Dictionary

tridentiferous en · ADJ

Meanings

1. (obsolete, rare) Bearing a trident.
   • […]where the tridented Rhadamanthus—(Yama with Brahams, also tridentiferous?) with his three-headed dog Cerberus […] receives them into those unsunned dominions. 1834, Edward Moor, “Fragments—Fourth. Descriptive Account of the Plates in This Volume.”, in Oriental Fragments, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 462:
   • Somebody calls Senator [Benjamin] Tillman a “tridentiferous statesman.” This is a reminder of the story that when some person described a crab to Cuvier as a red fish that walks backward, he answered, “a crab is not a fish, it is not red and it does not walk backward. With these three exceptions, your definition is perfect.” A pitchfork is not tridentiferous and Mr. Tillman is not a statesman. With these exceptions, the description fits him exactly. [Tillman was known as “Pitchfork Ben”.] The Philadelphia Inquirer, volume 136, number 168, Philadelphia, Pa.: The Inquirer Company, 17 June 1897, →OCLC, page 6, column 4:
   • And my sea-birds made a great confusion in the awful calm, filling it with flashing pinions and plaintive whimperings, and settling into the shape of a dome all formed of beating wings, in which I on my ship and the tridentiferous god of the sea were enclosed, face to face. 1912, Prospero [pseudonym; Frederick Rolfe], Caliban [pseudonym; Harry Pirie-Gordon], “The Thirteenth Papyrus”, in The Weird of the Wanderer: Being the Papyrus Records of Some Incidents in One of the Previous Lives of Mr. Nicholas Crabbe, London: William Rider & Son, Limited, […], →OCLC, page 128:

Forms

Synonyms

tridented