bouillabaisse
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
Etymology: Borrowed from French bouillabaisse, from Occitan bolhabaissa, bouiabaisso, possibly a compound of bolhir (“to boil”) + abaissar (“to lower (the temperature)”).
Base: bolhir
Inflected forms:
form: bouillabaisses
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: A type of fish soup or stew from Provence, France.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: And here's an inn, not rich and splendid, / But still in comfortable case; / The which in youth I oft attended, / To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse. // This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is— / A sort of soup, or broth, or brew, / Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, / That Greenwich never could outdo; / Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern, / Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; / All these you eat at Terré's tavern, / In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
First of all they dined together at a delightful little Franco-Italian pothouse near Leicester Square, where they had bouillabaisse (imagine the Laird's delight), and spaghetti, and a poulet rôti, which is such a different affair from a roast fowl!
Further to the east he could see the jetty of the Yacht Club, where one may eat to surfeit of the best bouillabaisse in the world, in some of the best company.
A remarkable bouillabaisse is served up in the little restaurant where I take my meals, that is, lunch, for in the evening I eat only fruit, figs and grapes mostly, in my room.
On the very bridge of the boat, exhilarated, he [Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec] concocted elaborate bouillabaisses, refining his recipes with priestly gravity.
If you want to start an argument among Frenchmen, just ask a group of them what goes into an authentic bouillabaisse—that lusty Mediterranean seafood stew fragrant with the aroma of fish, shellfish and saffron. The dish was first brought to Marseilles by sailors, and legend has it that the Greek goddess Venus cooked bouillabaisse for her husband Vulcan to put him to sleep so that she could go about other business.
Catfish and redfish, turtles and shellfish (e.g. deep-fried clams) were often eaten in fricassees or bouillabaisses and in late summer, oysters and crawfish (described by one observer as "des ecrevices^([sic – meaning écrevisses]) magnifiques") were consumed with enthusiasm [...].
I expected the open-air markets, but defrosted bouillabaisse and canned ratatouille weren’t what I imagined to be staples of Parisian culinary life. Yet they’ve become mainstays.
gloss: A mixture.
pos: noun
tags: countable
figuratively
uncountable
examples: La Sirène du Mississipi is a synthesis of the work he [François Truffaut] has been doing during the preceding six or eight years, a great bouillabaisse of [Jean] Renoir, [Alfred] Hitchcock, [Humphrey] Bogart, [Antoine] Doinel, [...]
Social psychologists differentiated between "merely desegregated" and "genuinely integrated" schools [...]. The former refers to a mere racial bouillabaisse and implies nothing about the quality of racial interaction that is a precondition to effective learning.
By the mid-twentieth century the avant-garde, the good, the bad, and the fatal in-between [in art] have all become mixed in one indigestible bouillabaisse, and [Dwight] Macdonald has assigned himself the position of pointing out which is which.
The word "megadiversity" has been coined to describe such wildlife bouillabaisses, where many conservationists believe they should focus their efforts.
It's who I am that matters. God, you can see the Indian in me. There are 200 kinds of Indians in Nicaragua—actually, I [Barbara Carrera] call myself a bouillabaisse of bloodlines.
Both Dunn cases came to the Court on the “shadow docket,” a bouillabaisse of emergency motions and other matters that do not receive full briefing and oral argument before the justices decide a case.
Translations: