Word of the Day

Monday, January 22, 2001

florid

\FLOR-id\ , adjective;

Flushed with red; of a lively reddish color.

Excessively ornate; flowery; as, "a florid style; florid eloquence."

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Quotes:

The Reverend Mr Kidney is a short round bowlegged man with black muttonchop whiskers and a florid face, like a pomegranate, into which he has poured a great quantity of brandy and lesser amounts of whisky and claret.

-- Tom Gilling, The Sooterkin

Even though avant-garde attacks on the Victorian bourgeoisie were florid in rhetoric, deficient in evidence, and malicious in intent, it does not follow that they had no objective grounds.

-- Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience

Many were florid and overweight, too bulkily dressed and perspiring freely.

-- Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

The journalist Frank Crane would later glorify the . . . factory in florid prose as "a sermon in steel and glass," a "Temple of Work" in which machinery rather than an organ provided the music and the choir "was the glad laughter of happy workers."

-- RolandMarchand, Creating the Corporate Soul

Origin:

Florid comes from Latin floridus, "flowery," from flos, flor-, "flower."