Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of numerous cultivated forms of a perennial plant (Dianthus caryophyllus) having showy, variously colored, usually double, often fragrant flowers with fringed petals.
- noun A flower of this plant.
- noun A pinkish tint once used in painting.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Incarnation.
- noun Flesh-color; pink.
- noun In painting, the representation of flesh; the nude or undraped parts of a figure.
- noun In botany: The common name of the pink Dianthus Caryophyllus, a native of southern Europe, but cultivated from very ancient times for its fragrance and beauty.
- noun The Cæsalpinia pulcherrima, the Spanish carnation, a leguminous shrub with very showy flowers, often cultivated in tropical regions. Also formerly, by corruption, coronation.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The natural color of flesh; rosy pink.
- noun (Paint.) Those parts of a picture in which the human body or any part of it is represented in full color; the flesh tints.
- noun (Bot.) A species of Dianthus (
Dianthus Caryophyllus ) or pink, having very beautiful flowers of various colors, esp. white and usually a rich, spicy scent.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun botany A type of
Eurasian plant widely cultivated for its flowers. - noun The type of
flower they bear, originallyflesh-coloured , but since hybridizing found in a variety of colours. - noun A
rosy pink colour - noun archaic The
pinkish colors used in art to render humanface andflesh - noun Sometimes, a
scarlet colour. - adjective Of a rosy pink or red colour, like human flesh.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective pink or pinkish
- noun Eurasian plant with pink to purple-red spice-scented usually double flowers; widely cultivated in many varieties and many colors
- noun a pink or reddish-pink color
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Regarded as only suitable for sale in bodegas and grocery stores and primarily worn by pimply adolescents on middle-school dates, the carnation is a flower that is almost universally scorned.
What in Carnation? Lettie Teague 2010
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If you do not feel the same way, a white, yellow or stripped carnation is a sympathetic way to refuse.
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Antichrist was just art house porn? what was he trying to say all women are are evil in carnation it in there nature.
Lars von Trier Has No Plans To Remake Taxi Driver | /Film 2010
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I am a farmer although not in carnation and I like that the Port is helping to solve this because if the viaduct falls down and my produce can't get onto ships and out to markets, my farm stops being able to operate.
O’Brien Grills Staffers About Tunnel Cost Overruns « PubliCola 2010
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Requiring even less heat than the carnation is the old-time and all-time favorite, the violet.
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Normally, the carnation is a hardy perennial, but the garden kinds, or marguerites, are usually treated as annuals.
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A wild-flower thrust into the same nosegay with the carnation was the more fragrant for the good company it had kept.
Letters of Anton Chekhov Anton Pavlovich Chekhov 1882
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All red flowers, such as carnation and hibiscus are Arian.
Perfume Review: Neil Morris Dark Earth Marina Geigert 2008
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What we know as a "carnation" is named for the fact that it is the color of (Caucasian) skin (carne-); it's therefore emphatically not a red *flower* - although the clovey scent can certainly be thought of as red.
Perfume Review: Neil Morris Dark Earth Marina Geigert 2008
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But there is something amusing about him, something ‘forced,’” she detached the word, “like a green carnation, that is to say a thing that surprises me and docs not please me enormously, a thing it is surprising that anyone should have been able to create but which I feel would have been just as well uncreated.
The Guermantes Way 2003
seanmeade commented on the word carnation
*awesome* etymology: from Italian incarnatino, which came from the Latin incarnato, something incarnate, made flesh, from in + caro, carn-, "flesh." It is related to carnation, etymologically the flesh-colored flower; incarnate, "in the flesh; made flesh"; and carnal, "pertaining to the body or its appetites."
March 26, 2007