Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A Eurasian plant (Onobrychis viciifolia) in the pea family, having pinnately compound leaves and pink or white flowers and often grown as a forage crop.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A perennial herb, Onobrychis sativa, native in temperate Europe and part of Asia, and widely cultivated in Europe as a forage-plant.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Canada, Canada A leguminous plant (
Onobrychis sativa ) cultivated for fodder. - noun Canada A kind of tick trefoil (
Desmodium Canadense ).
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A perennial
herb of the genusOnobrychis with pale pink flowers, especially Onobrychis sativa.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun Eurasian perennial herb having pale pink flowers and curved pods; naturalized in Britain and North America grasslands on calcareous soils; important forage crop and source of honey in Britain
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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A field with a standing crop of wheat had a wide wild-flower margin with ox-eye daisies, red clover, sainfoin, poppies and trefoils – to name a few – and I was disappointed not to see a single butterfly, perhaps because it was overcast.
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As a fodder crop, sainfoin was so nourishing to cattle it was called "holy hay" – "sain" meaning sound or healthy and "foin" meaning hay.
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The scribbled note on the back said it was sainfoin.
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I track down the holy hay to the edge of a copse where someone long ago chucked some sainfoin seeds down for their cows, not knowing that 300 years later we would value the flowers like rare jewels, a living vernacular treasure.
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The sainfoin became an emblem of those traditional flower-rich hay meadows which once covered much of this landscape.
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There are occasional fields of sainfoin and of turnips; but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 Various
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Champs, near Meaux, in lucerne, sainfoin, and clover, with the object of producing a famine.
Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters A Family Record Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
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Then there were scattered groups of the rugged ilex, with its pale green leaves silvered by the moonbeams; and, where the land was cultivated, there was the livelier green of the young wheat, and the dark verdure of luxuriant crops of sainfoin: scarcely a house was passed; a solitary habitation is
Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. Thomas Forester
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Heaths, or places abounding in wild flowers, constitute the best neighbourhood for an apiary, and in default of this pasturage, there should be gardens where flowers are cultivated, and fields in which buck-wheat, clover, or sainfoin, is sown.
A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive With an Abstract of Wildman's Complete Guide for the Management of Bees Throughout the Year William Augustus Munn
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A brace of partridges rose out of the sainfoin, and flew down the hills; and watching their curving flight
Esther Waters 1892
knitandpurl commented on the word sainfoin
"I knew that Mlle Swann used often to go and spend a few days at Laon; for all that it was many miles away, the distance was counterbalanced by the absence of any intervening obstacle, and when, on hot afternoons, I saw a breath of wind emerge from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally come to rest, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to unite us; I would imagine that the same breath of wind had passed close to her, that it was some message from her that it was whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would kiss it as it passed."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 159 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 31, 2007
hernesheir commented on the word sainfoin
holy hay
September 18, 2011