rushlight
rushlight noun: a type of inexpensive candle formed by soaking the dried pith of the rush plant in fat or grease, which emits light for a relatively short period of time.
Noun
rushlight (plural rushlights)
- A type of inexpensive candle formed by soaking the dried pith of the rush plant in fat or grease, which emits light for a relatively short period of time.
- The rushlight was her friend, and aided her to pass the long, long hours before midnight, for it was enclosed within its accustomed tin cage; […]1842, [Katherine] Thomson, chapter XI, in Widows and Widowers. A Romance of Real Life., volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, pages 198–199
- After supper Sir Pitt Crawley began to smoke his pipe; and when it became quite dark, he lighted the rushlight in the tin candlestick, and producing from an interminable pocket a huge mass of papers, began reading them, and putting them in order.1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “Crawley of Queen’s Crawley”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 61
Forms of rushlight
| plural | rushlights |
|---|
Origin of rushlight
From rush + light.
Questions about rushlight
- What does rushlight mean?
- Rushlight means a type of inexpensive candle formed by soaking the dried pith of the rush plant in fat or grease, which emits light for a relatively short period of time.
- What part of speech is rushlight?
- Rushlight is a noun.
- What is the plural of rushlight?
- The plural of rushlight is rushlights.
Words near rushlight in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rushlight (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.
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Cite this entry: “rushlight.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rushlight. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.