Definitions

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

  • noun A rich sweet confection made with sugar and often flavored or combined with fruits or nuts.
  • noun A piece of such a confection.
  • noun Slang An illicit drug, especially one, such as cocaine, that has a sugary appearance or a drug in pill form, such as MDMA.
  • transitive verb To cook, preserve, saturate, or coat with sugar or syrup.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An East Indian unit of weight, usually 20 maunds, but sometimes 21 or 22, and varying in different localities and for every commodity.
  • noun A solid preparation or confection of sugar or molasses, or both, boiled, inspissated, and worked by pulling to a crystalline consistence, either alone or combined with flavoring and coloring substances; hence, any confection having sugar as its basis, however prepared. Candy made of or with molasses is specifically called molasses candy and taffy.
  • Sugared; sweet.
  • To form into congelations or crystals; congeal in a crystalline form or inspissated concretion: as, to candy sugar, honey, etc.
  • To preserve or incrust with sugar, as fruits, by immersing them in it while boiling and removing them separately or in mass.
  • To cover or incrust with concretions or crystals, as of ice.
  • To take the form of, or become incrusted by, candied sugar: as, pre-serves candy with long keeping.
  • To become crystallized or congealed.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To have sugar crystals form in or on.
  • intransitive verb To be formed into candy; to solidify in a candylike form or mass.
  • transitive verb To conserve or boil in sugar.
  • transitive verb To make sugar crystals of or in; to form into a mass resembling candy.
  • transitive verb To incrust with sugar or with candy, or with that which resembles sugar or candy.
  • noun Any sweet, more or less solid article of confectionery, especially those prepared in small bite-sized pieces or small bars, having a wide variety of shapes, consistencies, and flavors, and manufactured in a variety of ways. It is often flavored or colored, or covered with chocolate, and sometimes contains fruit, nuts, etc.; it is often made by boiling sugar or molasses to the desired consistency, and than crystallizing, molding, or working in the required shape. Other types may consist primarily of chocolate or a sweetened gelatin. The term may be applied to a single piece of such confection or to the substance of which it is composed.
  • noun slang Cocaine.
  • noun A weight, at Madras 500 pounds, at Bombay 560 pounds.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete a unit of mass used in southern India, equal to twenty maunds, roughly equal to 500 pounds avoirdupois but varying locally.
  • noun uncountable Edible, sweet-tasting confectionery containing sugar, or sometimes artificial sweeteners, and often flavored with fruit, chocolate, nuts, herbs and spices, or artificial flavors.
  • noun countable A piece of candy.
  • verb cooking To cook in, or coat with, sugar syrup.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a rich sweet made of flavored sugar and often combined with fruit or nuts
  • verb coat with something sweet, such as a hard sugar glaze

Etymologies

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

[Middle English candi, crystallized cane sugar, short for sugre-candi, translation of Old French sucre candi and Old Italian zucchero candi, both from Arabic sukkar qandī : sukkar, sugar + qandī, candied (from qand, cane sugar, probably from Dravidian kaṇṭu, lump).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French sucre candi, from Arabic قندي (qandi, "candied"), from Persian قند (qand, "hard candy made by boiling cane sugar")

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  • from Arabic qandi "candied," derived from Persian qand, meaning "sugar."[

    August 30, 2009