Definitions

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

  • noun A collection of valuable items discovered or found; a treasure-trove.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Something of value found; a find.

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

  • noun A treasure trove; a collection of treasure.

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

  • noun treasure of unknown ownership found hidden (usually in the earth)

Etymologies

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

[Short for (treasure-)trove.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Originally in the phrase treasure trove, from Anglo-Norman tresor trové 'found treasure'; postnominal adjective later reinterpreted as head noun.

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Examples

  • The trove is virtually all from Picasso's personal collection of his own works, which reflect how he hoped to shape his own legacy.

    The Short List: A Guide to This Week's Arts and Entertainment 2010

  • Captain Cook left his treasure trove from the Southern seas, and the

    Through the Malay Archipelago Emily Richings

  • trove, as in treasure trove, is a verb, not a noun, and means found.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » The influence of French words in English legal terminology 2010

  • Our intelligence agencies are still methodically analyzing the so-called trove of documents and data -- "a bonanza of intelligence" -- our brave Navy SEALs captured during their daring raid.

    Dorian de Wind: Will Bin Laden's "Dead Hand" Reach Out From Its Watery Grave? Dorian de Wind 2011

  • For help, the court turned not only to the dictionary, as it traditionally has, but to a billion-word trove of digitized English text known as the "BYU corpora."

    'I' Is a Window To the Soul 2011

  • He had found in some ruins a sort of treasure-trove, that is to say, an earthenware jar containing a sum of about ten thousand francs in old gold and silver coins; and not only had he handed it over to the owner of the ruins, whom he might easily have deceived, but further he had refused to accept any reward, declaring emphatically in his abbreviated jargon, "honesty would die selling itself."

    Mauprat George Sand 1840

  • The head of the Travancore royal family Maharaja Uthradam Thirunal Marthanda Varma regularly stole priceless jewellery and coins from the temple's treasure trove, which is estimated to be worth £14 billion, according to former temple employees and Kerala's former chief minister.

    Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2011

  • The trove is a combination of two major gas fields -- called Leviathan and Tamar, named for the granddaughter of Israeli energy mogul Yitzhak Tshuva.

    JTA - Recent News 2010

  • Brandon McInerney, the 14-year-old accused of murdering fellow gay student, Lawrence King when King, an unapologetically open homosexual, asked McInerney to be his Valentine, was discovered to be housing a "trove" of White Supremacist material according to prosecutors reports the L.A. Times.

    MOC Blog 2008

  • The "trove" of white supremacist literature and drawings depict a "racist skinhead philosophy of the variety espoused by Tom Metzger, David Lane and others," Fox wrote.

    Joe. My. God. 2008

Comments

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  • Can anyone think of usage outside the common, alliterative, almost-one-word-by-now "treasure trove"?

    September 25, 2009

  • I'm sure these corpora abound with examples.

    September 25, 2009

  • Tonald Tuck trove me crazy.

    September 25, 2009

  • Hmm...after a bit of research, found this on Wiki:

    "Treasure trove" literally means "treasure that has been found". The English term "treasure trove" was derived from tresor trové, the Anglo-French equivalent of the Latin legal term thesaurus inventus. In 15th-century English the Anglo-French term was translated as "treasure found", but from the 16th century it began appearing in its modern form with the French word trové anglicized as "trovey", "trouve" or "trove".

    So perhaps it doesn't come apart from "treasure", and for good reason! Say it ain't so.

    September 25, 2009

  • Also a GNU package.

    September 28, 2009