Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A kind of woolen cloth of a bluish color.
  • noun In botany, a name given to several plants with blue flowers: to the bluebottle, Centaurea Cyanus;
  • noun in the United States, to Houstonia (formerly Oldenlandia) cærulea;
  • noun to a species of bilberry.
  • noun In ornithology, a humming-bird of the subgenus Basilinna, as the Mexican B. leucotis, or the Californian B. xantusi, one of the queen-hummers.

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

  • noun Any of several different species of plants having blue flowers.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French bluet, diminutive of bleu ("blue").

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Examples

  • And yet this blue-bird -- (one can't say "blue robin" -- I think we shall have to call him "bluet," like the cornflower) -- stays in Sweden, where it sings so sweetly that it is called "a hundred tongues."

    Love's Meinie Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds John Ruskin 1859

  • Of the 4 air beds we took (old ones), three went down within a couple of hours of inflation, and the ancient bluet Camping Gaz stove took about 40 minutes to (just about) boil a litre or so of water – at which point (on one occasion), I knocked it over onto the grass and had to start again.

    F*cking Big Tent « We Don't Count Your Own Visits To Your Blog 2008

  • Common forbs included asters, prairie bluet, prairie clovers, and black-eyed susan.

    Ecoregions of Texas (EPA) 2009

  • He can make a bouquet from one violet, one bluet, and one hawthorn blossom.

    Big and Little asakiyume 2006

  • A sizable stack of felled logs lay to one side, and nearby lay a tangle of uprooted stumps, though several more, still rooted in the ground, poked through the heavy growth of wood sorrel and bluet.

    A Breath of Snow and Ashes Gabaldon, Diana 2005

  • Billy picked a bluet and the grasshopper picked a bluet.

    The Grasshopper Stories Elizabeth Davis Leavitt

  • And I've had flowers, thousands of wild flowers, to find and carry home or, if too frail to bear carrying home, like the delicate spring beauty and the bluet, just to look at and admire and turn again to look at as I went out of the woods.

    Patchwork A Story of 'The Plain People' Anna Balmer Myers

  • John Burroughs found a single bluet in blossom one January, near

    Wild Flowers Worth Knowing Neltje Blanchan 1891

  • The bluet leaves the doctor's office feeling even smaller than when it came in.

    AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed Ode Thomas Armstrong 2010

  • The rose psychiatrist gives the bluet a few diagnostic tests and a full physical examination.

    AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed Ode Thomas Armstrong 2010

Comments

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  • "A sizable stack of felled logs lay to one side, and nearby lay a tangle of uprooted stumps, though several more, still rooted in the ground, poked through the heavy growth of wood sorrel and bluet."

    —Diana Gabaldon, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), 139

    January 30, 2010

  • I loved the bluets when I lived in Hoosier land. I had a neighbor whose child-of-nature daughter was named Bluet - and her nickname, Bluie, I simply adore to this day.

    January 30, 2010