Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. See smoky quartz.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A smoky-yellow or smoky-brown variety of rock-crystal or quartz, found in great perfection on the Cairngorm mountain in Scotland and in many other localities. It is much used for brooches, seals, and other ornaments. The color is probably due to some hydrocarbon compound. Also called
cairngorm-stone and smoky quartz.
GNU Webster's 1913
- (Min.) A smoky yellow or brown variety of rock crystal, or crystallized quartz, found especially, in the mountain of Cairngorm, in Scotland.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a smoky yellow or brown quartz
Etymologies
- After the Cairngorm (Mountains) . (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Toni's and Jos's were conventional longswords, carried in long slender cases that looked like instrument cases, but Paul carried only an elegant sword cane, an antique, ebony with a silver ferrule and a large cairngorm set into the silver ball-handle.”
“The cairngorm brooch he had given her for her birthday was there.”
“Come to visit the wounded, he was dressed for the occasion in plum velvet breeches with stockings to match, immaculate linen, and-to show solidarity with the troops, no doubt-a coat and waistcoat in Cameron tartan, with a subsidiary plaid looped over one shoulder through a cairngorm brooch.”
“Alice drew Hamish aside and showed him a silver and cairngorm ring she was wearing on a string around her neck.”
“In repose the Highlander's eye was as clear as a cairngorm and as cold, but when it fell upon John Broom it took a twinkle not quite unlike the twinkle in the one eye of the sailor; and then, to his amazement, this grand creature beckoned to John Broom with a rather dirty hand.”
“According to Mr E.H. Cunningham-Craig, the mineral occurs in crystals lining cavities in highly-inclined veins of a fine-grained granite running through the coarser granite of the main mass: Shallow pits were formerly dug in the kaolinized granite for sake of the cairngorm and the mineral was also found as pebbles in the bed of the river Avon.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 "Bulgaria" to "Calgary"
“The feet of the various species of grouse and owls are capped with silver or gold (in which is set a cairngorm), the toes tipped, or the tarsus banded with silver or gold, to form clasps or brooches.”
“A friend, he explained, had promised to meet him in that place; and though the shopwoman plainly doubted his veracity, and kept a sharp eye that he did not take to his heels with the cairngorm, she did not go so far as to suggest his removing himself from the zone of temptation.”
“It was difficult now to continue the pursuit unobserved: and Gimblet became absorbed in the contemplation of an enormous cairngorm, which was masquerading as an article of personal adornment in the window of the last outlying shop.”
“For ten long minutes they stood talking, driving poor Gimblet to the desperate expedient of entering the shop and demanding a closer acquaintance with the cairngorm.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘cairngorm’.
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Jesse's random
bathos, dragoman, tessellated, escutcheon, eikon, mondaine, basilisk, ciborium, rubric, machicolation, jet, defalcation and 198 more...
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phrontistery - c
from phrontistery.info
czardas, cytometer, cytology, cytheromania, cystoscope, cystolith, cyrenaic, cypseline, cyprinoid, cyphonism, cynophobia, cytogenesis and 1298 more...
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buzzwords
oddities of any kind
recuse, sipe, mullion, cairngorm, gormless, thole, drug, rutch, plonk, yips, gurry, reredos and 8 more...
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♥
ambrosia, inamorata, gossamer, lily-white, hummingbird, roucoulement, poppy, daisy, calypso, lunula, lamb, dove and 1526 more...
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Illuminated Manuscript
words for the bespoke
midheaven, moth-fly, yea-forsooth, ontil, coxcomb, vulnerary, landhelgisgæslan, beasthood, deviltry, triolet, diablerie, titil and 107 more...
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Outlander series words
A place for me to keep words I found (or found anew) while reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. (Culling my enormous "Learned (or Encountered) in Reading" list.)
gralloch, yeuk, corpse-candle, saprophytic, baldachin, Kermanshah, celandine, tynchal, quaich, mesentery, basidium, dittany and 244 more...
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the omnibus
preponderance, idioglossia, acumen, heteronym, flux, anacoluthon, metonymy, impetus, constellation, exegesis, revelatory, cloistered and 877 more...
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What David Foster Wallace circled in ...
ablative, ablaut, abulia, acephalous, ACTH, adit, adumbrate, agrapha, ailanthus, aleatory, alfresco, algolagnia and 474 more...
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What David Foster Wallace Circled in ...
http://www.slate.com/id/2250784/
ablative absolute, ablaut, abulia, acephalous, ACTH, adit, adumbrate, agrapha, aleatory, ailanthus, alfresco, algolagnia and 482 more...
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Words to remember
adventive, affectation, ambiguous, anachronism, anesis, antithetic, apostasy, attenuate, authenticity, autodidact, -fic, bandolier and 146 more...
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Words that make you go hmmmm...
Interesting words you probably won't hear in your day-to-day.
maxwell, mooncalf, quagga, glaikit, musquash, lingam, haruspex, qindarka, chthonic, ipomoea, azimuthal, valuta and 304 more...
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Geology
baraboo, monadnock, peneplain, endrumpf, peneplanation, cairngorm, paleooology, stream capture, allochthon, slickensides, graywacke, tectonics and 56 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for cairngorm.

chained_bear "... he was dressed for the occasion in plum velvet breeches with stockings to match, immaculate linen, and—to show solidarity with the troops, no doubt—a coat and waistcoat in Cameron tartan, with a subsidiary plaid looped over one shoulder through a cairngorm brooch."
—Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber (NY: Delacorte Press, 1991), 649 Jan 2, 2010
mollusque She wandered the prairie at will, though never strayed far, and came home running if she heard a wolf howl, her fine big cairngorm eyes wide with fear.
--Nellie L. McClung, 1935, Clearing in the West: My Own Story Nov 25, 2007