empetalled

empetalled

English

Alternative forms

• empetaled

Etymology

em- +‎ petal +‎ -ed

Adjective

empetalled (not comparable)

1. Covered with petals or petal-like objects.
   • 1872, Roden Noel, “A Sea Symphony” in The Red Flag and Other Poems, London: Strahan, p. 247,

     Innocent billows on the strand

     Leave a crystal over sand,

     Whose thin ebbing soon is crossed

     Of a crystal foam-enmossed,

     Variegating silvergrey

     Shell-empetalled sand in play:

   • 1948, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Raintree County, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 911,

     There did she secretly also tender to the young Athenian the empetalled garland of her love, and all the girls dancing flung wreaths of flowers over the heads of the statues lining the way […]

   • 1993, Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995, Part One, p. 50,

     Two young and naked men, the unchanging under faith and thought, yet not of the cycle, threshing, making the bed shake, dislodging with a thrust ecstatic foot a pot with flowers of the season from its stand, so that dancing soles became wet and empetalled.

2. (of a large number of similar objects) Resembling petals.
   • 1935, Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, Garden City, NY: Sun Dial, 1944, Book II, XIX, p. 202,

     In its beauty and design that vision of the soaring stands, the pattern of forty thousand empetalled faces, the velvet and unalterable geometry of the playing field, and the small lean figures of the players, set there, lonely, tense and waiting in their places, bright, desperate solitary atoms encircled by that huge wall of nameless faces, is incredible.