Raisin
name, noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A dried grape.
"Some of the fruit had turned black and shrunken — becoming, effectively, absurdly high-cost raisins."
- 2 guardian (A person legally responsible for a minor (in loco parentis)) rare, slang
- 3 dried grape wordnet
- 1 Of fruit: to dry out; to become like raisins. intransitive
"Second-crop fruit tends to show smaller clusters than first-crop, to have a high skin-to-juice ratio, and to be a good blending tool, according to Iantosca, although care must be exercised to ensure that the second-crop berries have not raisined."
- 2 To flavor (an alcoholic beverage) with fruit that has raisined. transitive
"We must have put down about thirty quart bottles, richly raisined and tightly corked."
- 3 To add raisins to. transitive
"Of sweets there are halvás of all kinds from the sweet-smalling tar-halwa raisined and saffroned to the coarse malídah or powdered sweetbread."
- 4 To distribute throughout (with small bits or things), to dot or pepper. broadly, transitive
"It was ground out solemnly in the academies, the University, the press, raisined with scholarly arguments quoted from the French physiocrats and positivists, in French, of course."
- 5 To shrivel. ambitransitive
"If my heart didn't make a new friend soon, it would raisin and then petrify."
Show 3 more definitions
- 6 To crush or drain, so that all plumpness and vitality is gone. transitive
"Out in the bean field Shinto was being horribly bullied by horse-flies, and armed with that reflective strip of marker post– still an invaluable humane goad when the sun was in the right position– I raisined four against his loins. Oddly, he seemed to understand why I kept hitting him."
- 7 To cause to have wrinkles. transitive
"She was a bony woman with hollow cheeks, her skin raisined by years of hard labor in the sun."
- 8 To form wrinkles; to become wrinkled. intransitive
"We soaked together in long baths until we raisined, skin pressed to skin ."
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"This morning as I did not have any money with me, I could not buy my raisin bread, and this evening, even though I had taken money in the meantime, there was no raisin bread left at the bakery."
Etymology
From Middle English raysyn, borrowed from Anglo-Norman reysin (“grape, raisin”), from Late Latin racīmus, from Latin racēmus. Possibly a distant cognate of Persian رز (raz, “vine”). Doublet of raceme.
Related phrases
More for "raisin"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.