Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various shrubs or herbs of the genus Bouvardia of Mexico and Central America, cultivated for their showy, tubular, variously colored flowers grouped in terminal clusters.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A genus of plants, natural order Rubiaceæ, natives of Mexico and Central America.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin Bouvardia, genus name, after Charles Bouvard, (1572–1658), French physician.]

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Examples

  • I did not answer a word, but sat with a wreath of white bouvardia and small adiantum round my head, which I had plaited anyhow.

    Erema Richard Doddridge 2004

  • She found instead that the Vegas wedding chapels, "with their wishing wells and stained-glass paper windows and their artificial bouvardia," were in fact selling "'niceness,' the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it."

    The Wedding Merchants 2001

  • She found instead that the Vegas wedding chapels, "with their wishing wells and stained-glass paper windows and their artificial bouvardia," were in fact selling "'niceness,' the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it."

    The Wedding Merchants 2001

  • Nature is very liberal in all things; and we have coarse and disagreeable flower odors, supplied by peonies, marigolds, the gay bouvardia, and a still more odious greenhouse flower -- a yellowish, toadlike thing, which those who have once known will never forget, and for which perhaps they can supply a name.

    The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864 Devoted To Literature And National Policy Various

  • I did not answer a word, but sat with a wreath of white bouvardia and small adiantum round my head, which I had plaited anyhow.

    Erema — My Father's Sin 1862

  • Rodney Sherrett got up from the breakfast table, where he had eaten half an hour later than the rest of the family, threw aside the newspaper that had served to accompany his meal as it had previously done his father's, and walked out through the conservatory upon the slope of lawn scattered over with bright little flower-beds, among which his sister, with a large shade hat on, and a pair of garden scissors and a basket in her hands, was moving about, cutting carnations and tea-roses and bouvardia and geranium leaves and bits of vines, for her baskets and shells and vases.

    The Other Girls 1865

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