Dictionary

ilex en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin ilex (“holm oak”).

Meanings

1. Holm oak (Quercus ilex).
   • Sometimes I lost track of them and had to hunt round in a circle, thrusting through sharp-scented bushes, scratching myself on various plants which were still new to me: resinaceous rock-roses, juniper, ilex [translating chênes verts], yellow and white asphodel. 1962, Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Peter Green, The Prime of Life, Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, translation of La Force de l'âge, →OCLC, page 77:
   • There is a point of strand / Near Vada's tower and town; and on one side / The treacherous marsh divides it from the land, / Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide, / And on the other creeps eternally, / Through muddy weeds, the shallow, sullen sea. 1818 (date written), Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mazenghi”, in Mary W[ollstonecraft] Shelley, editor, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: […] [C. H. Reynell] for John and Henry L[eigh] Hunt, […], published 1824, →OCLC, stanza 9, page 259:
   • Many nights, though autumnal mists were spread around, I passed under an ilex—many times I have supped on arbutus berries and chestnuts, making a fire, gypsylike, on the ground […] 1826, [Mary Shelley], chapter X, in The Last Man. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC:
2. Any of the numerous trees or shrubs of the genus Ilex.

Forms