polverine
polverine noun: glassmaker's ashes; a kind of potash or pearlash, brought from the Levant and Syria, used in the manufacture of fine glass.
Noun
polverine (countable and uncountable, plural polverines)
- Glassmaker's ashes; a kind of potash or pearlash, brought from the Levant and Syria, used in the manufacture of fine glass.
- A tiny biting insect found in South America.
- Mosquitoes and polverines, little midges so small as to be scarcely visible, rose in a cloud from the water and settled on our hands and faces.1946, Kenneth Walker, I talk of dreams: an experiment in autobiography, page 145
- The polverines, however, were so small and numerous that even though we massacred fifty with a slap it seemed to make no difference to the hazy black cloud which hung around our heads.1980, David Attenborough, The Zoo Quest Expeditions: Travels in Guyana, Indonesia, and Paraguay, →ISBN
Forms of polverine
| plural | polverines |
|---|
Origin of polverine
From Italian polverino, from Latin pulvis (“dust”). Doublet of pulvinus.
Questions about polverine
- What does polverine mean?
- Polverine means glassmaker's ashes; a kind of potash or pearlash, brought from the Levant and Syria, used in the manufacture of fine glass.
- What part of speech is polverine?
- Polverine is a noun.
- What is the plural of polverine?
- The plural of polverine is polverines.
Words near polverine in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: polverine (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “polverine.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/polverine. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.