vanilla

  1. Noun.  (countable) Any tropical, climbing orchid of the genus ''Vanilla'' (especially ''Vanilla planifolia''), bearing podlike fruit yielding an extract used in flavoring food or in perfumes.
  2. Noun.  (countable) The fruit or bean of this orchid.
  3. Noun.  (uncountable) The extract of this fruit.
  4. Noun.  (uncountable) The distinctive fragrant flavour/flavor characteristic of vanilla extract.
  5. Noun.  (uncountable) Any artificially produced homologue of vanilla extract, principally vanillin produced from lignin from the paper industry or from petrochemicals.
  6. Adjective.  (colloquial) By association with vanilla as the "plain" flavour of ice cream: the standard, plain, default, unmodified, basic.

This is an unmodified, but possibly outdated, definition from Wiktionary and used here under the Creative Commons license. Wiktionary is a great resource. If you like it too, please donate to Wikimedia.

This entry was last updated on RefTopia from its source on 3/20/2012.