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Nightshade   Listen
noun
Nightshade  n.  (Bot.) A common name of many species of the genus Solanum, given esp. to the Solanum nigrum, or black nightshade, a low, branching weed with small white flowers and black berries reputed to be poisonous.
Deadly nightshade. Same as Belladonna (a).
Enchanter's nightshade. See under Enchanter.
Stinking nightshade. See Henbane.
Three-leaved nightshade. See Trillium.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nightshade" Quotes from Famous Books



... Take half a score of the berries of enchanter's nightshade,[15] two ounces of hemlock leaves in powder, and one ounce of red sorrel leaves. Heat them in an oven for two hours, pound them together, in a mortar, and at midnight boil them in water. As soon as the contents begin to bubble, ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... the cottage, a bundle of enchanter's nightshade in her arms. She hangs it by a string to the wall and ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... but the bitter-sweet of hope and fear has been given us as daily food for two weeks past, and the wormwood of ceaseless apprehension took the place of the yellow berries, and nightshade darkness settled down upon us. Lovely young girls cried over their ball-dresses of illusion, and wondered if their hopes would thin off into the same slimpsy nothingness. Middle-aged ladies, whose hair needs no powder, and whose teeth ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate That opes to those abysses Where ye grope darkly,—ye who never knew On your young hearts love's consecrating dew, Or felt a mother's kisses, Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled; Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world The fatal nightshade grows ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... acclamations of the livery, and the more tremulous, but not less sincere, applause, the blessings, "not loud, but deep," of bankrupt merchants and doubting stock-holders. If they look to the army, what wreaths, not of laurel, but of nightshade, are preparing for the heroes of Walcheren! It is true, there are few living deponents left to testify to their merits on that occasion; but a "cloud of witnesses" are gone above from that gallant army which they so generously and piously ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... fens there are dense woods tangled with parasitic creepers and filled with owls. Bats fly from wood to wood. The air on the lower ground is charged with the poisonous gases which exude from the marsh, while in the woods it is heavy with the dank odours of deadly nightshade and poison ivy. ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... The duskier sisters— Descended, relinquished The orchard, the trout-pool, Torridge and Tamar, The Druid circles, Sheepfolds of Dartmoor, Granite and sandstone; By Roughtor, Dozmare, Down the vale of the Fowey Moving in silence, Brushing the nightshade By bridges cyclopean, By Trevenna, Treverbyn, Lawharne and Largin, By Glynn, Lanhydrock, Restormel, Lostwithiel, Dark wood, dim water, dreaming town; Down the vale of the Fowey To the tidal water Washing the feet Of fair St Winnow— Each, in her exile Musing the ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q

... the more central parts of the county, and even some of these were far from being luxuriant, owing to such a peculiarly wet and cold season. The hedges in places are diversified with the small gold and violet star-like flowers and the green and scarlet berries of the climbing woody nightshade, or bitter-sweet (Solanum Dulcamara), often mistaken for the deadly nightshade (Atropa Belladonna—a fine bushy herbaceous perennial, with large ovate-shaped leaves, and lurid, purple bell-shaped flowers), quite ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... arsenious acid; bichloride of mercury; carbonic acid, carbonic gas; choke damp, corrosive sublimate, fire damp; hydrocyanic acid, cyanide, Prussic acid[ISA:chemsubcfp], hydrogen cyanide; marsh gas, nux vomica[Lat], ratsbane[obs3]. [poisonous plants] hemlock, hellebore, nightshade, belladonna, henbane, aconite; banewort[obs3], bhang, ganja[obs3], hashish; Upas tree. [list of poisonous substances(on-line)] Toxline. rust, worm, helminth[Med], moth, moth and rust, fungus, mildew; dry rot; canker, cankerworm; cancer; torpedo; viper &c. (evil doer) 913; demon ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... sat on his amethyst throne in the middle of a grove of deadly nightshade. He was the ugliest enchanter any one has ever seen; and on each side of him sat an enormous purple toad with an ugly purple smile on his face. Even the sun's rays shone purple in the home of the Purple Enchanter; and Martin stared ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp

... build a yarn that had the architectural completeness of a turreted castle, created out of smoke by some imaginative minstrel of hell. His language on all occasions was so fresh and startling that men had a way of following him about just to gather up the poppies and the nightshade ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... Surf The Swimmer The Three Friends Thick-headed Thoughts Thora's Song To a Proud Beauty To My Sister "Two Exhortations" Unshriven Visions in the Smoke Whisperings in Wattle-Boughs Wolf and Hound Wormwood and Nightshade Ye Wearie Wayfarer, hys Ballad Zu ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... poplars but crimson roses, but I was not quite right, for in many places the wild flowers had crept into the garden from without; lush green briony, with green-white blossoms, that grows so fast, one could almost think that we see it grow, and deadly nightshade, La bella donna, O! so beautiful; red berry, and purple, yellow-spiked flower, and deadly, cruel-looking, dark green leaf, all growing together in the glorious days of early autumn. And in the midst ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris

... (Solanaceae) Nightshade, Blue Bindweed or Bittersweet; Jamestown Weed, Thorn Apple ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... the Captain lisped, prolific of his kisses, "Maria Theresa! Semiramis! Agrippina! Cleopatra! ever fecund in great ideas and growing youthful by nightshade, alto! quedo! but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... of Furness; or an account of the Royal Abbey of St. mary, in the vale Of Nightshade, near Dalton, in Furness." London, 1774 4to. This volume, which was dedicated to Lord George Cavendish, Was written by Thomas West, the antiquary, who was likewise the author of "A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmoreland, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... ago, a Mr. Sprague was tried for the murder of the Walker family by means of the well-known poison of the deadly nightshade. The medical evidence showed clearly that they all died from belladonna poisoning, and belladonna was found in the rabbit-pie they had for dinner. A common-sense jury, however, acquitted the prisoner; and only recently have medical men solved the mystery by discovering ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... when they slowly steamed into the beautiful harbour of Noumea, and before them lay the crime-cursed land, fair with the fatal fairness of deadly nightshade. ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson

... of the stinking kind! Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind! Africa, that brags her foison, Breeds no such prodigious poison! Henbane, nightshade, both together, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... circumstances under which a particular plant appears in England are often very suspicious. Take the instance of the belladonna, or deadly nightshade, an extremely rare British species, found only in the immediate neighbourhood of old castles and monastic buildings. Belladonna, of course, is a deadly poison, and was much used in the half-magical, half-criminal sorceries of the Middle Ages. Did ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... holy marriage, which makes or breaks for time and eternity. Oh, this is not a mere question of residence or wardrobe! It is a question charged with gigantic joy or sorrow, with heaven or hell. Alas for this new dispensation of George Sands! Alas for the mingling of the nightshade with the marriage garlands! Alas for the venom of adders spit into the tankards! Alas for the white frosts of eternal death that kill the orange blossoms! The Gospel of Jesus Christ is to assert what is right and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... overhanging growth of cedars, poplars, and birch, which were wreathed together by the flexile branches of the vine and bitter-sweet, which climbed to a height of fifteen feet [FN: Solatnum dulcamara,—Bitter-sweet or Woody nightshade. This plant, like the red-berried briony of England, is highly ornamental. It possesses powerful properties as a medicine, and is in high reputation among the Indians.] among the branches of the trees, ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... a choice collection," said the Governor, with a smooth tongue, but with an angry light in his eyes. "May I ask by whom it was chosen; who it was that so carefully culled nightshade and ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... to the thorny thickets and the miry 30 bogs and the fever-breeding marshes, to gather what evils he might. Soon he returned with an arm load—the poison of spiders, the venom of serpents, the miasmata of swamps, the juice of the deadly nightshade. All these he cast into the tub of water wherein the Smith was vainly trying to ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... leaves, put forth so early in the spring they are especially tempting to grazing cattle on that account, are too well known by most animals, however, to be touched by them—precisely the end desired, of course, by the hellebore, nightshade, aconite, cyclamen, Jamestown weed, and a host of others that resort, for protection, to the low trick of mixing poisonous chemicals with their cellular juices. Pliny told how the horses, oxen, and swine of his day were killed by eating the foliage of the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... as it appears, belongs to a family suspected of very dangerous traits. It is a family connection of the deadly nightshade and other ill-reputed gentry, and sometimes shows strange proclivities to evil,—now breaking out uproariously, as in the noted potato rot, and now more covertly in various evil affections. For this reason, scientific directors bid us beware of the water in which potatoes are boiled,—into ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... "May nightshade cluster round his path, And thistles shoot, and brambles cling; May blistering ivy scorch his veins, And dogwood burn, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... use in so vague a sense that strangers are often rather puzzled to know precisely what we mean. He might also have added to the list many old Cornish words, still in common use, as skaw for the elder-tree; skaw-dower, water-elder; skaw-coo, nightshade; bannel, broom; skedgewith, privet; griglans, heath; padzypaw (from padzar, four?), the small gray lizard; muryan, the ant; quilkan, the frog (which retains its English name when in the water); pul-cronach (literally pool-toad) is the name ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... Linnaeus classed it with the natural order Luridae,—since he attributed the luridness only to the color of those plants, not to their character. It is absurd to denounce it as belonging to the poisonous nightshade tribe, when the potato and the tomato also appertain to that perilous domestic circle. It is hardly fair even to complain of it for yielding a poisonous oil, when these two virtuous plants—to say nothing of the peach and the almond—will under sufficient chemical provocation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. All that, in a happier field and a purer air, would expand into virtue and germinate into usefulness, is thus concerted into henbane and deadly nightshade. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... scarlet fruit of the woody nightshade (a first cousin of the potato) hung in tempting clusters, and I could not help wondering whether they would endanger the ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various

