eau de vie
1
9.9
- noun
- /oʊ də vi/
:
eau de vie
- Patricia turned to the barman and ordered an eau-de-vie framboise on ice.
- brandies and eaux de vie
- eau de vie is made
Examples
-
She had taken three eaux-de-vie Mirabelle instead of one and saw the cedars shifting across the too spangling stars.
Fiction book (1998) -
Madame screams, slugging back her eau de vie.
Fiction book (1997) -
- Have you some eau de vie?
-
Empty bottles of eau de vie.
Fiction book (1997) -
Both men drank rather a lot of red wine and then rather a lot of eau de vie.
Fiction book (1995) -
He ordered eau-de-vie Mirabelle with ice, and she ordered the same, indifferent.
Fiction book (1998) -
Quoting myself: If a good novel is like a fine-crafted bottle of beer or wine, then Blindsight is a partially vacuum distilled eau de vie from the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Blog text (9) -
Raymond Potter came out of the car smiling and carried a leg of wild boar, the ingredients for a ratatouille, a crate of red wine, and several bottles of eau de vie Poire Williams.
Fiction book (1995) -
Patricia turned to the barman and ordered an eau de vie framboise on ice.
-
Check out their apple eau de vie, which tilts toward caramel apples in its flavor due to aging in wooden barrels.
Synonyms
106
2.7
A strong alcoholic drink made from wine or fruit juice and often aged in wood
Surface Forms
Morphology
eau + de + vie
If a learner knows the constituents ('eau' = water, 'de' = of, 'vie' = life) they can compose the literal gloss 'water of life' and thereby infer an alcoholic spirit, so the basic idea is accessible. However, the specific conventionalized sense 'a clear fruit brandy' is a lexicalized cultural use (not fully predictable from the literal words), and although the pattern exists cross-linguistically (aqua vitae, etc.), the precise referent is conventional rather than strictly compositional.
Etymology
The noun eau de vie literally means eau 'water' and vie 'life' in French, and one popular story says people called strong, clear drinks made from fruit 'water of life' because they thought these drinks could heal. That image of a clear, life-giving drink explains why eau de vie today means a clear fruit brandy often served after a meal.