Definitions

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

  • noun Something that gives off light.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to illumination; affording light.
  • noun That which illuminates or affords light; a material from which light is procured.

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

  • noun That which illuminates or affords light.

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

  • noun Something that illuminates.

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

  • noun something that can serve as a source of light

Etymologies

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

[Latin illūmināns, illūminant-, present participle of illūmināre, to illuminate; see illuminate.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French

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Examples

  • I had a dream last night it was the illuminant who was stirring all this controversy over the health care bill ........

    Baucus could send proposal to 'Gang of Six' on Saturday 2009

  • Rockefellers as soon as the sun goes down, no matter what form of illuminant they use.

    Chapter 9: The Mathematics of a Dream 2010

  • If you have a surface that reflects only in the yellow wavelength, it will seem rather dark for it wastes most of the illuminant, and, by seeming dark, it will have low chroma so you'll end up with that sort of brown or greenish thingy that you can see in Gurney's low chroma yellow, in the post.

    Peak Saturation Value James Gurney 2010

  • What Don said is, I think, perfectly correct when talking about saturation, my point was just that Jim wasn't talking about saturation but about chroma, and not about emmited lights but about reflective surfaces under a given illuminant, so, in my view, Don was correct but beyond the point.

    Peak Saturation Value James Gurney 2010

  • With a flash of intuition, Bissell had the idea that it could be used as an illuminant.

    The Pennsylvania Start-up That Changed The World 2009

  • As the population grows, the demand for illuminant should grow at least as quickly.

    Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » By Hatchet, Axe, and Saw 2009

  • The group thought that the rock oil could be exploited in far larger quantities and processed into a fluid that could be burned as an illuminant in lamps.

    The Prize Daniel Yergin 2008

  • This new illuminant, they were sure, would be highly competitive with the “coal-oils” that were winning markets in the 1850s.

    The Prize Daniel Yergin 2008

  • Seeing the rock oil sample at Dartmouth, he conceived, in a flash, that it could be used not as a medicine but as an illuminant—and that it might well assuage the woes of his pocketbook.

    The Prize Daniel Yergin 2008

  • As the population grows, the demand for illuminant should grow at least as quickly.

    Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Someone Else Joins the “Peak Whale” Bandwaggon 2008

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