释义 |
oak-apple|ˈəʊkˌæp(ə)l| 1. A globular form of oak-gall; spec. the bright-coloured spongy gall formed on the leaf-bud of the common British oak.
14..Nom. in Wr.-Wülcker 716/9 Hec galla, a nake appylle. 1486Bk. St. Albans B vj b, Take..oke appilles and make Iuce of theym. 1578Lyte Dodoens vi. lxviii. 745 The Oke apples do grow in sommer, and do begin to fall in September. 1753Chambers Cycl. Supp. s.v., If the oak apple..be found full of worms..it bodes, if not a plague, yet an unhealthy year. 1818Keats Enaym. i. 276 Silvery oak⁓apples, and fir-cones brown. 1874Lubbock Orig. & Met. Ins. i. 10 The oak supports several kinds of gallflies, one produces the well known oak-apple. 2. In Australia, the young cone of the She-oak.
1889J. H. Maiden Useful Native Pl. 15 (Morris) Children chew the young cones [of Casuarina], which they call ‘oak⁓apples’. 3. attrib., as oak-apple day, the 29th of May, the day of the Restoration of Charles II, when oak-apples or oak-leaves have been worn in memory of his hiding from his pursuers in an oak, on the 6th of September, 1651.
1807–8Syd. Smith Plymley's Let. Wks. 1859 II. 80/1 He does not say whether this is a loyal procession, like Oak⁓apple Day. 1859W. S. Coleman Woodlands (1862) 14 Oak-apples, so much in vogue on the ‘Twenty-ninth of May, Oak-Apple Day’, are also excrescences of this nature. |