fruitage

English

Etymology

From fruit +‎ -age.

Noun

fruitage (countable and uncountable, plural fruitages)

1. Fruit, collectively.
   • 1815, Lydia Sigourney, Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, The Giving of the Bible to the Esquimaux, page 10:

     For them no spring, with gentle care, / Paints the young bud and scents the air; / Nor autumn bids the loaded stem / Scatter its fruitage fair for them.

   • 1832 December (indicated as 1833), Alfred Tennyson, “The Hesperides”, in Poems, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, stanza IV, page 106:

     The luscious fruitage clustereth mellowly, / Goldenkernelled, goldencored, / Sunset-ripened above on the tree.

   • 1889 March, Walter Besant, “The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies”, in The Gentleman's Magazine, volume 266, number 1899, page 259:

     The tendency of modern science is to close this gate—though it can never stop the search for it—the vague desire after some kind of communication, some kind of poetic identification with the soul that reveals itself through the rolling year, the mysterious presence that is felt to lie behind the outbuddings of spring, the wealth and greenery of summer, with all its whisperings and music and rippling laughter, the blue of autumn, with its fruitage, its expansive horizons, its glory veiling temporary decay.

2. Product or result of any action, effect, good, or ill.

Further reading

• “fruitage”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

Anagrams

• figurate