Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The intricate patterns produced by frost, as on a windowpane.
- noun Artificially made ornamental patterns similar to those produced by frost, applied to the surface of metal or glass.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The beautiful covering of hoar frost deposited on shrubs or other objects, and with the finest effects on windows.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The figurework, often fantastic and delicate, which moisture sometimes forms in freezing, as upon a window pane or a flagstone.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any naturally occurring intricate pattern of
ice crystals
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Most of the bubbles popped right away, but a few froze hard and clear with a pattern of frostwork forming from the top down.
Sub-Zero Bubbles James Gurney 2009
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Most of the bubbles popped right away, but a few froze hard and clear with a pattern of frostwork forming from the top down.
Archive 2009-01-01 James Gurney 2009
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And as the clergyman gazed, the belief which had so strongly clung to him that the Earl of Etherington and young Valentine Bulmer were the same individual person, melted away like frostwork before the morning sun, and that so completely, that he marvelled at himself for having ever entertained it.
Saint Ronan's Well 2008
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And was there frostwork about and thick weather and hice, soon calid, soon frozen, cold on warm but moistly dry, and a boatshaped blanket of bruma air-sighs and hellstohns and flammballs and vodashouts and every — thing to please everybody? —
Finnegans Wake 2006
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This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst of a cavern whose walls were supported by many fantastic pillars which had been formed by the joining of great stalactites and stalagmites together, the result of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries.
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The walls are beautifully stuccoed and decorated with Morisco fancifulness; the lofty ceiling was originally of the same favorite material, with the usual frostwork and pensile ornaments or stalactites; which, with the embellishments of vivid coloring and gilding, must have been gorgeous in the extreme.
The Alhambra 2002
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The walls are beautifully stuccoed and decorated with Morisco fancifulness; the lofty ceiling was originally of the same favorite material, with the usual frostwork and pensile ornaments or stalactites; which, with the embellishments of vivid coloring and gilding, must have been gorgeous in the extreme.
The Alhambra 2002
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A red rash, with the pattern of frostwork on a Minnesota windowpane in January, was across his lean, handsome face.
The Planet Strappers Raymond Z. Gallun 1952
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Not that these nuns are not good cooks and bakers: witness the delicate sweetmeats, biscuits and pastry they offer to strangers on such festival days as the one just described, the fruit-preserves in blocks sold for their sustenance by the nuns at Funchal, Madeira, and the fairy frostwork of sugar seen on great occasions in French convents.
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 099, March, 1876 Various
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Allow me to present my humble views of an analogous discovery of frostwork on December 6, 1856, in a sandy loam in Chester county, Pa., near the Paoli monument.
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