tridentiferous

English

Adjective

tridentiferous (comparative more tridentiferous, superlative most tridentiferous)

1. (rare, obsolete) Bearing a trident.
   • 1834, Edward Moor, “Fragments—Fourth. Descriptive Account of the Plates in This Volume.”, in Oriental Fragments, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 462:

     […] where the tridented Rhadamanthus—(Yama with Brahams, also tridentiferous?) with his three-headed dog Cerberus […] receives them into those unsunned dominions.

   • 1897 May 13, “Run Here, Somebody”, in The Montgomery Advertiser, volume LXVII (old series) / XXXII (new series), number 291, Montgomery, Ala.: The Advertiser Co., →OCLC, page 4, column 2:

     Where’s Stewart, the yawping yaw-doodle from the Empire of Nevada? Where’s the sockless hirsutes from the grasshopper-bitten wilds of Kansas? Where’s the argentiferous wind-jammer of Nebraska whose fervescent oratory knocked the Chicago Convention head over heels? What’s become of the tridentiferous statesman from Carolina? Can it be possible that silver is to be trodden down by the feet and claws of gold-bugs, flattened by the Kanchulla of money-devils or swallowed by the squamigerous hydra of Wall Street? Won’t somebody do something?

     The Philadelphia Inquirer, volume 136, number 168, Philadelphia, Pa.: The Inquirer Company, 1897 June 17, →OCLC, page 6, column 4:

     Somebody calls Senator [Benjamin] Tillman a “tridentiferous statesman.” This is a reminder of the story that when some person described a crab to Cuvier as a red fish that walks backward, he answered, “a crab is not a fish, it is not red and it does not walk backward. With these three exceptions, your definition is perfect.” A pitchfork is not tridentiferous and Mr. Tillman is not a statesman. With these exceptions, the description fits him exactly.
     [Tillman was known as “Pitchfork Ben”.]

   • 1912, Prospero [pseudonym; Frederick Rolfe], Caliban [pseudonym; Harry Pirie-Gordon], “The Thirteenth Papyrus”, in The Weird of the Wanderer: Being the Papyrus Records of Some Incidents in One of the Previous Lives of Mr. Nicholas Crabbe, London: William Rider & Son, Limited, […], →OCLC, page 128:

     And my sea-birds made a great confusion in the awful calm, filling it with flashing pinions and plaintive whimperings, and settling into the shape of a dome all formed of beating wings, in which I on my ship and the tridentiferous god of the sea were enclosed, face to face.

Synonyms

• tridented

Further reading

• “tridentiferous”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.