... No, not angry; but a district visitor should learn to eschew melodrama. Visit the poor, by all means, and give them tea and barley-water, but don't do it as if you were administering a bowl of deadly nightshade. It upsets them. Then when you nurse sick people, and find them not as well as could be expected, why go into hysterics? MAR. Why not? DES. Because it's too jumpy for a sick-room. MAR. How strange! Oh, Master! Master!—how shall ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... black or white slaves, with no other garment than a waist girdle, held out to them necklaces of flowers made of crocuses, the blooms of which, white outside, are yellow inside, purple safflowers, golden-yellow chrysanthemums, red-berried nightshade, myosotis whose flowers seemed made of blue enamel of the statues of Isis, and nepenthes whose intoxicating odour makes one forget everything, even the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... but the summer heat had returned, and when the road passed through a beech wood the shade was welcome. Here over the mossy ground rambled the enchanter's nightshade, still carrying its frail white flowers, which really have a weird appearance in the twilight of the woods. The plant has not been called circe without a reason. Under the beeches there were raspberry canes with some fruit still ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... It can never be done more perfectly than at Furness Abbey, which is in itself a very sombre scene, and stands, moreover, in the midst of a melancholy valley, the Saxon name of which means the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Tabacum of the order Solanaceae, which includes Atropa Belladonna, or "Deadly Nightshade," Hyoscyamus, or "Henbane," Solanum Dulcamara, or "Bitter Sweet," all powerful poisons, and likewise the common potato and tomato, which are wholesome foods. The cured leaves are used for smoking and chewing, or when powdered, ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... the prepared and manufactured leaf of several species of plant, belonging to the nightshade family. Most of the product is derived from the species known as Virginia tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and the Brazilian species (Nicotiana rustica). The former is cultivated in the United States, West Indies, the Philippine ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... turned him round in act to go. The way is long, he cannot fly, His soiled wing has lost its power, And he winds adown the mountain high, For many a sore and weary hour. Through dreary beds of tangled fern, Through groves of nightshade dark and dern, Over the grass and through the brake, Where toils the ant and sleeps the snake; Now o'er the violet's azure flush He skips along in lightsome mood; And now he thrids the bramble bush, Till its points are ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake

... on which our colonists have very inappropriately bestowed the name Kangaroo-apple, while in literal scientific translation it ought to be called Bird's Nightshade, because Captain Cook's companions observed in New Zealand that birds were feeding on ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... Eries, moving slowly, came a slender shape, shrouded in white. Her head was bent in the shadow of her cowl; her white wool vestments trailed behind her. Both hands were clasped together under her loose robe. On her cowl was a wreath of nightshade, with its dull purple fruit and blossoms ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... neighborhood In some remote provincial town, A scandalous chronicle at best! They seem to me a stagnant fen, Grown rank with rushes and with reeds, Where a white lily, now and then, Blooms in the midst of noxious weeds And deadly nightshade ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



Words linked to "Nightshade" :   poisonous nightshade, ball nightshade, bittersweet, silver-leaved nightshade, purple nightshade, genus Solanum, buffalo bur, poison-berry, ball nettle, bull nettle, Solanum carolinense, trompillo, horse nettle, woody plant, climbing nightshade, silver-leaved nettle, Alpine enchanter's nightshade, deadly nightshade, prairie berry, white horse nettle, Solanum elaeagnifolium, silverleaf nightshade, bittersweet nightshade, stinking nightshade, Solanum pseudocapsicum



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