Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Latin plural of colon.
  • noun A tree of the family Sterculiaceæ, Bichea acuminata (Cola acuminata of Schott and Endlicher), which yields the cola-nut. See cola-nut.
  • noun Any tree of the genus Bichea, which includes about 40 species of tropical African sterculiaceous trees having entire or lobed leaves and axillary clusters of unisexual or polygamous flowers.

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

  • noun L. pl. of colon.
  • noun A genus of sterculiaceous trees, natives of tropical Africa, esp. Guinea, but now naturalized in tropical America, esp. in the West Indies and Brazil.
  • noun Same as cola nut, below.
  • noun a dark-colored carbonated soft drink flavored with extract of the cola nut, and often colored with caramel; also, any soft drink similar in color and flavor to a cola-flavored drink. The name was predominantly derived from the popular soft drink Coca-Cola.

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

  • noun obsolete Plural form of colon.
  • noun The kola plant, genus Cola, famous for its nut, or one of these nuts.
  • noun A beverage or a drink made with kola nut flavoring, caramel and carbonated water.

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

  • noun carbonated drink flavored with extract from kola nuts (`dope' is a southernism in the United States)
  • noun large genus of African trees bearing kola nuts

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

See colon

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From a Niger-Congo language, compare Temne kola, Mandinka kola. The beverage "Coca-Cola" was what made the term widely known.

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Examples

Comments

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  • I found cola in the serendipity section while looking up the word meesoic. Mesoic pertains to an interval between two cola but when I looked up cola there was no definition that referred to a literary use.

    June 10, 2009

  • Reference my recent note on cola mesodic is the word I was orginally looking at.

    June 10, 2009