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alcedine (al-seh-deen) - adj., resembling a kingfisher in color.
A vivid blue-green color, specifically. This word is apparently current only in the community of translators from classical Chinese, especially of poetry -- there is a common classical Chinese word that means this, for which there is no good English equivalent, and so this was coined from Latin alcēdine, ablative of alcēdō, kingfisher, borrowed from Greek alkuōn, also sometimes transcribed as halcyon (which was also used to name Alcedines, the suborder or superfamily containing the three families of kingfishers). It has, however, never caught on outside of that circle and doesn't even appear in the OED.
---L.
A vivid blue-green color, specifically. This word is apparently current only in the community of translators from classical Chinese, especially of poetry -- there is a common classical Chinese word that means this, for which there is no good English equivalent, and so this was coined from Latin alcēdine, ablative of alcēdō, kingfisher, borrowed from Greek alkuōn, also sometimes transcribed as halcyon (which was also used to name Alcedines, the suborder or superfamily containing the three families of kingfishers). It has, however, never caught on outside of that circle and doesn't even appear in the OED.
---L.
