Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The sheep-laurel, Kalmia angustifolia.

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

  • noun (Bot.) A small American ericaceous shrub (Kalmia angustifolia), resembling mountain laurel but having narrower leaves and small red flowers; -- called also calfkill, sheepkill, sheep laurel, etc. It is supposed to poison young sheep and other animals that eat it at times when the snow is deep and they cannot find other food.

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

  • noun Kalmia angustifolia, a toxic plant with small, deep pink flowers.

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

  • noun North American dwarf shrub resembling mountain laurel but having narrower leaves and small red flowers; poisonous to young stock

Etymologies

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

[From its poisonous effect on sheep.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

lamb +‎ kill

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Examples

  • Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there — the high blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora — all standing in the quaking sphagnum.

    Walking 1969

  • Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there — the high blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora — all standing in the quaking sphagnum.

    Walking 1862

  • Through what some would consider rough woods and bleak pasture land, in a little sheep-track, crooked and sometimes steep, over her hung like a white cloud the wild thorn tree, large golddusted cymes of viburnums, rose-blooming lambkill, and other sorts, suggested all she knew, and more than she knew, of the Gardens of Princes.

    Margaret 1851

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