Word of the Day Archive
Monday January 22, 2001

florid \FLOR-id\, adjective:
1. Flushed with red; of a lively reddish color.
2. Excessively ornate; flowery; as, "a florid style; florid eloquence."

The Reverend Mr Kidney is a short round bowlegged man with black muttonchop whiskers and a florid face, like a pomegranate, into which he has poured a great quantity of brandy and lesser amounts of whisky and claret.
-- Tom Gilling, The Sooterkin

Even though avant-garde attacks on the Victorian bourgeoisie were florid in rhetoric, deficient in evidence, and malicious in intent, it does not follow that they had no objective grounds.
-- Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience

Many were florid and overweight, too bulkily dressed and perspiring freely.
-- Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

The journalist Frank Crane would later glorify the . . . factory in florid prose as "a sermon in steel and glass," a "Temple of Work" in which machinery rather than an organ provided the music and the choir "was the glad laughter of happy workers."
-- RolandMarchand, Creating the Corporate Soul

Florid comes from Latin floridus, "flowery," from flos, flor-, "flower."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for florid

 

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