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"Everything's coming up roses." "He views the world through rose-tinted glasses." "She has a rosy outlook on life." In English, we tend to associate roses and rose color with optimism, and roseate is no exception. Roseate comes from the Latin adjective roseus, and ultimately from the noun rosa, meaning "rose." Figurative use of roseate (with the meaning "happy" or "smiling") began in the 18th century, but the literal sense of the term has been in the language since the 15th century. It's especially well-suited to literary descriptions of sunrises and sunsets: "through yon peaks of cloud-like snow / The roseate sunlight quivers," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. And in an early short story, Edith Wharton wrote, "The sunset was perfect and a roseate light, transfiguring the distant spire, lingered late in the west."
Synonyms
Examples of roseate in a Sentence
Calin Van Paris, Vogue, 10 Oct. 2022
Cape Cod: Large numbers of shearwaters offshore including 2,250 great shearwaters, 750 Cory’s shearwaters, 90 sooty shearwaters, and 100 manx shearwaters, in addition to a Baird’s sandpiper, a black tern, and three roseate terns.
—BostonGlobe.com, 13 Aug. 2022
And Billie Eilish took the self-facing art form back to its roots with a series of pouty mirror snaps with a mussed chop and roseate blush.
—Calin Van Paris, Vogue, 24 July 2022
Carnivores also include reptiles like the Burmese python and the gharial, birds like vultures and roseate spoonbills, and some cuter mammals like otters and seals.
—Zachary Smith, cleveland, 26 May 2022
An elegant pompadour updo worn with a soft-focus glow punctuated by roseate smoky eyes, fluttery falsies, and a bright cherry red lip.
—Lauren Valenti, Vogue, 28 Mar. 2022
Visitors can spot egrets, anhingas, ducks, eagles, hawks, vultures, gallinules, osprey, blackbirds, roseate spoonbills, woodpeckers and more.
—Patrick Connolly, orlandosentinel.com, 31 Dec. 2021
These ringing blue skies, these wide roseate plains, these great, windy sweeps of land exist nowhere else.
—Roxana Robinson, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2021
From Georges Island in Boston Harbor, sightings included flyby eight great shearwaters, a Cory’s shearwater, 16 Wilson’s storm-petrels, a whimbrel, a Forster’s tern, 12 roseate terns, and two cliff swallows.
—BostonGlobe.com, 28 Aug. 2021
Dictionary Entries Near roseate
Cite this Entry
“Roseate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/roseate. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.
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