The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gingerbread \Gin"ger*bread`\, n.
A kind of plain sweet cake seasoned with ginger, and
sometimes made in fanciful shapes. ``Gingerbread that was
full fine.''
--Chaucer.
Gingerbread tree (Bot.), the doom palm; -- so called from the resemblance of its fruit to gingerbread. See Doom Palm.
Gingerbread work, ornamentation, in architecture or decoration, of a fantastic, trivial, or tawdry character.
Usage examples of "gingerbread work".
In principle Jack disliked much in the way of shining ornament, but he felt that this was a special case, and for once in his life he laid out a considerable sum on gold-leaf for the gingerbread work of her stern and he called in the best inn-sign painter in Valletta to attend to her figurehead, an anonymous lady with a splendid bosom.
She was nothing much to look at, just an ordinary thirty-eight-gun eighteen-pounder frigate of about a thousand tons that had been shabbily treated by the dockyard in the article of paint and that had been on the North American station for close on two years in all weathers, most of them unpleasant, with ice forming thick on the yards, rigging, and deck, playing Old Harry with what very little she possessed in the way of ornament or gingerbread work or graces.
Although a boat had pulled round her every morning when it was practicable, with the captain of the head and his mates swabbing all that could be swabbed, resin, tar, pitch and oily sea-borne filth had dimmed the frigate's brilliant Nelson chequer, and her gingerbread work was not at all what a loving first lieutenant's eye could have wished.