columbine

1 of 2

noun (1)

col·​um·​bine ˈkä-ləm-ˌbīn 

: any of a genus (Aquilegia) of plants of the buttercup family with irregular showy spurred flowers: such as

a

: a red-flowered plant (A. canadensis) of eastern North America

b

: a blue-flowered plant (A. caerulea) of the Rocky Mountains

Illustration of columbine

• columbine a

Columbine

2 of 2

noun (2)

Col·​um·​bine ˈkä-ləm-ˌbīn 

-ˌbēn

: the saucy sweetheart of Harlequin in comedy and pantomime

Examples of columbine in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Noun

Letting her front yard in a historic, urban Birmingham, Ala., neighborhood go wild with more-than-foot-high native roses, irises, azalea saplings, tiger lilies, columbines, rose campions and daisy fleabanes, in violation of a local ordinance. —USA Today, 16 May 2025

Luckily, several species of columbine (Aquilegia spp.) are native to North America. —Anne Readel, Better Homes & Gardens, 11 Aug. 2024

These playful structures are bolstered by walkways and gardens spanning 25,000 new flora, most of which, like the Texas gold columbine, are native to the state. —Alia Akkam, Architectural Digest, 12 Aug. 2024

Look for heartleaf arnica and blue columbine in the shadows of the trees while paintbrush, elephant heads, bistort and purple fringe grow in the wet areas of the meadows. —Estes Park Trail-Gazette, The Denver Post, 6 Aug. 2024

Word History

Etymology

Noun (1)

Middle English columbyne, calombin, calobyn, borrowed from Anglo-French & Medieval Latin; Anglo-French columbine, borrowed from Medieval Latin columbīna (perhaps originally as modifying herba "small plant, herb"), noun derivative from feminine of Latin columbīnus "of a dove or pigeon, dove-colored," from columba "dove, pigeon" + -īnus -ine entry 1; columba akin to Old Church Slavic golǫbĭ "dove, pigeon," Russian gólubʼ, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian gȍlūb, Greek kólymbos, kolymbás, kolymbís "the little grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis)," all perhaps of substratal origin

Note: The name columbīna supposedly alludes to the five petals of the inverted flower of Aquilegia vulgaris, said to resemble five doves clustered together; this has the look of an after-the-fact explanation, however. — The interrelationship of the Latin, Greek and Slavic words is a perhaps insoluble puzzle. It has been assumed that the initial col-/gol- of the Latin and Slavic words describes a color, presumably a shade of blue, and that -b- continues an Indo-European suffix *-b^ho- of color and animal names. W.B. Lockwood ("Latin columba, palumbēs, Greek κόλυμβος," Historische Sprachforschung, Band 103 [1990], pp. 261-63) compares Greek ellós, hellós "young deer, fawn" (from *elnós) beside élaphos "red deer (Cervus elaphus)," but as the base here is probably an original n-stem *h₁el-en- with evidence in a number of other Indo-European languages (see elk), the internal vowel-nasal sequence in columba and golǫbĭ is not really accounted for. The Slavic words have been compared with Lithuanian gelumbė̃̃ "rather thick machine-made woolen fabric" (originally dove-colored, i.e., blue or blue-gray?) and less likely with gul̃bė "swan," though these hardly illuminate. (Old Prussian golimban "blue" may be a loan from Slavic.) Lockwood (op. cit.) rejects the relevance of Greek kólymbos on the grounds that names for the grebe in languages generally are based on their diving habits, not on color words. The resemblance of kólymbos to the Latin and Slavic words is nevertheless inescapable, and the presence of -b- rather -ph- in the putative suffix would rule out any connection with Indo-European *-b^ho-. R. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009), based on the variants kolýmbaina/kolýbdaina as the name for a kind of crab, believes the word is of pre-Greek substratal origin. If, pace Lockwood, kólybos is of any relevance to columba and golǫbĭ, a European substratum might be behind all three.

Noun (2)

Italian Colombina

First Known Use

Noun (1)

14th century, in the meaning defined above

Noun (2)

1719, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for columbine

• acridine
• alkaline
• andesine
• anodyne
• anticline
• arginine
• asinine
• atropine
• benzidine
• borderline
• byzantine
• calamine

Kids Definition

columbine

noun

col·​um·​bine ˈkäl-əm-ˌbīn 

: any of a genus of plants that are related to the buttercups and have showy flowers with five petals of which each usually has a long hollow spur