french

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. v. To cut (green beans, for example) into thin strips before cooking.
2. v. To trim fat or bone from (a chop, for example).
3. v. Slang To give a French kiss to.
4. v. Vulgar Slang To perform oral sex on.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. Pertaining to France, a country of western Europe, or to its inhabitants. Often abbreviated Fr.
2. Foreign; from a distant or foreign land; hence, strange; uncommon; rare.
3. a variety of grenadine used for ladies' dresses and very durable.
4. Baldness produced by what was called the French disease (morbus Gallicus). Hence used with equivocation.
5. n. The language spoken by the people of France. French is parallel with Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Wallachian, and minor dialects, called together the Romance languages, being descended from the Latin as spoken by the Romans and the peoples of the various provinces whom they brought under their dominion, mingled with the Celtic and Teutonic tongues with which Latin was thus brought in contact. (See Romance.) French means ‘the language of the Franks,’ a Teutonic people merged with the mixed races of Gaul, who received the Frankish name (the country being thence called France), but retained their Romanic speech, the Franks and other Teutonic tribes, and later the Northmen, accepting the speech of the people they conquered, It is divided chronologically into Old French and modern French, the former extending from the ninth century to the fourteenth, or, with the convenient inclusion (as usually in this dictionary) of what is specifically called Middle French, to the sixteenth century. Old French existed in many dialects, the phrase, indeed, when unqualified or undiscriminated, including the aggregate of such dialects. The most important were the dialect of the Ile de France, which, as the “French of Paris,” has become the modern literary French; and that of Normandy, the Norman or Norman French, which, transferred to England at the Conquest and there developed (as Anglo-French), gave much to and took much from the English, and was finally displaced by the mixed English speech thus formed. (See English.) By later borrowing from French, or from the Latin on the French model, the Romanic part of the English vocabulary is now to a great extent nearly identical with that of French. As the most central and highly developed of the Romance dialects, French began, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to take the place of Latin as the general language of diplomacy, polite society, and commerce. Its importance in this respect has much diminished in the present century. It is now drawn upon by other languages chiefly for terms of fine art, dress, and cookery. The use of accents as a customary part of French orthography began in the seventeenth century; they now form a rigid artificial system, often a guide to pronunciation, and reflecting generally, but with numerous exceptions, previous etymological conditions of the words concerned. Regarded as a Romance language, French is remarkable for its departure from the Latin type. In its vowel and consonant system (notably in its nasal vowels), its sweeping contractions, and its general destruction of final sounds or syllables, with the retention in many cases of these lost sounds in spelling, it differs markedly from other Romance tongues.
6. n. Collectively, the people of France.
7. To prepare according to the French mode.
8. To dress, as a chop, by partly freeing the bones.
9. In metallurgy, to carry out the last step in the refining of metallic antimony, by which ‘bowl metal’ is converted into ‘star metal.’
10. [lowercase] In botany, to appear distorted and unnatural, owing to some abnormal condition of the plant. See frenching.

Wiktionary

1. v. To prepare food by cutting it into strips.
2. v. To kiss (another person) while inserting one’s tongue into the other person's mouth.
3. v. To kiss in this manner.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. Of or pertaining to France or its inhabitants.

WordNet 3.0

1. adj. of or pertaining to France or the people of France
2. n. the people of France
3. n. the Romance language spoken in France and in countries colonized by France
4. v. cut (e.g, beans) lengthwise in preparation for cooking
5. n. United States sculptor who created the seated marble figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. (1850-1931)