Lign-aloes
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 agalloch, aloes
- 2 agarwood, trees of the genus Aquilaria, especially the species Aquilaria malaccensis
"c. 1380 "Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." In the digital collection Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Book IV, line 1135ff. The woful teeris that they leten falle As bittre weren out of teris kynde, ffor peyne, as is ligne aloes or galle:"
Example
More examples"c. 1380 "Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." In the digital collection Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Book IV, line 1135ff. The woful teeris that they leten falle As bittre weren out of teris kynde, ffor peyne, as is ligne aloes or galle:"
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English, from Middle French lignalöé, from Latin lignum + aloes. Compare lign-. The -s originates in the Latin genitive case, but it seems to have been reinterpreted as an English plural form.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.