mahogany

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   The valuable wood of any of various tropical American evergreen trees, of the genus Swietenia, mostly used to make furniture.

   A very neat old woman, still in her good outdoor coat and best beehive hat, was sitting at a polished mahogany table on whose surface there were several scored scratches so deep that a triangular piece of the veneer had come cleanly away[…].

2. 2
   noun

   A Cornish drink made from gin and treacle.

   William Murdoch […] produced a bottle of port; but I chose mahogany (two parts gin and one part treacle, which Lord Eliot made us at Sir Joshua Reynolds's as a Cornish liquor, but it seems they make it also with brandy, and often add porter to it).

3. 3
   noun

   A reddish-brown color, like that of mahogany wood.

   Better she, my dear, than a black Mrs. Sedley, and a dozen of mahogany grandchildren.

4. 4
   noun

   A table made from mahogany wood; a dining table.

   Poets eat and drink without stint — and seldom at their own cost — for what man of mark or likelihood in the moneyed world is there, who is not eager to get their legs under his mahogany?

A word of unknown origin, concocted in either English or Middle Dutch from one or more exotic phytonyms and common European words. alternative etymologies Alternatively from Portuguese mogano, mógono, obsolete forms of mogno, itself of unknown origin (often suggested to be from the English word instead of the reverse), perhaps from an extinct indigenous language, such as a Mayan language originally spoken in Honduras or a South American language, but no known cognates survive. Another theory attempts to link Yoruba moganwo (“trees”, literally “tall ones”), but this has been criticized.

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