bilby commented on the word chinaberry
See citation on roller bird.
June 15, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word chinaberry
"A final flight, short and narrow, as though it were the last resistance to gravity the structure could come up with, passes through glass doors to an open balcony overlooking a charming old garden of chinaberries and variegated mosses and birches peeling in papery white tatters around a pool that undoubtedly spells out a word like heart or mind but has been allowed to revert so thoroughly to nature that its letters, like the snow-weathered features of a marble bust, have lapsed into incoherence."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 69 of the Vintage International paperback edition
November 20, 2009