Crossword clues for costard
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Costard \Cos"tard\ (k?s"t?rd), n. [Prob. fr. OF. coste rib, side, F. c[^o]te, and meaning orig., a ribbed apple, from the ribs or angles on its sides. See Coast.]
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An apple, large and round like the head.
Some [apples] consist more of air than water . . .; others more of water than wind, as your costards and pomewaters.
--Muffett. -
The head; -- used contemptuously.
Try whether your costard or my bat be the harder.
--Shak.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
late 13c., coster, perhaps from Anglo-French or Old French coste "rib" (from Latin costa "a rib;" see coast (n.)). A kind of large apple with prominent "ribs," i.e. one having a shape more like a green pepper than a plain, round apple. Also applied derisively to "the head." Common 14c.-17c. but limited to fruit-growers afterward.
Wiktionary
n. (context British English) a large cooking apple
Wikipedia
Costard is a comic figure in the play Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare. A country bumpkin, he is arrested in the first scene for flouting the king's proclamation that all men of the court avoid the company of women for three years. While in custody, the men of the court use him to further their own romantic endeavors. By sending love notes to the wrong women and blurting out secrets (including that of an unplanned pregnancy), Costard makes fools of the royal court. Along with Moth the page and Jaquenetta, a country wench, Costard pokes fun at the upper-class. While mocking a pedantic schoolmaster, Costard uses the word honorificabilitudinitatibus, the longest word by far from any of Shakespeare's works.
Costard makes many clever puns, and is used as a tool by Shakespeare to explain new words such as remuneration. He is sometimes considered one of the smartest characters in the play due to his wit and wordplay.
Costard's name is an archaic term for apple, or metaphorically a man's head. Shakespeare uses the word in this sense in Richard III.
Usage examples of "costard".
Klaskat awedly asked, just before Costard smote the ocean with a burst of foam and sank like a stone, his wobbly pallor dwindling to a glimmer in the blue-black deeps, and vanishing.
For Costard, the contrived perplexities and feigned bafflements by which polished folk set conversation going were plain and simple entreaties for instruction.
To stand thus chagrined and discomfitted, on the very point of being bucketed down a dark shaft to the mountain's bowel—to stand thus on the brink of our peril and still be denied by Costard the information we sought, was too infuriating.
The throng was kept back, and order preserved, by porters of the royal household, who made good use of their staves upon the costards of such as pressed forward too rudely, by tall yeomen of the guard, having the king's cognizance worked in gold on their breasts, and halberds in their hands, and by mounted pursuivants of arms, who rode constantly from point to point.
One of the ever-vigilant Nurses who feed and tend the larvae had rushed to devour him as a brood parasite, and Costard had burst his flask of brood scent (a precautionary measure every tapper goes equipped for) at the last possible instant.
We turned the wagons to run along the clifftop, and geed up, giving Costard a diagonal pull slantwise up the last bit of slope to the cliff.
Bunt had evidently prepared some grave remonstration, but Costard, forestalling him, bleated out, "