Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Any plant of the madder family, Rubiaceæ.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) A name proposed for any plant of the same natural order (Rubiaceæ) as the madder.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A name proposed for any plant of the same natural order (Rubiaceae) as the madder.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun any of numerous trees or shrubs or vines of the family Rubiaceae

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Our ideas of what colours looked like come from stained glass of the period or paintings, but in reality they would have been quite different as they came not from pigments but from vegetable dyes, like madderwort (red), weld (yellow) and woad (blue), all from plants, to the reds of kermes and cochineal extracted from crushed insects.

    Archive 2007-05-01 2007

  • Our ideas of what colours looked like come from stained glass of the period or paintings, but in reality they would have been quite different as they came not from pigments but from vegetable dyes, like madderwort (red), weld (yellow) and woad (blue), all from plants, to the reds of kermes and cochineal extracted from crushed insects.

    Medieval costume brought to life 2007

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