Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A plant of the genus Epilobium, so named from the willow-like leaves of E. angustifolium, the great willow-herb. This is the most conspicuons species, a native of Europe, Asia, and North America, abounding especially in recent forest-clearings, hence in America also called
fire-weed . It grows from 4 to 7 feet high, and bears a long raceme of showy pink-purple flowers. Other(British) names are rose-bay, bay willow, Persian, and especially French, willow. E. latifolium of arctic Europe, Asia, and North America, reaching Colorado in the mountains, is a much lower plant with similar showy flowers. E. obcordatum is a beautiful dwarf species of the mountains of California. E. luteum, found from Oregon northward, is peculiar in its yellow flowers. Many species are not at all showy. The great willow-herb and others have an unofficinal medicinal use. The Indian name wicup or wicopy survives in some books. See also cut undercoma . - n. See Lythrum.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Bot.) A perennial herb (Epilobium spicatum) with narrow willowlike leaves and showy rose-purple flowers. The name is sometimes made to include other species of the same genus.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a plant of the genus Epilobium having pink or yellow flowers and seeds with silky hairs
Examples
“Then my quarry settled on a down-covered stem, deep inside the willow-herb thicket.”
“Now is the time for the towering spikes of purple foxgloves and pink rosebay willow-herb.”
“• If any poet deserves to have his statue in a railway station, I feel that Edward Thomas does in Adlestrop Editorial, 28 January, except that no doubt willow-herb and grass and meadowsweet have long ago completely taken over.”
“And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?”
“Rosebay willow-herb (Epilobium angustifolium) (another Ninja)”
“And up he went through the transfigured tangles of the willow-herb and the uncut seeding grass of the farther bank.”
“It was the end one of a Victorian terrace, a bit like the flat, with a small yard in front overgrown with willow-herb and brambles, transferred from the park via the alimentary canals of the local pigeons.”
“The back garden was a single, small bomb-crater; heaped clay, statuary and the bricks and glass of ruined greenhouses; dry stalks of willow-herb stood breast high over the mounds.”
“Once they sought coolness and secrecy among the high cow-parsley and willow-herb of the waste building sites.”
“Vegetables and fruit-trees were flanked by herbaceous borders running down to a tarred fence at the end, where a curtain of giant convolvulus, drooping over a mass of mallow and foxglove, borage and rosebay willow-herb, suggested that Miss Barnslow had not yet got round to the task of civilizing this corner of the estate.”
Lists
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Quenelles of Random Palavery
More randomly-garnered terms from the world of words that don't quite yet fit into my other lists.
Goddidit, barcelona, filigrain, good-natured, ill-natured, half-bit, endosome, underplaying, parotid, denormalization, sleightgeist, wheezing and 2334 more...
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