Definitions

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

  • noun A coarse cotton or linen fabric heavily sized with glue, used for stiffening garments and in bookbinding.
  • noun Archaic Rigid formality.
  • adjective Resembling or suggesting buckram, as in stiffness or formality.
  • transitive verb To stiffen with or as if with buckram.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To strengthen with buckram, or in the manner of buckram; make stiff.
  • noun Formerly, a fine and costly material used for church banners and vestments and for personal wear; also, a cheaper material used for linings.
  • noun In recent times, coarse linen cloth stiffened with glue or gum, used as a stiffening for keeping garments in a required shape, and recently also in binding books.
  • noun 3. A buckram bag used by lawyers' clerks.
  • noun The ramson or bear's-garlic, Allium ursinum.
  • noun In the old herbals, the cuckoo-pint, Arum maculatum.
  • Made of or resembling buckram of either kind; hence, stiff; precise; formal.

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

  • transitive verb To strengthen with buckram; to make stiff.
  • noun A coarse cloth of linen or hemp, stiffened with size or glue, used in garments to keep them in the form intended, and for wrappers to cover merchandise.
  • noun (Bot.) A plant. See Ramson.
  • adjective Made of buckram.
  • adjective Stiff; precise.

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

  • noun A coarse cloth of linen or hemp, stiffened with size or glue, used in garments to keep them in the form intended, and for wrappers to cover merchandise.
  • verb transitive To stiffen with or as if with buckram.
  • noun botany A plant, Allium ursinum, also called ramson, wild garlic, or bear garlic.

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

  • adjective rigidly formal
  • noun a coarse cotton fabric stiffened with glue; used in bookbinding and to stiffen clothing
  • verb stiffen with or as with buckram

Etymologies

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

[Middle English bukeram, fine linen, from Old French boquerant and from Old Italian bucherame, both after Bukhara, (Bukhoro), from which fine linen was once imported.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English bukeram ("fine linen"), from Anglo-Norman bokeram, from Old French boquerant, bougherant ("fine cloth"), bougueran, probably ultimately from Bokhara.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Perhaps from ealier buckrams, from buck +‎ ramps, ramsh (“wild garlic, ramson”). Compare Danish ramsløg ("ramson"), Swedish ramslök ("bear garlic, ramson").

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Examples

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  • men in buckram: sometimes proverbially for non-existent persons, in allusion to Falstaff's ‘four rogues in buckram’ (quot. 1596).

    February 6, 2007

  • Citation (as adjective) on hodge-podge.

    October 8, 2008

  • From Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution

    March 6, 2011