Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A curious or unusual object of art or piece of bric-a-brac.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Originally, an object of virtu or article of bric-à-brac, such as a bronze, a piece of porcelain or lacquer-ware, etc., brought from China or the far East; now, any bronze, or piece of old china or of bric-à-brac in general, especially such as is rare or curious: as, a collection of curios.
Wiktionary
- n. A strange and interesting object which invokes curiosity.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Any curiosity{3} or article of virtu; any object esteemed for its unusual nature.
WordNet 3.0
- n. something unusual -- perhaps worthy of collecting
Etymologies
- Short for curiosity.
Examples
“There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times".”
“Andy Baio of Waxy. org shares a curio from the past — Computability, in which Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows explain the concept of home computing to the layman of 1984.”
“I mean if you look at the issues that face the next papacy and you look at them from the perspective of this curio, which is very Euro-centric, most of the cardinals are European.”
“The curio is my own property, and I will do just as I please with it.”
“The centre will also have a "lapa" for the staging of traditional dances, a small lodge to house tourists overnight and tourist-orientated businesses such as curio shops and safari companies to serve surrounding private game reserves.”
“a hundred men each, with a centurion to command it; a priest called curio, to perform the sacrifices, and two of the principal inhabitants, called duumviri, to distribute justice.”
“Upon Mr. Arbuthnot admitting that he studies Shakespere merely from a "curio" point of view, and that for the poetry he cared nothing,”
The Life of Sir Richard Burton
“Yüan-ming Yüan, or the "Bright Round Garden," to give it its proper name, had been laid out by the Jesuit fathers on the plan of the Trianon at Versailles, and was packed with valuable porcelain, old bronzes, and every conceivable kind of curio, most of which were looted or destroyed by the infuriated soldiery.”
“This is the species so often collected as a "curio," and on account of its very white under surface is much used for etching various figures.”
Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc.
“I saw first one of our men and then another emerge from the crowd, go to the boat, and carefully deposit something -- probably a "curio" of some kind -- in her sternsheets, and then rejoin the laughing, gesticulating throng.”
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