Definitions

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

  • noun Any of various vines of the family Cucurbitaceae, especially Cucumis melo or Citrullus lanatus, widely cultivated for their edible fruit.
  • noun The fruit of any of these plants, having a hard rind and juicy flesh.
  • noun A fatty structure in the forehead of cetaceans, especially the toothed whales, thought to be used in the production of high-frequency sounds.
  • noun Vulgar Slang A woman's breasts.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A herbaceous succulent trailing annual plant, Cucumis Melo, natural order Cucurbitaceæ, or its fruit, the muskmelon.
  • noun The watermelon, Citrullus vulgaris.
  • noun A melon-shell.
  • noun A hemispherical mass of blubber taken from the top of the head of the black-fish, grampus, and related cetaceans; melon-blubber.
  • noun Same as pademelon.

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

  • noun (Bot.) The juicy fruit of certain cucurbitaceous plants, as the muskmelon, watermelon, and citron melon; also, the plant that produces the fruit.
  • noun (Zoöl.) A large, ornamental, marine, univalve shell of the genus Melo.
  • noun (Zoöl.) a small leaf beetle (Diabrotiea vittata), which damages the leaves of melon vines.
  • noun (Bot.) The related genus Mamillaria, in which the stem is tubercled rather than ribbed, and the flowers sometimes large. See Illust. under Cactus.

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

  • noun Any of various fruits of the family Cucurbitaceae grown for food, generally not including the cucumber.
  • noun A light pinkish orange colour, like that of some melon flesh.
  • noun in the plural, slang Breasts.
  • noun slang The head.
  • adjective Of a light pinkish orange colour, like that of melon flesh.
  • noun chemistry The result of heptazine being polymerized with the tri-s-triazine units linked through an amine (NH) link.

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

  • noun any of numerous fruits of the gourd family having a hard rind and sweet juicy flesh
  • noun any of various fruit of cucurbitaceous vines including: muskmelons; watermelons; cantaloupes; cucumbers

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin mēlō, mēlōn-, short for Latin mēlopepō, from Greek mēlopepōn : mēlon, apple + pepōn, gourd.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old French melon, from Medieval Latin melonem, from Latin melopeponem ("type of pumpkin"), from Ancient Greek μηλοπέπων (mēlopepōn), from μῆλον (mēlon, "apple") + πέπων (pepōn, "ripe").

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Examples

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  • A large, fat-filled organ located in the forehead of a harbour porpoise, which serves to focus sound-waves out into the ocean.

    November 10, 2007

  • Are you serious?! Eeew...

    March 3, 2008