oxblood

1. uncountableA dark brownish-red colour.
2. uncountableThe blood of an ox.

   […] we can change clothes, and with the aid of a bottle of oxblood, which is secreted about my person, we will deceive the tyrant, and spare a nobleman who does honour to Japan.

   1866 May 26, “The Jewelled Dagger”, in The Saturday Reader, volume II, number 38, Montreal: W. B. Cordier & Co., page 188

   5 more examples

   Vampires do urinate copiously on their victims, however, and the possibility exists that they relocate their victims by following the mixed scents of their own urine and butyric acid. Nothing is known about how they are able to relocate the precise wound made on a previous feeding sortie; it was thought they could respond to the odour of dried blood, but this has now been shown to be ineffective; cattle experimentally treated with oxblood are no more nor less attacked than untreated controls (Turner, 1975).

   1980, D. Michael Stoddart, The Ecology of Vertebrate Olfaction, Springer, →ISBN

   Gibreel smiles to himself, then quietly slides the window slightly open, lifts his glass of Coca Cola and pours it quickly into the water below. As he slides the window shut, his eyes meet Mira’s again and he smiles at her much more frankly. Then he guffaws and says, apparently to his partner but really across at her and loudly enough for her to hear: I don’t drink oxblood. Isn’t it, he adds for Indian idiom and bursts out laughing.

   1991, Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination, New Directions Books, →ISBN, page 70

   Animal products like blood, urine, manure, casein and animal glue have been used through the centuries to stabilise loam. Oxblood was commonly used as a binding and stabilising agent in former times. In Germany, the surfaces of rammed earth floors were treated with oxblood rendering them abrasion and wipe resistant.

   2000, Gernot Minke, Earth Construction Handbook: The Building Material Earth in Modern Architecture, WIT Press, →ISBN, page 45

   Ryckeboer’s map shows the different complementisers used in the sentence Ik moet ossebloed drinken om te verkloeken lit. I must oxblood drink for to recover ‘I have to drink oxblood to recover.’

   2005, Sjef Barbiers, editor, Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects, Amsterdam University Press, →ISBN, page 17

   Le bon sens served Voltaire well: it enabled him to discredit much clerical propaganda and a good many naive and pedantic absurdities. But it also told him that the empires of Babylon and Assyria could not possibly have coexisted next door to each other in so confined a space; that accounts of temple prostitutes were obvious nonsense; that Cyrus and Croesus were fictional beings; that Themistocles could not possibly have died of drinking oxblood; that Belus and Ninus could not have been Babylonian kings, for ‘-us’ is not a Babylonian ending; that Xerxes did not flog the Hellespont.

   2013, Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, 2nd edition, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 116

comparative more oxblood · superlative most oxblood

1. Of a dark brownish-red colour.

   He was tall and lean, with lank fair hair and a square jaw, togged out in tweeds and a checked shirt and scuffed, oxblood brogues.

   1993, John Banville, Ghosts