Definitions

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

  • noun Any of various usually thorny trees or shrubs of the genus Crataegus of the rose family, having clusters of white or pinkish flowers and reddish fruits containing a few one-seeded nutlets.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A thorny shrub or small tree, Cratægus Oxyacantha, much used in hedges.
  • noun A decorative pattern used in some Oriental wares. See Hawthorn china.

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

  • noun (Bot.) A thorny shrub or tree (the Cratægus oxyacantha), having deeply lobed, shining leaves, small, roselike, fragrant flowers, and a fruit called haw. It is much used in Europe for hedges, and for standards in gardens. The American hawthorn is Cratægus cordata, which has the leaves but little lobed.

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

  • noun Any of various shrubs and small trees of the genus Crataegus having small, apple-like fruits and thorny branches

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

  • noun a spring-flowering shrub or small tree of the genus Crataegus

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Old English hagathorn : haga, haw + thorn, thorn.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English hagaþorn, hæguþorn, from haga ("enclosure, hedge") + þorn ("thorn")

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Examples

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  • several species of crataegus are called hawthorn

    August 1, 2007

  • "It was in the "Month of Mary" that I remember first having fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness."

    -- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 121 of the Vintage International paperback edition

    December 28, 2007

  • "And the name Guermantes of those days is also like one of those little balloons which have been filled with oxygen or some other gas; when I come to prick it, to extract its contents from it, I breathe the air of the Combray of that year, of that day, mingled with a fragrance of hawthorn blossom blown by the wind from the corner of the square, harbinger of rain, which now sent the sun packing, now let it spread itself over the red woolen carpet of the sacristy, clothing it in a bright geranium pink and in that, so to speak, Wagnerian sweetness and solemnity in joy that give such nobility to a festive occasion."

    --The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 5 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    July 13, 2008

  • "When all was said, the stories I had heard at Mme de Guermantes's, very different in this respect from what I had felt in the case of the hawthorns, or when I tasted a madeleine, remained alien to me."

    --The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 756 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    September 29, 2008

  • "When we speak of the "niceness" of a woman, we are doing no more perhaps than project outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel in seeing her, like children when they say: "My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorns." Which explains, incidentally, why men never say of a woman who is not unfaithful to them: "She is so nice," and say it so often of a woman by whom they are betrayed."

    --The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 670 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    February 15, 2010

  • "Gradually, as the love that Albertine may have felt for certain women ceased to cause me pain, it attached those women to my past, made them somehow more real, as the memory of Combray gave to buttercups and hawthorn blossom a greater reality than to unfamiliar flowers."

    --The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 746 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    February 18, 2010

  • "And then, you've talked so often to Saint-Loup about the hawthorns and lilacs and irises at Tansonville, he'll see what you meant now."

    --The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 918 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    February 23, 2010