Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Of a pale grayish or bluish green.
- adjective Botany Covered with a grayish, bluish, or whitish waxy coating or bloom that is easily rubbed off.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Of a pale, luminous sea-green color; of a bluish green or greenish blue; specifically, in botany and zoology, dull-green passing into grayish-blue.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Of a sea-green color; of a dull green passing into grayish blue.
- adjective (Bot.) Covered with a fine bloom or fine white powder easily rubbed off, as that on a blue plum, or on a cabbage leaf.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Of a pale
green colour with a bluish-greytinge , especially when covered with apowdery residue . - adjective botany Covered with a
bloom or a palepowdery covering, regardless of colour.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective having a frosted look from a powdery coating, as on plants
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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The color of the leaves is always more glaucous, that is, of a darker and more bluish green, than is usual in the cauliflowers.
The Cauliflower 1877
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Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.
Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011
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Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.
Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011
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Suddenly, one of the glaucous gulls — a huge white-and-gray predatory bird — snatched a young murre from a ledge, swallowing it whole.
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Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.
Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011
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Dainty black-legged kittiwakes and glaucous gulls flew in swirling clouds overhead while black-and-white thick-billed and common murres skimmed low across the water, looking like tuxedo-clad squadrons on maneuvers.
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Dainty black-legged kittiwakes and glaucous gulls flew in swirling clouds overhead while black-and-white thick-billed and common murres skimmed low across the water, looking like tuxedo-clad squadrons on maneuvers.
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Piping plovers, difficult to identify gulls which were herrings? glaucous? great black-backed? and arctic terns were always there.
Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011
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Suddenly, one of the glaucous gulls — a huge white-and-gray predatory bird — snatched a young murre from a ledge, swallowing it whole.
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All was glaucous green but for her rosy flesh and her long golden hair.
Portobello Ruth Rendell 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glaucous
"For what princely traveller, sojourning here incognito, could they be intended, those plums, glaucous, luminous and spherical as was at that moment the circumfluent sea, those transparent grapes clustering on the shrivelled wood, like a fine day in autumn, those pears of a heavenly ultramarine?"
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 377-378 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word glaucous
Even in the side streets there was evidence of the new régime; twice they were obliged to shelter as police lorries thundered past them laden with glaucous prisoners.
—Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
November 16, 2010