orchidaceous

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The Word of the Day for April 5 is:

orchidaceous   \or-kuh-DAY-shus\   adjective 
     1 : of, relating to, or resembling the orchids 
    *2 : showy, ostentatious 

Example sentence: 
     "There's no clutter; no outlandish designer flatware or china; no 
orchidaceous, wordy wine lists. . . ." (James Villas, _Town and Country 
Monthly_, March 1998) 

Did you know? 
     In its sense first used by botanists in the 1830s, "orchidaceous" means 
"belonging to the family Orchidaceae" -- that is, to the orchid family, a very 
large family of flowering plants. While the basic shape of an orchid is simple 
-- three petals with, on many orchids, an enlarged middle petal -- there is no 
such thing as a typical orchid. Orchids range in size from very tiny flowers on 
inch-high plants to flowers a foot across, and they grow in habitats from 
tropical rain forests to semideserts. But when people use "orchidaceous" as a 
flashy term in phrases like "orchidaceous writing," "orchidaceous colors," and 
"orchidaceous ladies," it's the colorful, showy tropical species they have in 
mind --- species which, as Jacob Breynius, a 17th-century German botanist, put 
it, "surely excite our greatest admiration." 

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.





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