laurel

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English laurer, laurel, from Anglo-Norman lorer, from Old French lorier, from Vulgar Latin *laurārius, from Latin laurus (“laurel”).

noun

1. Laurus nobilis, an evergreen shrub having aromatic leaves of a lanceolate shape, with clusters of small, yellowish white flowers in their axils.
   Now large tracts of land are given over to the cultivation of the camphor laurel. March 1920, Alice Ballantine Kirjassoff, “FORMOSA THE BEAUTIFUL”, in National Geographic Magazine, pages 265–6
2. A crown of laurel.
3. (figurative, chiefly in the plural) Honor, distinction, fame.
   to win laurels; to crown with laurels
4. (botany) Any plant of the family Lauraceae.
5. (botany) Any of various plants of other families that resemble laurels.
6. (historical) An English gold coin made in 1619, and so called because the king's head on it was crowned with laurel.

verb

1. (transitive) To decorate with laurel, especially with a laurel wreath.
   Windows peered from the spaces between the columns, which rose to hold up the large portico laureling the home with chiseled, decorative wreaths and curving spirals. 2014, Cayden Carrico, A Nocturne of Echoes, page 32
2. (transitive) To enwreathe.
   It wasn't hot this late in the year, and the sun was low in the southern sky, bracketed by pines and nearly hidden by a tree line laureling a trailer park. 2013, John Hornor Jacobs, The Twelve-Fingered Boy, page 161
3. (transitive, informal) To award top honours to.
   In this regiment there was a young corporal, a native of Little K . He was laurelled and decorated more than many of his companions, for he excelled them all in courage, coolness, and daring. In one thing more he also excelled them — he was cruel, he was dissipated, and he was vicious in his tastes. 1866, Archibald Fergusson, The crusher' and the Cross, page 149
   Not in any vision of that order did he figure for most of the admirers who laurelled him on his eightieth birthday and the few who go on laurelling him still. 1927, John Mackinnon Robertson, Modern humanists reconsidered, page 29
   He was laurelled in admiring headlines from both left and right. 2010, Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party
   In 1973, the modern papist missionary was laurelled an honorary Doctor of Divinity by the institution founded by a Congregationalist missionary to the Indians of the northern wilds. 2017, George William Rutler, Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive