Post by t-bob on May 8, 2019 10:29:36 GMT -5
noun
1. the flower of a plant, especially of one producing an edible fruit.
verb
1. to flourish; develop: a writer of commercial jingles who blossomed out into an important composer.
Quotes
... the beauty of their island only blossomed the further through time they moved away from it. -- Roxane Gay, An Untamed State, 2014 This bit of utilitarian Web ephemera [the hashtag], invented with functionality squarely in mind, has blossomed into a marvelous and underappreciated literary device. -- Julia Turner, "#InPriaseOfTheHashtag," New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2012
Origin
Blossom in both the noun and the verb senses dates back to Old English. The Old English verb blōstmian “to bloom, blossom, effloresce” is a derivative of the noun blōstm, blōstma, blōsma “blossom, flower.” The English words blossom, bloom, and blow (“a yield or display of blossoms”) are all Germanic derivatives of the Proto-Indo-European root bhel-, bhlē-, bhlō- (and other variants) “to thrive, bloom.” In Latin the root appears in flōs (inflectional stem flōr-) “flower“ (which via Old French yields English flower, flour, and flourish). English florescent comes straight from Latin flōrescent-, the inflectional stem of flōrescēns, the present participle of flōrescere “to come into bloom.” Other English derivatives from Latin include floral and folium “leaf,” which becomes, again through Old French, English foil. Greek has the noun phýllon “leaf,” whose most common English derivative is probably chlorophyll
