sinople

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English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From Old French sinople, from Latin Sinōpis, from Ancient Greek Σινωπίς (Sinōpís, “of Sinope”), a town that exported a red ocher. The unexpected change to meaning "green" in heraldry occurred in French texts around 1350 for unclear reasons.[1]

Noun

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sinople (countable and uncountable, plural sinoples)

  1. (obsolete) A shade of red; sinoper.
  2. (obsolete) Sinoper, a kind of red earth historically used as a pigment, originally imported to Greece from Sinope in Paphlagonia.
  3. (mineralogy) Ferruginous quartz of a blood-red or brownish red colour, sometimes with a tinge of yellow, used to make the pigment sinopia.
  4. (obsolete, heraldry) Vert (green).
    • 1903, George Field, Ellis A. Davidson, A grammar of colouring, applied to decorative painting and the arts:
      In heraldry, sinople (the green of blazonry) also signified love, joy, abundance.
    • 1903, Isidore Singer, Cyrus Adler, The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, page 128:
      Espinosa (Spain and Flanders) : Argent, a tree terrassé sinople, accosted by two wolves affrontés, sable  […]
    • 1984, Lucile Kathryn Delano, Charles De Lannoy, Victor of Pavia, →ISBN:
      This shield argent with three lions sinople (green) has remained the coat of arms of the House of Lannoy. The young knight built a home in the woods around the seigneurie of Lys.

References

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  1. ^ Michel Pastoureau (2014 August 24) Green: The History of a Color, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 126:
    [C]onsider the term sinople that designates the color green in the language of French heraldry from the second half of the fourteenth century on. [...] Until that time to name the color green heraldry simply used the word "green." But about the years 1350-1380 its lexicon changed. In documents composed in French (armorial documents, heraldry manuals, accounts of tournaments), the term vert gradually disappeared, to be replaced by the word sinople. The reasons for this change, which took place over less than two generations, remain mysterious. Perhaps we can understand how heralds, the first specialists in the language of heraldry—which they often sought to enrich or to complicate to make themselves indispensable—may have wanted to align the color green with the other colors and thus designate it as well with a special term, different from ordinary language. Perhaps too we can recognize that there was a possible confusion between vert (the color green) and vair (the gray fur); to change one of those terms would avoid that confusion. So far so good. But why seek out the word sinople, a color term long used in literary language but that designates red, not green? The word's etymology leaves no doubt on this subject: the French sinople comes from the Latin sinopis or sinopensis, adjectives constructed from the name of a town in Asia Minor located on the shores of the Black Sea, Sinopa (Sinop today, in Turkey). In antiquity there were clay pits surrounding it that provided a red ocher [...] Why did the word sinople take on the meaning of "green" in the language of heraldry about 1350? Was some ignorant, priggish herald responsible for this change in meaning, immediately adopted by all his colleagues? Or must we look beyond heraldry for the reasons for this astonishing semantic mutation? Given the current state of our knowledge, we cannot answer that question.

Anagrams

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Catalan

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Pronunciation

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Noun

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sinople m (plural sinoples)

  1. (heraldry) vert

French

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French Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia fr

Etymology

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From Latin Sinopis.

Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /si.nɔpl/
  • Audio:(file)

Noun

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sinople m (plural sinoples)

  1. (heraldry) sinople, vert (green)
  2. (geology) sinople (red substance)

Further reading

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Anagrams

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Old French

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Noun

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sinople oblique singular, m (oblique plural sinoples, nominative singular sinoples, nominative plural sinople)

  1. (heraldry) vert (the green colour)

Portuguese

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Pronunciation

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Noun

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sinople m (plural sinoples)

  1. (heraldry) vert (the green colour)

Spanish

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Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /siˈnople/ [siˈno.ple]
  • Rhymes: -ople
  • Syllabification: si‧no‧ple

Adjective

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sinople m or f (masculine and feminine plural sinoples)

  1. (heraldry) vert

Further reading

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