Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An annual weed (Sinapis arvensis) in the mustard family, native to Eurasia and naturalized in North America, having racemes of yellow flowers and hairy stems and foliage.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A common name of the wild mustard, Brassica Sinapistrum, a common pest in grain-fields. Also written carlick.
Wiktionary
- n. Any of several yellow-flowered cruciferous weeds of grain fields, especially wild mustard.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Bot.) A cruciferous plant (Brassica sinapistrum) with yellow flowers; wild mustard. It is troublesome in grain fields. Called also
chardock ,chardlock ,chedlock , andkedlock .
WordNet 3.0
- n. weedy Eurasian plant often a pest in grain fields
Etymologies
- Middle English cherlok, from Old English cerlic. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Such dry waste places send up plants to flower, such as charlock and poppy, quicker than happens in better soil, but they do not reach nearly the height or size.”
“UC Riverside scientists studying the genetic makeup of wild radishes in California have determined that the California wild radish is descended from hybrids between two species: cultivated radish and the weed, jointed charlock.”
“He decided to pick it as a centerpiece for his bouquet of marguerites, charlock and cornflowers.”
“I'd found a late patch of charlock near the stream, leaves wilting and brown around the edges, and had brought back a handful in my pocket, along with a few juniper berries picked during a stop earlier in the day.”
“The oily burst of flavor sent fumes up the back of my throat that made my eyes water, but they did cleanse my tongue of the taste of grease and scorch, and would, with the charlock leaves, maybe be sufficient to ward off scurvy.”
“So, too, while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, houndstongue, cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles”
“And he instances these facts to show that the seeds of this charlock, and these dyke plants, had lain dormant in the soil from the time the dykes were built, and the house erected.”
“He also mentions, as a more or less remarkable fact, "that a house, which was known to have existed for two hundred years, was pulled down, and, no sooner was the surface soil exposed to the influence of light and moisture, than it became covered with a crop of wild-mustard or charlock.”
“And the year in which they brought it no more, two Sulphurs, with dresses like sunlight on a charlock-field, came with the rest to the moon-daisies 'Feast; because not once in all their years of marriage had the perfect rose been lacking.”
“Several kinds of mustard-plant grow in the Holy Land, either wild, as the charlock, Sinapis arvensis, and the white mustard, S. Alba, or cultivated, as S. nigra, which last seems the one intended in the Gospel.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘charlock’.
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End in -ock
Inspired by fbharjo (see spitchcock).
spitchcock, hillock, willock, peacock, pajock, penock, yapock, sycock, bittock, bawcock, burrock, cammock and 168 more...
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Mustard
n. A plant of the genus Brassica, formerly classed as Sinapis. The ordinary species are B. nigra, the black mustard; B. alba, the white mustard; and B. Sinapistrum, the wild mustard or charlock. Th...
mustard, Mustard, mustard greens, Brassica, Sinapis, black mustard, white mustard, mustard seed, Jieziyuan Huazhuan, Manual of the Mus..., mustard gas, mustard plaster and 77 more...
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Flora
fenugreek, verbena, saxifrage, arbutus, calendula, nasturtium, lobelia, hellebore, rhododendron, philodendron, bellflower, heuchera and 449 more...
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Hedgepiglet
Words for things both tangible and nonanthropic
rorqual, vellus, wrasse, rainbow bee-eater, tinkershire, lemonquat, boomslang, tufted vetch, cubeb, nipplefruit, madapple, wad and 447 more...
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Interesting Scrabble words
Interesting words worth @ least 15 points.
smoochy, zareba, hyphal, djellaba, cloque, pyxidium, qindarka, squiffy, howbeit, chthonic, quinta, azimuthal and 262 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1408 more...
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Words of the Day
glabella, chirotony, nook-shotten, crapehanger, filemot, swirlie, egosurf, lexiphanicism, Ruritanian, stichometry, chrononaut, faldstool and 2050 more...
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free rice
trepang, wain, stenosis, biltong, ablaut, ostler, gorgerin, qindar, hyson, gynoecium, traduce, blenny and 49 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for charlock.
knitandpurl "The white charlock, which was obviously as much of a pest in Furtwangen as its yellow brother in Low Hall, touched the morbid scene with falsely cheerful light.'
The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey, p 94 of the Knopf hardcover edition Jun 5, 2012
chained_bear "I'd found a late patch of charlock near the stream, leaves wilting and brown around the edges, and brought back a handful in my pocket, along with a few juniper berries picked during a stop earlier in the day."
—Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber (NY: Delacorte Press, 1991), 812–813 Jan 3, 2010
yarb Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout inflamed with worms and leaves.
- Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, XI Aug 30, 2008