Word of the Day for Thursday, July 13, 2006 florid \FLOR-id\, adjective:1. Flushed with red; of a lively reddish color.2. Excessively ornate; flowery; as, "a florid style; florid eloquence." The Reverend Mr Kidney is a short round bowlegged man with black muttonchop whiskers and a florid face, like a pomegranate, into which he has poured a great quantity of brandy and lesser amounts of whisky and claret.-- Tom Gilling, The Sooterkin Even though avant-garde attacks on the Victorian bourgeoisie were florid in rhetoric, deficient in evidence, and malicious in intent, it does not follow that they had no objective grounds.-- Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience Many were florid and overweight, too bulkily dressed and perspiring freely.-- Robert Stone, Damascus Gate The journalist Frank Crane would later glorify the . . . factory in florid prose as "a sermon in steel and glass," a "Temple of Work" in which machinery rather than an organ provided the music and the choir "was the glad laughter of happy workers."-- RolandMarchand, Creating the Corporate Soul Florid comes from Latin floridus, "flowery," from flos, flor-, "flower." Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for florid