frangipani
Americannoun
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a tree or shrub of the genus Plumeria, especially Plumeria rubra, or the flowers from this tree.
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a perfume prepared from or imitating the scent of the Plumeria rubra flower.
noun
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any tropical American apocynaceous shrub of the genus Plumeria , esp P. rubra , cultivated for its waxy typically white or pink flowers, which have a sweet overpowering scent
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a perfume prepared from this plant or resembling the odour of its flowers
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an Australian evergreen tree, Hymenosporum flavum , with large fragrant yellow flowers: family Pittosporaceae
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of frangipani
First recorded in 1860–65; from French frangipane, after Marquis Muzio Frangipane or Frangipani a 16th-century Italian nobleman, the supposed inventor of the perfume
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The piece, a frangipani branch from his grandmother’s former garden in the neighborhood, will be planted in the museum’s garden, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries between the institution and the artist.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 4, 2025
Outside of the South Pacific, Fiji, an island nation of about a million people, is seen as a remote vacation idyll: frangipani flowers, golden beaches, cobalt seas.
From New York Times ● Dec. 20, 2022
Most of them, made supine by arrack cocktails and the prevailing air of lassitude, spent the day just slumbering and perspiring in the shade of flowering frangipani trees.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 8, 2016
They were surrounded by massive trees: cannonball and eucalyptus, bottlebrush and frangipani.
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 3, 2013
It was tiring to stop and start—whir, pause, kachung—but at last they came to a short street with frangipani trees on either side.
From "The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm" by Nancy Farmer
And in the town center, butterflies and birds flutter among the frangipanis.
From New York Times ● Mar. 22, 2012
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
