FOUR-O'CLOCK • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Four-o'clock

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/fɔr-əklˈɑk/ Listen

noun

Four-o'clock n.

(Bot.) A plant of the genus Mirabilis. There are about half a dozen species, natives of the warmer parts of America. The common four-o'clock is M. Jalapa. Its flowers are white, yellow, and red, and open toward sunset, or earlier in cloudy weather; hence the name. It is also called marvel of Peru, and afternoon lady.

(Zool.) The friar bird; so called from its cry, which resembles these words.

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Etymology of 'Four-o'clock'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Four-o'clock" Quotes from Famous Books

... five large cups of piping hot tea into herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew, stunned by the spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted. I had a mental vision of her interior decorations—all fumed-oak wainscotings and buff-leather hangings. Still, I doubt whether their four-o'clock-tea habit is any worse than our five-o'clock cocktail habit. It all depends, I suppose, on whether one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled. But we are getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by figures and the visual evidences, while their ...

— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... proud head. New bell-flowers of white and blue and indigo rise above the first, which served merely as ushers to the display, and whole acres ablaze with the orange of the poppy are fast turning with the indigo of the larkspur. Where the ground was lately aglow with the marigold and the four-o'clock the tall penstemon now reaches out a hundred arms full-hung with trumpets of purple and pink. Here the silene rears high its head with fringed corolla of scarlet; and there the wild gooseberry dazzles the eye with a perfect shower of tubular flowers of the same bright color. The ...

— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner