Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Trefoil   Listen
noun
Trefoil  n.  
1.
(Bot.) Any plant of the genus Trifolium, which includes the white clover, red clover, etc.; less properly, applied also to the nonesuch, or black medic. See Clover, and Medic.
2.
(Arch.) An ornamental foliation consisting of three divisions, or foils.
3.
(Her.) A charge representing the clover leaf.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Trefoil" Quotes from Famous Books



... Tees A doctor. Mr. Treves A complaint Tic Doloreux A play Timon of Athens A state in the Union Tennessee A musical instrument Trombone A poet Tennyson A flower Trefoil A mineral Tin A lake Tanganyika A tree Tulip A country Turkey An author Trollope An artist ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... vinegar salt, the specific name of this plant, indicates that from it druggists obtain salt of lemons. Twenty pounds of leaves yield between two and three ounces of oxalic acid by crystallization. Names locally given the plant in the Old World are wood sour or sower, cuckoo's meat, sour trefoil, and shamrock—for this is St. Patrick's own flower, the true shamrock of the ancient Irish, some claim. Alleluia, another folk-name, refers to the joyousness of the Easter season, when the plant comes ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... in Henry III.'s Chapel in Westminster Abbey is another chair, similar, but lacking the trefoil Gothic arches, which are carved on the sides of the original chair; this was made for and used by Mary, daughter of James II. and wife of William III., on the occasion of their double coronation. Mr. Hungerford Pollen has given us a long description of ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... off the dark bogland in vanishing wreaths, soft and dim as the frail sloe-blossom, already stolen out over the writhen black branches up on the ridge. A jewel had been left in the heart of every groundling trefoil and clover-leaf, and the long rays that twinkled to them were still just tinged with rose. Here and there a flake of gold seemed to have lit upon the clump of sombre green furze-bushes, by which neighbours ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... known only three of these curious instruments are in existence; two in the museum of the Conservatoire, Paris, and one in Brussels; all three bear a trefoil as maker's mark; the smallest, in F, is reproduced in the Catalogue of the Musical Instruments exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890, by Capt. C. R. Day (London, 1891), pl. iv. F. It is also ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... crow flies for one of several tremendous hills that we saw in the distance. Under our feet was the purple heath with great patches of whortleberry, that tiny shrub that bears the little purply grey fruit. Then there was short elastic wiry grass and orange-yellow bird's-foot trefoil. Anon we came to great patches of furze of a dwarf kind with small prickles, and of an elegant growth, the purple and yellow making the place look like some vast ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... three-cut faith of the North and South, the leaf of the oxalis, and strawberry, and clover, fostering the same in their simple manner. I suppose it to be the most savage and natural of notions about Deity; a prismatic idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled—shadowy Markgraves the like—church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... ranged along the walls of the church, leaning against the string-course. The remaining space had been levelled, except a broad walk which led up to the church, and past it to the opposite gate; and it had been all sown with various kinds of trefoil, which had shot up and flowered ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Lancastrian reigns the Collar of SS. had no pendant, though, afterwards, it had a pendant called "the king's beast." On the effigy of Queen Joan the collar certainly has no pendant, except the jewelled ring of a trefoil form. But on the ceiling and canopy of the tomb of Henry IV., his arms, and those of his queen (Joan of Navarre), are surrounded with Collars of SS., the king's terminating in an eagle volant ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various

... large south porch, almost facing the entrance to St. Mary Hall. The date of this is not later than 1300. Each jamb of the outside arch has four external and two internal attached shafts; the pointed arch is deeply moulded, while the arch rising from the fourth shaft is of round-headed trefoil form. The ceiling is vaulted with diagonal and intermediate ribs, and has the appearance of having been added ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse

... is very amusing. He confesses his part heresies, which are mere opinions, while his orthodoxy is full of heretical errors. His Trinity is a mere trefoil, a 31, which is no mystery at all, but a common object of the senses. The mystery is, that one is three, that is, each being the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... the more generally accredited supposition, that Herbert built the presbytery with its encircling procession path and the original trefoil of Norman chapel radiating therefrom;—the choir and transepts with the two chapels projecting eastwards and the first two bays of the nave. Harrod advances a theory that he completely finished the whole of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... chestnut horses no bigger than grasshoppers and mice, and a very little well as big as my mug to draw up my water from, and a little green paddock the size of my pocket-handkerchief, and another of yellow corn, and another of crimson trefoil. And I would have a blue farm-wagon no larger than Hobb's shoe, and a haystack half as big as a seed-cake, and a duckpond that I could cover with my platter. And I'd live there and play with it all day long, if only I knew where ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... and fret-work, and alights finally and fatally on a red chimney-top. He might as well have built a Gothic aisle at an entrance to a coal wharf. We have no scruple in saying that the man who could desecrate the Gothic trefoil into an ornament for a chimney has not the slightest feeling, and never will have any, of its beauty or its use; he was never born to be an architect, and never ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... them outside it, simply because they do not increase fast enough to require to spread out in search of more food. Thus I should explain a case which I heard of lately of Anthocera trifolii, abundant for years in one corner of a certain field, and only there; while there was just as much trefoil all round for its larvae as there was in the selected spot. I can, I say, only give hints: but they will suffice, I hope, to show the path of thought into which I want young naturalists to ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... by the guelder-rose or wayfaring tree, the raspberry, strawberry, and cherry, the wild garlic of starlike flowers, the woodruff, fragrant as new-mown hay; the yellow pimpernel on the hedge side. I see in the fields and meadows the bird's foot trefoil, the oxeye daisy, the lady smocks, sweet hemlock, butterbur, the stitchwort, and the orchis, the "long purpled" of Shakespeare. By the margin of the pond the yellow iris hangs out its golden banners over which the dragon fly skims. The hedgerows are gay with the full-blown dog-roses, the bells ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... the place of our last encampment. In the lower part of the gully, we came upon some fine Nymphaea ponds and springs surrounded by ferns. The whole valley, though narrow, was beautifully grassed. Trichodesma, Grewia, Crinum, and the trefoil of the Suttor, grew on the flats; the apple-gum, rusty-gum, the mountain Acacia and Fusanus, the last in blossom, grew ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... instituted an Order. His Highness had his St. Hubertus to give, and she desired to have an Order of her own to distribute. Everybody laughed covertly, but the insignia of the Order of the White Trefoil were much coveted nevertheless, and the white riband and beautifully designed three-leaved badge of the Graevenitz's Order were proudly worn by the highest dignitaries, and at Ludwigsburg the courtiers who were fortunate enough to possess the decoration were ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... no hedge-rows. Property here is divided only by narrow ditches, serving at the same time for drains, or by ridges of unploughed ground, as in the common fields of England, which answer the purpose of foot-paths. These ridges were generally well covered with that family of running trefoil, known by the name of Melilotos, intermixed with a species of Poa or meadow grass, Avena or wild oats, and Briza or quaking grass. In the ditches, beside the common reed the Arundo phragmites, were growing two species of Cyperus, and a Scirpus ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... elevation, and 25 square miles over 2,000. Wexford is lower and more fertile. The coasts of both counties are in great measure flat and sandy, and are the home of many rare plants. A number of species of light soils and of gravelly shores have here their Irish headquarters, such as the Round-headed Trefoil (Trifolium glomeratum) the Sea-Stock (Matthiola sinuata), the rare Sea-Cudweed (Diotis candidissima), and the Wild Asparagus (A. officinalis). The Murrough, a great gravel beach backed by salt marshes which extends from Greystones to Wicklow, and the marshes ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... seventeen houses upon it. We walked up a brave old avenue to the church, with ships sailing on our left hand the whole way. Before the altar lies a lank brass knight, hight William Fienis, chevalier, who obiit c.c.c.c.v. that is in 1405. By the altar is a beautiful tomb, all in our trefoil taste, varied into a thousand little canopies and patterns, and two knights reposing on their backs. These were Thomas, Lord Dacre, and his only son Gregory, who died sans issue. An old grayheaded beadsman of the family talked to us of a blot in the scutcheon; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... departed friends, David ap Gwillym beautifully alludes in one of his odes. "O whilst thy season of flowers, and thy tender sprays thick of leaves remain, I will pluck the roses from the brakes, the flowerets of the meads, and gems of the wood; the vivid trefoil, beauties of the ground, and the gaily-smiling bloom of the verdant herbs, to be offered to the memory of a chief of fairest fame. Humbly will I lay them on the grave of Iver." On a grave in the church-yard at Hay, or the Hay, as it is commonly spoken, ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield

