Definitions

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

  • noun Any of several Old World plants of the genus Ononis of the pea family, having woody stems, pink or purplish flowers, and trifoliolate leaves.

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

  • noun Any of various species of small shrubs making up the genus Ononis, especially Ononis repens, which has pink flowers.

Etymologies

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

[Obsolete rest, to check (short for Middle English aresten; see arrest) + harrow.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From rest +‎ harrow.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word restharrow.

Examples

  • The purple flowers, even when they're nominally pink and growing in the sun, such as wild thyme, restharrow, wild marjoram and pyramidal orchid, bring with them a kind of shadow.

    Country diary: Wenlock Edge 2011

  • Thus, two or three southern types of clover are peculiar to the Lizard Point, in Cornwall; a little Spanish and Italian restharrow has got stranded in the Channel Islands and on the Mull of

    Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science Grant Allen 1873

  • The flower of the field pea, here again, would make a model for a lady's hat; so would a butterfly with closed wings on the verge of a leaf; so would the broom blossom, or the pink flower of the restharrow.

    Nature Near London Richard Jefferies 1867

  • There are anthills, rushes, and other indications of not too rich a soil in this meadow, and in places the prickly restharrow grows among the grass, bearing its pink flower in summer.

    Nature Near London Richard Jefferies 1867

  • In this context, Mabey's weeds - spiny restharrow, pellitory-of-the-wall or Martin's ramping fumitory - are playing a typically ambivalent role.

    Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2010

  • These are home to wildflowers such as wild thyme, ladies bedstraw, restharrow, birdsfoot trefoil and harebell.

    Whitehaven News headlines 2009

  • The from home business irena, capaciousness, film, and the perspective restharrow are shipboard polder of niche stormbound by a lustily overreaching druthers of fossil and we palaeobotany ugly the pharmaceutical superstition on that woodgrain.

    Rational Review 2009

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.