Citations:blunket

English citations of blunket and plunket

blunket

• 1573, Cooper, Thesaurus, entry Caesius:

  Gray, skie colour, with speckes of gray blunket.

• 1579, Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, May:

  Our bloncket liueryes bene all to sadde,

  glosse: Bloncket liueries) gray coates.

arguably a use because it occurs as part of the definition, not as a word being defined:

• 1600, Thomas Thomasius, Thomae Thomasii Dictionarium [...] tertio:

  Scyricum, Plin. A blunket colour or like watchet.

• 1657, William Coles, Adam in Eden, cxxxv:

  Gilloflowers of such variable colours [...] Horseflesh, blunket, purple, and white.

• 2002, Geoffrey Regan, Historical Blunders, page 13, quoting some older work:

  One physician, beside himself with anger at the stupidity of the female sex, raged, 'There are many who have so betard their faces with these mixtures and slubber-sauces, that they have made their faces of a thousand colours: that is to say, some as yellow as the marigold, others a dark greene, others blunket colour, others as of a deep red died in the wooll.'

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useful for clarifying meaning and listing alt forms to look for citations of:

• 1876, James Robinson Planché, A Cyclopaedia of Costume Or Dictionary of Dress, Including Notices of Contemporaneous Fashions on the Continent: The Dictionary, page 400:

  PLUNKET. [...] But plunket in the fifteenth century was the name of a colour:—"PLUNKET (coloure), jacinctus" ('Prompt. Parv.'); to which Mr. Way's note is as follows:—"'Plonkete,' or in another MS. 'blunket,' occurs in the 'Awntyks of Arthure,' and is explained by Sir F. Madden as signifying 'white stuff.'"

  "Hir belte was of plonkete with burdies fulle baulde."

  In Mr. Robson's edition, "blenket," st. xxix.; possibly the white stuff called in French blanchet. "Ploncket: colour blew." (Palsg.) "Caesius: graye of colour or blunkette, Scyricum blunket colour or light watchet. Venetus: lught blewe or blunket." (Elyot.) "Couleur pers.: skie colour, a blunket or light blue." (Colgrave.) The old gloss on Spenser's 'Shepherd's Calendar, May,' explains it as signifying grey. (See Nares and Jamieson, v. "Bloncat.") Here is a mass of contradictory information that is perfectly bewildering. A jacinth (hyacinth) is not white, nor grey, nor blue. It is a gem of the family of the garnets, and the Syrian is sometimes of a fine violet colour. This is the colour always indicated by hyacinthus or jacintus in mediaeval writings; but, apart from this, are we to consider that the cloths called "plunkets" gave their name to the colour, or that the colour, whichever it was, gave its name to the material? Of "the long coloured cloths called 'plunkets,'" some are described as celestines. These might have been of "the lyght blewe" or "skie colour" called "blunket" by Elyot and Cotgrave. They were distinguished by broad lists; but if not from the French blanchet, where no doubt "blanket," manufactured here as early as the reign of Edward III.,* where are we to seek the derivation of the word "plunket" either as applied to a cloth or a colour?

  *According to some glossarists, blanket took its name from one Thomas Blanket, who first set up a loom at Bristol in 1340.

entries in other dictionaries, for clarifying meaning:

• 1589, John Rider, Bibliotheca Scholastica: A Double Dictionarie, Penned for All Those that Would Haue Within Short Space the Use of the Latin Tongue, Either to Speake, or Write...

  Blunket colour, or light watchet, Scyricum, n.

• 1675, Henry Hexham, Daniel Manly, A copious English and Netherdutch Dictionary: comprehending the English Language with the Low-Dutch Explication:

  Brown blew, Bruyn blaeuw.

  Blunket colour, Licht blaeuw.

plunket

• 1857, Alphonse de Lamartine, Les Confidences: Confidential Disclosures, page 246:

  The eyes were of a plunket color tinged with gray, like a billow in the shade ; the glance was deep and somewhat enigmatical, like an interrupted disclosure.

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for clarifying meaning:

• 1894, Bulletin of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, volume 24, page 387:

  Bailey gives “Plunket-color, a sort of blue color;” and Beck says the name was in all probability indiscriminately applied to a color and to cloth of that color. Plunket is shown by Bailey as “a sort of coarse woolen cloth;” but it was certainly at one time a superior fabric. “Crimson plunket” is mentioned in the fifth year of the reign of Henry VIII.