... is the very beautiful chantry (47) to Bishop Giles de Bridport. On either side the gabled roof is carried by two open elaborately moulded arches with quatrefoil heads, inclosing two trefoil arches supported by clustered detached shafts. Each arch has a triangular hood moulding, crocketed with carved finials. The spandrils are ornamented with very interesting carvings. These have been interpreted to mean: ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White

... me. Sweeter unpossess'd, have I said of her my sweetest? Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes, Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths. . . . Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades; Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-gray leaf; Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow; Blue-neck'd the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf. Green-yellow, bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle; Sharp ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... clover and all its varieties, including the trefoil and the shamrock, are barometers. When rain is coming, the leaves shut together like the shells of an oyster and do not open again until fine weather is assured. For a day or two before rain comes their stems swell to an appreciable ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... the slightest attention to the uproar made by his companions, and was not in the least out of countenance. With measured steps he went up to the stove, flung down his load, straightened himself, took out of his tail-pocket a snuff- box, and with round eyes began helping himself to a pinch of dry trefoil mixed with ashes. At the entrance of this noisy party the fat man had at first knitted his brows and risen from his seat, but, seeing what it was, he smiled, and only told them not to shout. 'There's a sportsman,' said he, 'asleep in the next room.' 'What sort of sportsman?' two ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... years I trembled in the grass, The delicate trefoil that muffled warm A slope on Ida; for a hundred years Moved in the purple gyre of those dark flowers The Grecian women strew upon the dead. Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt; Then in the veins and sinews of a pine On a lone isle, where, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... Vaast-la-Hogue. This tiny church, for it measures only 34 feet by 24, and is 11 feet high, is by some supposed to have been a temple of the Gauls converted into a Christian place of worship; the nave and tower having been added to the old temple, which consists of a triple apse forming a regular trefoil, each of which has a domed top. We drove on to Nacqueville, the chateau of Comte Hippolyte de Tocqueville. The park is prettily laid out, a stream of water runs in front of the house, and a row of blue hydrangeas blazed ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... battle of Gettysburg called her again into the field. Arriving several days after the battle, she went directly to the Second Corps Hospital, and labored there until it was broken up. For her services in this hospital she received from the officers and men a gold medal—a trefoil, beautifully engraved, and with an appropriate inscription. She went next to Camp Letterman General Hospital, where she remained for some weeks, her stay at Gettysburg being in all about two months. Her health was impaired by her excessive labors at Gettysburg and previously ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... This trefoil badge of the scouts is now used, with slight local variations, in almost every civilized country as the mark of brotherhood, ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... and with Richard III. the white boar. When Henry VII. resumed the Lancastrian Collar of Esses, he added to it the portcullis of Beaufort. In the former Lancastrian regions it had no pendant, except a plain or jewelled ring, usually of the trefoil form. All the pendant badges which I have enumerated belong to secular heraldry, as do the roses and suns which form the Yorkist collar. The letter S is an emblem of a somewhat different kind; and, as it proves, more difficult ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various

... near Lucca; entered the Pisan territory by the Val di Serchio; and there, cutting down a great pine tree, struck their florins on the stump of it, putting, for memory, under the feet of the St. John, a trefoil "in guise of a little tree." And note here the difference between artistic and mechanical coinage. The Florentines, using pure gold, and thin, can strike their coin anywhere, with only a wooden anvil, and their engraver is ready on the instant to make such change in the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin



Words linked to "Trefoil" :   trefoil arch, bean trefoil, prairie trefoil, sickle alfalfa, herbaceous plant, medic, Italian clover, architectural ornament, herb, Medicago falcata, Medicago arborea, Medicago, dutch clover, red clover, Medicago sativa, Trifolium reflexum, medick, shamrock, genus Medicago, Trifolium stoloniferum, Medicago lupulina, stinking bean trefoil, yellow trefoil, Trifolium alpinum, Medicago echinus, white clover, nonesuch clover, moon trefoil, crimson clover, clover, Trifolium repens, purple clover, genus Trifolium, prairie bird's-foot trefoil, buffalo clover, Trifolium incarnatum, sickle medick, bird's foot trefoil, alpine clover, sickle lucerne, lucerne



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com