Definitions

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

  • adjective Of a pale grayish or bluish green.
  • adjective Botany Covered with a grayish, bluish, or whitish waxy coating or bloom that is easily rubbed off.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of a pale, luminous sea-green color; of a bluish green or greenish blue; specifically, in botany and zoology, dull-green passing into grayish-blue.

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

  • adjective Of a sea-green color; of a dull green passing into grayish blue.
  • adjective (Bot.) Covered with a fine bloom or fine white powder easily rubbed off, as that on a blue plum, or on a cabbage leaf.

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

  • adjective Of a pale green colour with a bluish-grey tinge, especially when covered with a powdery residue.
  • adjective botany Covered with a bloom or a pale powdery covering, regardless of colour.

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

  • adjective having a frosted look from a powdery coating, as on plants

Etymologies

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

[Latin glaucus, from Greek glaukos.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin glaucus, from Ancient Greek γλαυκός (glaukos, "blue-green, blue-grey"). See Irish glas.

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Examples

  • The color of the leaves is always more glaucous, that is, of a darker and more bluish green, than is usual in the cauliflowers.

    The Cauliflower 1877

  • Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • Suddenly, one of the glaucous gulls — a huge white-and-gray predatory bird — snatched a young murre from a ledge, swallowing it whole.

    Where Birds Rule the Earth 2009

  • Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • Dainty black-legged kittiwakes and glaucous gulls flew in swirling clouds overhead while black-and-white thick-billed and common murres skimmed low across the water, looking like tuxedo-clad squadrons on maneuvers.

    Where Birds Rule the Earth 2009

  • Dainty black-legged kittiwakes and glaucous gulls flew in swirling clouds overhead while black-and-white thick-billed and common murres skimmed low across the water, looking like tuxedo-clad squadrons on maneuvers.

    Where Birds Rule the Earth 2009

  • Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • Suddenly, one of the glaucous gulls — a huge white-and-gray predatory bird — snatched a young murre from a ledge, swallowing it whole.

    Where Birds Rule the Earth 2009

  • All was glaucous green but for her rosy flesh and her long golden hair.

    Portobello Ruth Rendell 2010

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  • "For what princely traveller, sojourning here incognito, could they be intended, those plums, glaucous, luminous and spherical as was at that moment the circumfluent sea, those transparent grapes clustering on the shrivelled wood, like a fine day in autumn, those pears of a heavenly ultramarine?"

    -- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 377-378 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    April 26, 2008

  • Even in the side streets there was evidence of the new régime; twice they were obliged to shelter as police lorries thundered past them laden with glaucous prisoners.

    —Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

    November 16, 2010