Definitions

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

  • adjective Of a fleshy pink color.
  • adjective Blood-red.
  • transitive verb To make incarnadine, especially to redden.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To dye red or carnation; tinge with the color of flesh.
  • noun A color ranging from flesh-color to blood-red.
  • Of a carnation-color; pale-red.

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

  • transitive verb To dye red or crimson.
  • adjective obsolete Flesh-colored; of a carnation or pale red color.

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

  • adjective Of the blood red colour of raw flesh.
  • adjective Of a general red colour
  • noun The blood red colour of raw flesh.
  • noun Red in general
  • verb To cause to be the blood-red colour of raw flesh.
  • verb To cause to be red or crimson.

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

  • verb make flesh-colored

Etymologies

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

[French incarnadin, from Italian incarnadino, variant of incarnatino, diminutive of incarnato : in-, in (from Latin; see in–) + carne, flesh (from Latin carō, carn-; see incarnate).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French incarnadine, Italian incarnadino, a variant of incarnadito ("flesh color"), from incarnato ("incarnate"), from Latin incarnari ("be made flesh"), from in + cano ("flesh").

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Examples

Comments

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  • Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

    Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

    The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

    Making the green one red.

    December 2, 2006

  • Virginia Woolf talks about "incarnadine" in her eulology to words: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/woolfv1.shtml

    December 9, 2007

  • This definition is a little off. Per the first commenter, the word is mostly used to describe a bloodred color due to the Shakespeare quote even though prior to Shakespeare it was known to be a softer pink.

    http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-inc2.htm

    February 1, 2009

  • Myth, if you look around, you'll see that many of those definitions, pulled from WordNet, are a little off. That's why we affectionately (and sometimes not so affectionately) call it WeirdNet.

    February 2, 2009

  • He kept furtively directing at me the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see if I was not about to faint.

    --Vladimir Nabokov, 1974, Look at the Harlequins!

    June 7, 2009

  • blood-red in color

    July 31, 2009