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  1. simnel love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. Chiefly British A crisp bread made of fine wheat flour.
  2. n. Chiefly British A rich fruitcake sometimes covered with almond paste and traditionally eaten at mid-Lent, Easter, and Christmas.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A cake made of fine flour; a kind of rich sweet cake offered as a gift at Christmas and Easter, and especially on Mothering (Simnel) Sunday.
  2. n. A variety of squash having a round flattish head with a wavy or scalloped edge, and so resembling the cake so called: now called simlin.

Wiktionary

  1. n. simnel cake

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. obsolete A kind of cake made of fine flour; a cracknel.
  2. n. engraving A kind of rich plum cake, eaten especially on Mid-Lent Sunday.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a fruitcake (sometimes covered with almond paste) eaten at mid-Lent or Easter or Christmas
  2. n. a crisp bread of fine white flour

Etymologies

  1. Middle English, from Old French siminel, from Medieval Latin siminellus, ultimately from Latin simila, fine flour; see semolina. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “The pastry, also called simnel cake, was a rich fruit cake, remembered by Robert Herrick in the lines:”

    Liz Smith: A Chapter From The Mother Book

  • “Personally I like to stick with the old favourites but Heavenly has developed a reputation for wild and wonderful flavours such as bubble gum, pink grapefruit, Turkish delight, simnel cake an Easter special and peanut butter.”

    The Guardian: Ten of the best UK ice-cream sellers

  • “Holy Week...family arrangements for Easter with talk of travel arrangements and grandparents and simnel cake... jostling with the veiled statues in church and the Gospel bringing home the stark ghastliness of a Roman crucifixion and Christ's agony.”

    Archive 2009-04-01

  • “A simnel cake is a light fruit cake, similar to a Christmas cake, that is covered in marzipan.”

    Simon & Schuster: Princess Party Cookbook

  • “Spring bulb flowers (daffodils, for ex.) are given to mothers, and simnel cake is made to celebrate the occasion (this cake has also become an Easter Cake of late, however).”

    Simnel Cake for Laetare Sunday

  • “Last year I made very traditional simnel cupcakes so I decided on a change.”

    Easter Cupcake Nests

  • “They are eaten alongside hot cross buns, simnel cake and copious quantities of chocolate eggs as part of our Easter festivities.”

    Archive 2006-04-01

  • “Besides these dishes of domestic origin, there were various delicacies brought from foreign parts, and a quantity of rich pastry, as well as of the simnel-bread and wastle cakes, which were only used at the tables of the highest nobility.”

    Ivanhoe

  • “All these were duly packed away deep in the traveller's scrip, and above them old pippin-faced brother Athanasius had placed a parcel of simnel bread and rammel cheese, with a small flask of the famous blue-sealed Abbey wine.”

    The White Company

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synonyms (1)

Words with the same meaning

  1. cracknel

hypernyms (4)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. fruitcake
  1. breadstuff
  1. staff of life
  1. bread

reverse dictionary (3)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. simbling-cake
  1. simlin
  1. simnel

tags (2)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. word-of-the-day
  1. wotd

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‘simnel’ has been looked up 1529 times, loved by 3 people, added to 21 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 8.