Definitions

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

  • noun A rich sweet confection made with sugar and often flavored or combined with fruits or nuts.
  • noun A piece of such a confection.
  • noun Slang An illicit drug, especially one, such as cocaine, that has a sugary appearance or a drug in pill form, such as MDMA.
  • transitive verb To cook, preserve, saturate, or coat with sugar or syrup.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To form into congelations or crystals; congeal in a crystalline form or inspissated concretion: as, to candy sugar, honey, etc.
  • To preserve or incrust with sugar, as fruits, by immersing them in it while boiling and removing them separately or in mass.
  • To cover or incrust with concretions or crystals, as of ice.
  • To take the form of, or become incrusted by, candied sugar: as, pre-serves candy with long keeping.
  • To become crystallized or congealed.
  • noun A solid preparation or confection of sugar or molasses, or both, boiled, inspissated, and worked by pulling to a crystalline consistence, either alone or combined with flavoring and coloring substances; hence, any confection having sugar as its basis, however prepared. Candy made of or with molasses is specifically called molasses candy and taffy.
  • Sugared; sweet.
  • noun An East Indian unit of weight, usually 20 maunds, but sometimes 21 or 22, and varying in different localities and for every commodity.

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

  • transitive verb To conserve or boil in sugar.
  • transitive verb To make sugar crystals of or in; to form into a mass resembling candy.
  • transitive verb To incrust with sugar or with candy, or with that which resembles sugar or candy.
  • intransitive verb To have sugar crystals form in or on.
  • intransitive verb To be formed into candy; to solidify in a candylike form or mass.
  • noun A weight, at Madras 500 pounds, at Bombay 560 pounds.
  • noun Any sweet, more or less solid article of confectionery, especially those prepared in small bite-sized pieces or small bars, having a wide variety of shapes, consistencies, and flavors, and manufactured in a variety of ways. It is often flavored or colored, or covered with chocolate, and sometimes contains fruit, nuts, etc.; it is often made by boiling sugar or molasses to the desired consistency, and than crystallizing, molding, or working in the required shape. Other types may consist primarily of chocolate or a sweetened gelatin. The term may be applied to a single piece of such confection or to the substance of which it is composed.
  • noun slang Cocaine.

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

  • noun obsolete a unit of mass used in southern India, equal to twenty maunds, roughly equal to 500 pounds avoirdupois but varying locally.
  • noun uncountable Edible, sweet-tasting confectionery containing sugar, or sometimes artificial sweeteners, and often flavored with fruit, chocolate, nuts, herbs and spices, or artificial flavors.
  • noun countable A piece of candy.
  • verb cooking To cook in, or coat with, sugar syrup.

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

  • noun a rich sweet made of flavored sugar and often combined with fruit or nuts
  • verb coat with something sweet, such as a hard sugar glaze

Etymologies

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

[Middle English candi, crystallized cane sugar, short for sugre-candi, translation of Old French sucre candi and Old Italian zucchero candi, both from Arabic sukkar qandī : sukkar, sugar + qandī, candied (from qand, cane sugar, probably from Dravidian kaṇṭu, lump).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French sucre candi, from Arabic قندي (qandi, "candied"), from Persian قند (qand, "hard candy made by boiling cane sugar")

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  • from Arabic qandi "candied," derived from Persian qand, meaning "sugar."[

    August 30, 2009