Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A tendril-bearing Old World vine (Citrullus colocynthis) bearing yellowish, green-mottled fruits the size of small lemons.
- n. The fruit of this plant, whose dried, bitter, spongy pulp is a very strong laxative.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The bitter apple, the fruit of a cucurbitaceous plant, Citrullus Colocynthis, indigenous in the warmer parts of Asia, but now widely cultivated on account of its medicinal properties. The fruit is a round gourd, resembling an orange in size and appearance, with many seeds embedded in a light and spongy pulp, which is very bitter. It is used in medicine as a purgative. The seeds are an article of food in some parts of Africa.
Wiktionary
- n. A viny plant native to the Mediterranean Basin and Asia. It produces a lemon-sized, yellowish, green-mottled, spongy, and extremely bitter fruit, a powerful hepatic stimulant and hydragogue cathartic used as a strong laxative.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The light spongy pulp of the fruit of the bitter cucumber (Citrullus colocynthis, or Cucumis colocynthis), an Asiatic plant allied to the watermelon; coloquintida. It comes in white balls, is intensely bitter, and a powerful cathartic. Called also
bitter apple ,bitter cucumber ,bitter gourd .
Etymologies
- Latin colocynthis, from Greek kolokunthis, from kolokunthē, round gourd.
Examples
“The dried pulp of its unripe, full-grown fruit constitutes the drug colocynth, which is used as a cathartic.”
“I applied my usual remedies for it, which consisted of colocynth and quinine; but experience has shown me that an excessive use of the same cathartic weakens its effect, and that it would be well for travellers to take with them different medicines to cause proper action in the liver, such as colocynth, calomel, resin of jalap, Epsom salts; and that no quinine should be taken until such medicines shall have prepared the system for its reception.”
“The hero of the Romance “Al – Dalhamah” is described as a bitter gourd (colocynth), a viper, a calamity.”
““I learned wisdom from the blind who make sure of things by touching them” (as did St. Thomas); and when he ate the colocynth offered by his owner,”
“It is impossible to make any description, either of the most pleasant or of the most unpleasant, of the raspberry or of colocynth.”
“My enfeebled stomach, harrowed and irritated with medicinal compounds, with ipecac, colocynth, tartar-emetic, quinine, and such things, protested against the coarse food.”
“The ground was luxuriant with colocynth, whose runners and fruits looked festive in the early light.”
“On the way we were shown pits of coarse sulphur and alum mixed with sand; in the low lands senna and colocynth were growing wild.”
“For a certain local disease, they use senna or colocynth, anoint the body with sulphur boiled in ghee, and expose it to the sun, or they leave the patient all night in the dew; — abstinence and perspiration generally effect a cure.”
“Sometimes the centre is occupied by an islet of torn trees and stones rolled in heaps, supporting a clump of thick jujube or tall acacia, whilst the lower parts of the beds are overgrown with long lines of lively green colocynth. 29 Here are usually the wells, surrounded by heaps of thorns, from which the leaves have been browsed off, and dwarf sticks that support the water-hide.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘colocynth’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
chained_bear "'...parenthetically I may say that I gave him such a dose, such a comfortable dose, the next day, when he was to take physic: I did not scruple to add two scruples of colocynth to his black draught, ha, ha, ha! Colocynth for ever, and the strong watery gripes. Are you not amused, my dear sir?'"
--Patrick O'Brian, Treason's Harbour, 280
A Sea of Words: The violently cathartic pulp of a gourd, Citrullus colocynthus. (152) Feb 19, 2008