carmine

plural carmines

1. countableuncountableA purplish-red pigment, made from dye obtained from the cochineal beetle; carminic acid or any of its derivatives.

   1 more example

   1967, Time, "The Case of the Dubious Dye," 6 January, 1967, https://web.archive.org/web/20130721101257/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,843172,00.html Cases of cubana salmonellosis in three other states were traced to carmine red, and supplies were called in. […] But authorities have been checking other places for carmine red, knowing that it is a favorite coloring in candy, chewing gum, ice cream, cough syrups and drugs. Manufacturers like to use it because of a legal quirk: being a natural rather than a synthetic product, it does not have to be mentioned on labels.

2. countableuncountableA purplish-red colour, resembling that pigment.

   He wore a great coat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine.

   1854, Henry David Thoreau, chapter XIV, in Walden, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, published 1910, page 347

   4 more examples

   I am alive, I guess, / The branches on my hand / Are full of morning-glory, / And at my fingers' end / The carmine tingles warm,

   c. 1862, Emily Dickinson, “(please specify the chapter or poem)”, in M[abel] L[oomis] Todd and M[illicent] T[odd] Bingham, editors, Bolts of Melody, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, published 1945, page 140

   He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his hair.

   1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chapter 5, in This Side of Paradise

   […] the dawn breaking behind the hill-tops in our rear, the first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness, and then the growing light and the seas of carmine cloud stretching away into inconceivable distances […]

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter IV, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC

   The velvet I seen was brown, but in Boston they got all colors. Carmine. That means red but when you talk about velvet you got to say 'carmine.'

   1987, Toni Morrison, Beloved, New York: Vintage, published 2004, page 33

1. Of the purplish red colour shade carmine.

plural Carmines

1. A male given name from Italian.
2. A surname from Italian.