Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A curious or unusual object of art or piece of bric-a-brac.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Originally, an object of virtu or article of bric-à-brac, such as a bronze, a piece of porcelain or lacquer-ware, etc., brought from China or the far East; now, any bronze, or piece of old china or of bric-à-brac in general, especially such as is rare or curious: as, a collection of curios.

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

  • noun Any curiosity{3} or article of virtu; any object esteemed for its unusual nature.

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

  • noun A strange and interesting object which invokes curiosity.

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

  • noun something unusual -- perhaps worthy of collecting

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Short for curiosity.]

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Examples

  • There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times".

    Books Maxine 2009

  • There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times".

    June 2009 Maxine 2009

  • There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times".

    Spy master Eric Ambler in The Times archive Maxine 2009

  • There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times".

    PETRONA Maxine 2009

  • There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times".

    Spy master Eric Ambler in The Times archive Maxine 2009

  • Andy Baio of Waxy. org shares a curio from the past — Computability, in which Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows explain the concept of home computing to the layman of 1984.

    2008 September : Scrubbles.net 2008

  • Andy Baio of Waxy. org shares a curio from the past — Computability, in which Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows explain the concept of home computing to the layman of 1984.

    Steve and Jayne and 8K of RAM : Scrubbles.net 2008

  • I mean if you look at the issues that face the next papacy and you look at them from the perspective of this curio, which is very Euro-centric, most of the cardinals are European.

    CNN Transcript Apr 3, 2005 2005

  • 'The curio is my own property, and I will do just as I please with it.'

    A Bid for Fortune or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta Guy Boothby 1886

  • The centre will also have a "lapa" for the staging of traditional dances, a small lodge to house tourists overnight and tourist-orientated businesses such as curio shops and safari companies to serve surrounding private game reserves.

    ANC Daily News Briefing 1996

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