Snowdrop

Definitions

1. A Royal Air Force police officer.
2. Any of the 20 species of the genus Galanthus of the Amaryllidaceae, bulbous flowering plants, bearing a solitary, pendulous, white, bell-shaped flower that appears, depending on species, between autumn and late winter or early spring, all native to temperate Eurasia.
3. Alternative letter-case form of Snowdrop (“a Royal Air Force police officer”).
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Equivalents

Examples

“A flower that first in this sweet garden smiled, / To virgins sacred, and the Snow-drop styled.”

“Tufts of primroses grew under the still leafless trees; the hepatica had succeeded the snowdrop.”

“White Ladies did not mean⟳ snowdrops, by their pretty old English name⟳, ghosts in white cere-clothes, or belles in white tarlatan.”

“[I]t was considered unlucky to decorate⟳ a room with cut⟳ snowdrops. The name⟳ death's flower relates to an old belief that a solitary snowdrop indicates impending death, with suggestions that it was inauspicious to bring⟳ snowdrops indoors.”

“For quotations using this term, see⟳ Citations:Snowdrop.”

CEFR level