Brazil
name, noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A red-orange dye obtained from brazil wood. obsolete
"A small Quantity of Saffron will Tinct more then a very great Quantity of Brasil."
- 2 three-sided tropical American nut with white oily meat and hard brown shell wordnet
- 3 The hard, brown wood of a certain species of the tribe Caesalpinieae; originally sappan (Biancaea sappan), of the East Indies, and later brazilwood, Paubrasilia echinata.
"The Prouince Brasilia tooke his name of the woode called Brasill."
- 4 A Brazil nut.
"I picked up a handful of brazils from the bowl."
- 5 A seam of coal containing iron pyrites
- 1 A large Portuguese-speaking country in South America. Official name: Federative Republic of Brazil. Capital: Brasília.
"In February, a young man from an isolated Indigenous tribe in Brazil made brief contact with the outside world before returning to the Amazon rainforest."
- 2 A surname from Irish.
- 3 A city, the county seat of Clay County, Indiana, United States.
Example
More examples"To our surprise, she has gone to Brazil alone."
Etymology
From Portuguese Brazil, older spelling of Brasil, from brasil (“brazilwood”), originally ‘red like an ember’, from brasa (“ember”), perhaps from Proto-Germanic *brasō (“gleed, crackling coal”), and -il (“-ile, -like, -y”) from Latin -īlis (“adjective suffix”).
Reduced Anglicized form of Irish Ó Breasail (“descendant of Breasal”), a byname meaning "strife".
Related phrases
More for "brazil"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.