Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A tropical American tree (Hippomane mancinella) having poisonous fruit and a milky sap that causes skin blisters on contact.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A tropical American tree, Hippomane mancinella, having apple-like, poisonous fruit, and a sap that causes blisters on contact with the skin
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A euphorbiaceous tree (Hippomane Mancinella) of tropical America, having a poisonous and blistering milky juice, and poisonous acrid fruit somewhat resembling an apple.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A tree, Hippomane Mancinella, of moderate size, found in the West Indies, Central America, and Florida.
Etymologies
Examples
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Next to me on the rocks was my bottle of water, still almost full, my pile of manchineel apples, my purse, and my one shoe.
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Because that is a manchineel tree, she said, looking me in the eye.
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He suffered from poison of another kind; for drinking at a spring in which some boughs of the manchineel had been thrown, the effects were so severe as, in the opinion of some of his friends, to inflict a lasting injury upon his constitution.
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In one of my excursions at this place I found a large manchineel tree.
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Still weak from his illness after the manchineel poisoning, and exhausted as he was after a sleepless night in the grip of a hurricane, yet Stuart's first thought on leaving the hurricane wing was to get a news story to his paper.
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"You went to sleep under the shade of some poison-trees, manchineel trees, we call them here," the doctor explained.
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Lord Nelson, when a young man here in Barbados, was made very ill by drinking from a pool into which some branches of the manchineel had been thrown.
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The salt ponds, sunken far below the level of the sea, from lack of rain, glittered white, but they were set with aloes and manchineel, and there were low and muddy flats to be avoided.
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Selika thereupon magnanimously despatches them home in Vasco's ship, and poisons herself with the fragrance of the deadly manchineel tree.
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There is no trace of a town having ever existed here, for the poisonous manchineel tree has spread itself over the ruins, and it is difficult to realise that twenty years ago the pride of the French West Indies stood here.
cryptofascistbbq commented on the word manchineel
–noun
a tropical American tree or shrub, Hippomane mancinella, of the spurge family, having a milky, highly caustic, poisonous sap.
May 20, 2009