Definitions

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

  • noun Fine meal prepared from cereal grain and various other plant products, often used as a cooked cereal or in pudding.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In a general sense, meal or flour. Specifically
  • noun A soft, tasteless, and commonly white flour, obtained by trituration of the seeds of cereal and leguminous plants, and of some roots, as the potato. It consists of gluten, starch, and mucilage.
  • noun A preparation of white maize in granular form, coarser than meal, but finer than hominy. It is used for puddings, etc.
  • noun In botany, the pollen of flowers.
  • noun In entomology, a mealy powder found on some insects. See farinose

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

  • noun A fine flour or meal made from cereal grains or from the starch or fecula of vegetables, extracted by various processes, and used in cookery.
  • noun (Bot.), rare Pollen.

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

  • noun A fine flour or meal made from cereal grains or from the starch or fecula of vegetables, extracted by various processes, and used in cookery.

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

  • noun fine meal made from cereal grain especially wheat; often used as a cooked cereal or in puddings

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Latin farīna, from far, a kind of grain; see bhares- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin farīna ("flour, meal"), from far ("kind of grain").

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Examples

  • Being an American ship we didn't have oatmeal for breakfast but were served what they called farina which many years later I discovered to be cream of wheat.

    Coming of Age: 1939-1946 John Cox

  • She makes some stuff which she calls farina out of it, and grieves bitterly that she is no longer young and spry enough to gather it for herself along the shore.

    Flint His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes Maud Wilder Goodwin

  • For example, sago reaches a fairly stable viscosity after vigorous boiling for a period of about two hours while farina, which is very thick when first boiled, rapidly loses viscosity as boiling proceeds.

    Chapter 5 1983

  • -- The wheat preparation called farina is very much the same as cream of wheat, being manufactured in practically the same manner.

    Woman's Institute Library of Cookery Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads

  • The unprepared farina, which is the pith of the sago palm, is imported from a neighbouring island.

    The Story of Ida Pfeiffer and Her Travels in Many Lands Anonymous

  • The unprepared farina, which is the pith of the sago palm, is imported from a neighbouring island.

    The Story of Ida Pfeiffer Anonymous 1879

  • Their food consisted of rice, or farina, which is flour made from the cassada, a species of potato boiled, or calabancies, a kind of bean; occasionally a small quantity of salt beef, fish, or chillies, was served out to them as a relish.

    The Three Lieutenants William Henry Giles Kingston 1847

  • Of this the capsule, about an inch in length, is covered with soft prickles or hair, opens like a bivalve shell, and contains in its cavities a dozen or more seeds, the size of grape-stones, thickly covered with a reddish farina, which is the part that constitutes the dye.

    The History of Sumatra Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And Manners Of The Native Inhabitants William Marsden 1795

  • It stands for rava or cream of wheat (coarsely ground wheat also known as "farina" or "semolina"), a pantry staple in most Indian households.

    Archive 2006-01-01 Nupur 2006

  • The rather soft, smooth cereals, such as farina and cream of rice, are to be measured in just the same way, but they need not be cooked overnight; only put on in a double boiler in the morning for an hour.

    A Little Cook Book for a Little Girl Caroline French Benton

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