Find the word definition

Crossword clues for geranium

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
geranium
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
red
▪ There was a pot of red geraniums at the upstairs window.
▪ He was standing beneath a house with a painted balcony, bright red geraniums trailing from a terracotta pot on the ledge.
▪ Still smiling, still watching her, Guido reached unhurriedly behind him and detached a stem of bright red geranium.
▪ His curly dark hair gleamed even darker and glossier against the backdrop of red geraniums.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And then, finally, he would have snapped off their arms and legs and used their torsos for planting geraniums.
▪ Having learned from that sage, I planted scented geraniums along the narrow part of the driveway.
▪ Instead he writes about his geraniums.
▪ Iron gates open to a courtyard filled with pots of geraniums and ivy tucked next to rusted bistro tables and chairs.
▪ It was your average London park, complete with flasher, park-keeper, geraniums, a bum-splintering see-saw and baby swings.
▪ Well, she could, but it certainly wasn't the geranium.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Geranium

Geranium \Ge*ra"ni*um\ (j[-e]*r[=a]"n[i^]*[u^]m), n. [L., fr. Gr. gera`nion, from ge`ranos crane: cf. F. g['e]ranium. See Crane, n.]

  1. (Bot.) A genus of plants having a beaklike torus or receptacle, around which the seed capsules are arranged, and membranous projections, or stipules, at the joints. Most of the species have showy flowers and a pungent odor. Called sometimes crane's-bill.

  2. (Floriculture) A cultivated pelargonium.

    Note: Many plants referred to the genus Geranium by the earlier botanists are now separated from it under the name of Pelargonium, which includes all the commonly cultivated ``geraniums'', mostly natives of South Africa.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
geranium

1540s, from Latin geranium, from Greek geranion, the plant name, diminutive of geranos "crane" (cognate with Latin grus, English crane (n.)), from supposed resemblance of seed pods to cranes' bills; the native name was also cranebill. As a color name from 1842.

Wiktionary
geranium

a. Of a bright red color tinted with orange, like that of a scarlet geranium. n. 1 Any flowering plant of the genus ''Geranium'', the cranesbills, of family ''Geraniaceae''. 2 The common name for flowering plants of the genus ''Pelargonium''. 3 A bright red color tinted with orange, like that of a scarlet geranium.

WordNet
geranium

n. any of numerous plants of the family Geraniaceae

Wikipedia
Geranium

Geranium is a genus of 422 species of flowering annual, biennial, and perennial plants that are commonly known as the cranesbills. They are found throughout the temperate regions of the world and the mountains of the tropics, but mostly in the eastern part of the Mediterranean region. The long, palmately cleft leaves are broadly circular in form. The flowers have five petals and are coloured white, pink, purple or blue, often with distinctive veining. Geraniums will grow in any soil as long as it is not waterlogged. Propagation is by semiripe cuttings in summer, by seed, or by division in autumn or spring.

The genus name is derived from the Greek (géranos) or (geranós) ‘crane’. The English name ‘cranesbill’ derives from the appearance of the fruit capsule of some of the species. Species in the Geranium genus have a distinctive mechanism for seed dispersal. This consists of a beak-like column which springs open when ripe and casts the seeds some distance. The fruit capsule consists of five cells, each containing one seed, joined to a column produced from the centre of the old flower. The common name ‘cranesbill’ comes from the shape of the unsprung column, which in some species is long and looks like the bill of a crane. However, many species in this genus do not have a long beak-like column.

Geraniums are eaten by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including brown-tail and mouse moth.

The species Geranium viscosissimum (sticky geranium) is considered to be protocarnivorous.

Usage examples of "geranium".

Pots of stalky geraniums were set about, scarcely redeeming the place, which stank of the gamy stew, a cauldron of which sat abubble somewhere.

Red geraniums, white impatiens, and purple ageratum formed a patriotic border around the base of the tent platform.

I opened them and stared through the predawn light of my bedroom to the chair beside the window with the dead geranium on the sill, where he sat, tall and thin, almost anorectic looking.

And beside this can Jean would find, every day, something particular,--a blossom of the red geranium that bloomed in the farmhouse window, a piece of cake with plums in it, a bunch of trailing arbutus,--once it was a little bit of blue ribbon, tied in a certain square knot--so--perhaps you know that sign too?

The wide lawns about it smiled in the sunshine, bright with Victorian gardening: geraniums, calceolaria, lobelia.

There they sat while the scarlet geraniums and the yellow calceolarias blazed in the sunlight.

He loved fantastically shaped beds and geometrical patterns, and geraniums and lobelias and calceolarias were still dear to his antiquated soul.

Geranium argenteum, Gillenia trifoliata, Hesperis matronalis flore-pleno, Heuchera, H.

The house itself had a nice little garden, gay with geraniums and gladiolus, and bounded by a hedge of sunflowers which would have gladdened the heart of an aesthete.

He was given a set of gouache paints by an aunt when he was a boy, and painted a geranium, and then a fish-tank.

Beta, Brassica, Geranium, Apium, Solanum, and Mirabilis, named in our list.

Kitchens is the nurseryman who festoons the Sleeping Dragon with all those baskets of geraniums.

In the kitchen are bottles of 80-proof vodka to make the translucent rose geranium and brown sugar soap and the patchouli soap, and I steal a bottle of vodka and spend my personal burial money on cigarettes.

The thumbless man beckoned him through the chamber, furnished up as a sitting room, and out to a little wooden balcony, festooned with twining vines and rose geraniums in pots, overlooking the Temple Square.

A pair of redwood planters filled with geraniums and vinca vines sat as decoration flanking the door to the screened area.