WOAD • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Woad

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noun

Woad n. (Written also wad, and wade)

(Bot.) An herbaceous cruciferous plant (Isatis tinctoria) of the family Cruciferae (syn. Brassicaceae). It was formerly cultivated for the blue coloring matter derived from its leaves. See isatin.

A blue dyestuff, or coloring matter, consisting of the powdered and fermented leaves of the Isatis tinctoria. It is now superseded by indigo, but is somewhat used with indigo as a ferment in dyeing. "Their bodies... painted with woad in sundry figures."

Wild woad (Bot.), the weld (Reseda luteola). See Weld.

Woad mill, a mill grinding and preparing woad.

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Etymology of 'Woad'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Woad" Quotes from Famous Books

... rate, as the modern barrister. And in reaching the high-minded conditions under which he worked, he had only the light of his own genius to guide him. When compare the clothing of the savage race with our own, their beads and woad and straw and fibres with our own petticoats and pantaloons, we acknowledge the progress of civilization and the growth of machinery. It is not a wonderful thing to us that an African prince should not be as perfectly ...

— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... under the name of Indicum, whence its present appellation. In modern Europe, it first came into extensive use in Italy; but about the middle of the sixteenth century, the Dutch began to import and employ it in considerable quantity. Present in the woad plant, which is a native of Great Britain, indigo is chiefly derived from a genus of leguminous plants called Indigofera, found in India, Africa, and America. The colouring matter of these is wholly in the cellular ...

— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... sacrificial tones of curious shells wrought from conch let us worship our blazing parent planet! We stripe our bodies with ochre and woad, lamenting the decline of our god under the rim of the horizon. O! sweet lost days when we danced in the sun and drank his sudden rays. O! dread hour of the Shadow, the Shadow whose silent wings drape the world in gray, the Shadow that sleeps. Our souls slink behind our shields; our women and ...

— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... people dayly to us, halfe dead, for they have but the skin & boans. How shall we have strength to make a hole in the snow to lay us downe, seeing we have it not to hale our racketts after us, nor to cutt a litle woad to make a fire to keepe us from the rigour of the cold, which is extreame in those Countreyes in its season. Oh! if the musick that we heare could give us recreation, we wanted not any lamentable musick nor sad spectacle. In the morning the husband looks uppon his wife, the ...

— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson

Words linked to "Woad" : herbaceous plant, dyer's woad, dye, Isatis, genus Isatis, dyestuff