raisin

name

1. A surname.

noun

Etymology: From Middle English raysyn, borrowed from Anglo-Norman reysin (“grape, raisin”), from Late Latin racīmus, from Latin racēmus. Possibly a distant cognate of Persian رز (raz, “vine”). Doublet of raceme.

1. A dried grape.

   “Some of the fruit had turned black and shrunken — becoming, effectively, absurdly high-cost raisins.”

verb

Etymology: From Middle English raysyn, borrowed from Anglo-Norman reysin (“grape, raisin”), from Late Latin racīmus, from Latin racēmus. Possibly a distant cognate of Persian رز (raz, “vine”). Doublet of raceme.

1. Of fruit: to dry out; to become like raisins.

   “Second-crop fruit tends to show smaller clusters than first-crop, to have a high skin-to-juice ratio, and to be a good blending tool, according to Iantosca, although care must be exercised to ensure that the second-crop berries have not raisined.”

   “The ultraripe grapes are usually dried in the sun for a few days so they can raisin and their sugars can be concentrated before they are crushed and pressed.”

2. To flavor (an alcoholic beverage) with fruit that has raisined.

   “We must have put down about thirty quart bottles, richly raisined and tightly corked.”

   “The 12-year-old Redbreast is the most easily found and shows single pot still at its most defiant: oily and rich with stewed plums, light leather, creme caramel and a dense, raisined palate where the tongue tries to cleave through the white peaches.”

3. To add raisins to.

   “Of sweets there are halvás of all kinds from the sweet-smalling tar-halwa raisined and saffroned to the coarse malídah or powdered sweetbread.”

   “Her nicest one is sweetened with sugar, then spiced, buttered, egged, and raisined, to be baked for a mere hour and a half because the proportion of meal to milk is so small that the result is more like a thickened custard than a hasty pudding.”

4. To distribute throughout (with small bits or things), to dot or pepper.

   “It was ground out solemnly in the academies, the University, the press, raisined with scholarly arguments quoted from the French physiocrats and positivists, in French, of course.”

   “While Mother raisined our oatmeal with niacin tablets and wheatgermed our milk, Opal baked us sugar cakes and sugar cookies, deep-fried us sugar doughnuts.”

5. To shrivel.

   “If my heart didn't make a new friend soon, it would raisin and then petrify.”

   “Beneath a raisined basketball, among nail polish, dead spiders and other junk, I found a faded photograph of Hannah with cropped, spiky red hair and brilliant purple eye shadow painted all the way to her eyebrows.”

6. To crush or drain, so that all plumpness and vitality is gone.

   “Out in the bean field Shinto was being horribly bullied by horse-flies, and armed with that reflective strip of marker post– still an invaluable humane goad when the sun was in the right position– I raisined four against his loins. Oddly, he seemed to understand why I kept hitting him.”

   “And shouldn't we be getting out of here before we get, y'know, raisined or something?'”

7. To cause to have wrinkles.

   “She was a bony woman with hollow cheeks, her skin raisined by years of hard labor in the sun.”

   “Before him, a stoic mother, hands raisined from the scrubbing of clothing and children.”

8. To form wrinkles; to become wrinkled.

   “We soaked together in long baths until we raisined, skin pressed to skin .”

   “She remained under the spray until the hot water heater ran out and her skin raisined.”