English

Etymology

Noun

1. A fine-grained white or lightly-tinted variety of gypsum, used ornamentally.
2. A variety of calcite, translucent and sometimes banded.

Quotations

• c. 1596, William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene I, lines 89-90

  Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,

  Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?

• 1867 Dante Alghieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XV, lines 22-23 (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

  Nor was the flame dissevered from its ribbon

  But like a radiant fillet ran along

  So that fire seemed it behind alabaster.

• 1915, The New York Times, "Egyptian Antiquities for Metropolitan" (pdf), 15 May

  One of the striking relics found at the tomb, was a Canopic portrait head of Queen Tii, made entirely of alabaster except the eyes and eyebrows, which were inlaid lapis lazuli and osidian.

Adjective

1. Made of alabaster

   The crown is stored in an alabaster box with an onyx handle and a gold lock.

2. Resembling alabaster: white, pale, translucent.

   An ominous alabaster fog settled in the valley.

3. ghostly

Quotations

• 1594, William Shakespeare, "The Rape of Lucrece", lines 418-420

  With more than admiration he admir’d

  Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,

  Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.

• 1611, King James Version of the Bible, Mark 14:3

  And being in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head.

• before 1887, Emily Dickinson, "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers"

  Safe in their alabaster chambers

  Untouched by morning, untouched by noon

  Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,

  Rafters of satin, and roof of stone.

• 1895, Katherine Lee Bates, "America the Beautiful"

  Thy alabaster cities gleam

  Undimmed by human tears!