bombycinous

English

Etymology

From Latin bombycinus. See bombazine.

Adjective

bombycinous (comparative more bombycinous, superlative most bombycinous)

1. (obsolete) silken; made of silk
   • 1856, Samuel Klinefelter Hoshour, Letters to Squire Pedant, in the East, page 39:

     and ye wassailers elide your costrels and denegate yourselves of your vinolency; and ye clinquant jillflirts, abject your elamping and bombycinous habiliments, and your bijous, and cease from your irrational calamistrations;

   • 1885, The Australasian Printers' Keepsake, page 58:

     The softer sex now come into our sight, Robed in their garbs of fashion heteroclite; Superimposed by their headgear pennigerous, Gaily bedecked with stuffs bombycinous, In radiant pulchritude their ways pursuing, Each novel fashion hypercritically viewing.

   • 1894 March 3, “The Showman's Trouble”, in To-day, volume 2, page 128:

     This gorgeous agglomeration is centifidous in construction, and is exhibited in seven cyclostomous pavilions, each decked with bombycinous banners.

   • 2008, Thomas Stone, Frontier Experience, page 20:

     so that my corporeal organization was, in totality, subjected to redundant sudations, necessitating me to bring my bombycinous sudary into frequent requisition.

2. (obsolete) Of the colour of the silkworm; transparent with a yellow tint.
   • 1794–1796, Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], →OCLC:

     But what is peculiar to this disease, and distinguishes it from all others at the first glance of the eye, is the bombycinous colour of the skin, which, like that of full-grown silk worms, has a degree of transparency with a yellow tint

   • 1899, James Allan Ormar, William Wakefield: A Tale of the West, page 205:

     Dallering performed the titillation and four more bombycinous bottles displayed their poetic countenances upon the little round table, soon to be deprived of their supernal fragrance and beauty.

   • 1832, Samuel Jackson, The Principles of Medicine, page 496:

     This defective state of the red globules is characterized, in addition to the preceding symptoms, by the bombycinous aspect of the skin

   • 1856, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, page 347:

     I found him anæmic, surface bombycinous; conjunctivæ greenish; abdomen very prominent; spleen greatly enlarged;

   • 1899, James Allan Ormar, William Wakefield: A Tale of the West, page 205:

     Dallering performed the titillation and four more bombycinous bottles displayed their poetic countenances upon the little round table, soon to be deprived of their supernal fragrance and beauty.

3. (of paper) made of cotton in imitation of parchment.
   • 1895, Honoré de Balzac, The Edition Définitive of the Comédie Humaine, page 169:

     The necessity of finding a substitute for parchment , which was very costly, led to the inventio , in imitation of the bombycinous paper — such was the name given to the cotton paper of the East - of paper made of rags, some say at Basle in 1170, by Greek refugees; others say at Padua in 1301, by an Italian named Pax.

   • 2017, Diane H. Touliatos-Miles, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece:

     Type of paper: bombycinous