ambrosia
[am-broh-zhuh]
- Classical Mythology. the food of the gods.Compare nectar(def 3).
- something especially delicious to taste or smell.
- a fruit dessert made of oranges and shredded coconut and sometimes pineapple.
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Origin of ambrosia
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for ambrosia
Contemporary Examples
If Tilda Swinton ate anything for five years straight, it would probably be ambrosia.
Start with the beets and horseradish crème fraiche, then move on to the Ambrosia burger, ending strong with the banana cream pie.
Like ambrosia from the gods, I suddenly realized that Nicotine is the most amazing legal substance of the twentieth century.
Historical Examples
Ambrosia is lovely to my heart, for it was my mother's favorite.
Home Life in Colonial DaysAlice Morse Earle
I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further.
Confessions of an English Opium-EaterThomas De Quincey
He goes on to state that the month is so called from the Lenaea, or from the Ambrosia.
“I suppose this is what they call nectar and ambrosia,” said Magnus.
BoycottedTalbot Baines Reed
He felt as Romulus might have felt when first invited to taste the ambrosia of the gods.
Kenelm Chillingly, CompleteEdward Bulwer-Lytton
ambrosia
- classical myth the food of the gods, said to bestow immortalityCompare nectar (def. 2)
- anything particularly delightful to taste or smell
- another name for beebread
- any of various herbaceous plants constituting the genus Ambrosia, mostly native to America but widely naturalized: family Asteraceae (composites). The genus includes the ragweeds
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Word Origin
C16: via Latin from Greek: immortality, from ambrotos, from a- 1 + brotos mortal
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Word Origin and History for ambrosia
n.
1550s, "favored food or drink of the gods," from Latin ambrosia, from Greek ambrosia "food of the gods," fem. of ambrosios, probably literally "of the immortals," from a- "not" (see a- (3)) + mbrotos, related to mortos "mortal," from PIE *mer- "to die" (see mortal (adj.)). Applied to certain herbs by Pliny and Dioscorides; used of various foods for mortals since 1680s (originally of fruit drinks); used figuratively for "anything delightful" by 1731.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
ambrosia
[(am-broh-zhuh)]
The food of the gods in classical mythology. Those who ate it became immortal.
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Note
Particularly delicious food is sometimes called “ambrosia.”
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.