Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Delicate and intricate ornamental work made from gold, silver, or other fine twisted wire.
- n. An intricate, delicate, or fanciful ornamentation.
- n. A design resembling such ornamentation: filigrees of frosting on a cake.
- v. To decorate with or as if with filigree.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Ornamental work consisting of fine gold, silver, or sometimes copper wire, formed into delicate tracery of scrolls, network, and the like, or of minute grains or plates of metal soldered to a background, or of both combined. It is used either independently or for application to more solid articles, and is one of the most ancient kinds of jewelers' work. The Greek and Etruscan filigree-work is of extreme beauty, and much of the jewelry for personal adornment found in their tombs or elsewhere is of this kind. In the middle ages filigree-work reached great development in certain parts of Europe, especially in Ireland before the eleventh century. It is made in northern Italy, Genoa and Venice being famous for it.
- n. Any kind of ornamental openwork resembling or analogous to filigree.
- n. Hence Figuratively, anything very delicate, light, and fanciful or showy in structure; especially, anything too delicately formed to be serviceable; something easily destroyed or injured.
- Composed of filigree: as, a filigree brooch.
- To ornament with filigree-work.
Wiktionary
- n. A delicate and intricate ornamentation made from gold or silver (or sometimes other metal) twisted wire.
- n. A design resembling such intricate ornamentation.
- v. transitive To decorate something with intricate ornamentation made from gold or silver twisted wire.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Ornamental work, formerly with grains or breads, but now composed of fine wire and used chiefly in decorating gold and silver to which the wire is soldered, being arranged in designs frequently of a delicate and intricate arabesque pattern.
- adj. Relating to, composed of, or resembling, work in filigree. Hence: Fanciful; unsubstantial; merely decorative.
WordNet 3.0
- v. make filigree, as with a precious metal
- n. delicate and intricate ornamentation (usually in gold or silver or other fine twisted wire)
Etymologies
- Alteration of French filigrane, from Italian filigrana : Latin fīlum, thread; see gwhī- in Indo-European roots + Latin grānum, grain; see gr̥ə-no- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Also decorated with filigree is the familiar introit, In medio ecclesie, in which the initial I is inhabited by ten scenes from the life of John the Evangelist. 136”
Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany
“There will be a lot of flash and filigree from the new Hook (Step 1 was to create a convenient urban legend to explain the otherwise cliche name).”
“The points of light lit up a tin filigree framed mirror, returning a full reflection of the altar.”
“To support these trends Murano artists and artisans returned to techniques of the past such as filigree, murrino, and lattimo.”
“It reminds her of plants; of ferns specifically, so does the word 'filigree'.”
“(My yarn is the "filigree" colorway, which is currently out of stock, btw.)”
“And this is a beautifully written tale, composed of rhyming couplets and incorporating rich vocabulary like "filigree," "regal" and "luminescent.”
“One exhibit item was a bull's head covered in filigree crochet reminiscent of what Grandma did and displayed on her table.”
The Huffington Post: Magda Abu-Fadil: "Bezaubern" Zurich on a Short Business Trip
“Portis's language is an archaic, biblically inflected 19th-century American English, free of contractions, a plainsong not averse to rhetorical filigree and curlicue – a perfect fit for the hyper-literate, word-drunk Coens.”
The Guardian: With True Grit, the Coen brothers have given the western back its teeth
“It has a quirky, preppy-luxe feel — such as a skirt of delicate golden filigree — and is one to watch as it develops.”
The Wall Street Journal: Early Shows Draw Scouts and Mentors
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘filigree’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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Silver
Silvery words. (Mithril doesn't count.)
lessilver, silver, ladysilver, loadsilver, silvery, silversmith, silverwork, silverware, ale-silver, quicksilver, aver-silver, besilver and 242 more...
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Fairylike
fairylike, enchanted, pixieish, pixyish, impish, mischievous, fluttery, magical, bewitching, enchanting, fey, otherworldly and 126 more...
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words 1
Traduce, Ramify, precipitous, rapture, adumbrate, knell, smolder, vagary, choleric, sibylline, hypocritical, jejune and 135 more...
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Art
daguerreotype, impressionism, expressionism, action painting, sketch, collage, photography, sculpture, dadaism, mutoscope, filigree, aesthete
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GRE
GRE words from Princeton Review guide, ETS GRE Book from 2010 (for revised test), New Yorker/NY Times articles.
sycophant, obsequious, volubility, equanimity, enervate, effrontery, impertinent, platitude, impudence, quiescent, propitiate, equivocate and 124 more...
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gre2
aberrant, aberration, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate and 1827 more...
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f
f
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princeton review
jubilance, obtrusive, maladjusted, prodigious, incredulous, stolidity, inured, stoicism, sidereal, boisterous, etiolated, circumscribed and 90 more...
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good ones
grumble, fumble, bumble, stumble, crumble, mumble, jumble, humble, bramble, scramble, amble, ramble and 191 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, F
felony, frolic, fend, fuselage, farthingale, freewheeling, frigorific, flummery, fancypants, felsitic, flagstone, flageolet and 295 more...
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summer words 2009
how many words can I make mine this summer?
largess, hoyden, catholic, fornicatress, quean, slattern, bildungsroman, sybaritic, descresent, nodus, frittle, callipygian and 529 more...
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Infinite Jest
Words taken from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
prorector, monograph, post-fourier, snuffle, rototremble, creatus, enfilade, subanimalistic, balletic, espadrilles, leonine, cirri and 1153 more...
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patterns
ergodic, stochastic, stereopsis, echolocation, holocation, broker, map, intarsia, encipher, ocellus, muslin, mandelbrot set and 159 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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The Innocents Abroad
Words rounded up while reading The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain.
rakish, excursionist, bowelless, pilgrimizing, melodeon, woebegone, abaft, sextant, veriest, behindhand, stanchion, avast and 188 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for filigree.

dimã©lion this word has always sounded a bit highbrow to me. but i do like it. Nov 21, 2008
knitandpurl "I had more pleasure on the evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by the horizon, appeared so much the same colour as its background, as in an Impressionist picture, that it seemed also to be of the same substance, as though its hull and the rigging in which it tapered into a slender filigree had simply been cut out from the vaporous blue of the sky."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 525 of the Modern Library paperback edition Apr 26, 2008