raisin

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.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹeɪzən/
• (obsolete) IPA^(key): /ˈɹiːzən/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪzən

raisin (plural raisins)

1. A dried grape.
   • 2021 July 18, Christopher Flavelle, “Scorched, Parched and Now Uninsurable: Climate Change Hits Wine Country”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

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

In the USA, raisin refers to any kind of dried grape. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand, raisin is reserved for the dried large dark grape, with sultana meaning the dried large white grape, and currant meaning the dried small Black Corinth grape.

• → Japanese: レーズン (rēzun)

raisin (third-person singular simple present raisins, present participle raisining, simple past and past participle raisined)

1. (intransitive) Of fruit: to dry out; to become like raisins.
   • 2008, John Winthrop Haeger, Pacific Pinot Noir:

     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.

   • 2010, Michael Gibson, The Sommelier Prep Course, page 214:

     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.

   • 2019, Sinclair Jayne, A Bride for the Texas Cowboy:

     Too much water and the taste would be too thin. Too little and the grapes would raisin.

2. (transitive) To flavor (an alcoholic beverage) with fruit that has raisined.
   • 2005, Alan King, Matzo Balls for Breakfast, page 183:

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

   • 2014, Dave Broom, Whisky: The Manual:

     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.

   • 2019, Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, page 177:

     Another liquid—perhaps honey, a berry juice, a raisined or herbal wine—could be poured into the large opening and automatically fed into the interior of the vessel.

3. (transitive) To add raisins to.
   • 1899, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, volume 9, number 2, page 150:

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

   • 1986, Betty Harper Fussell, I Hear America Cooking, page 308:

     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.

   • 2021, Gertrude Stein, Three Lives:

     He went then to each customer he had and gave them each a large, sweet, raisined loaf of caky bread.

4. (by extension, transitive) To distribute throughout (with small bits or things), to dot or pepper.
   • 2010, Anita Brenner, The Wind that Swept Mexico:

     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.

   • 2011, The Georgia Review - Volume 65, page 219:

     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.

   • 2019, Stephanie Strickland, Ringing the Changes, page 93:

     I find it helpful to imagine the world as a fullness of varying density, not as a vacuum raisined with corpuscles but as a plenum instead.

5. (transitive, intransitive) To shrivel.
   • 2008, Trey Ellis, Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood:

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

   • 2013, Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics:

     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.

   • 2013, Brittany Aguilera, Silent Hurricanes, page 17:

     My raisined heart is shrinking.

   • 2016, Karen Rivers, The Girl in the Well Is Me:

     My mom and my dad, the way they were before everything happened and their souls raisined and they went bad.

6. (transitive) To crush or drain, so that all plumpness and vitality is gone.
   • 2005, Tim Moore, Spanish Steps, page 196:

     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.

   • 2008, Martin Ed Chatterton, The Brain Full of Holes:

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

   • 2023, Crimpy G, Huntress and The Alpha King:

     I haven't seen him since about a week before you got raisined, but Lan saw him just before.

7. (transitive) To cause to have wrinkles.
   • 2012, Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth, page 18:

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

   • 2016, Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume Two: Empire Decayed, page 67:

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

   • 2019, A. S. Kingly, If Stilettos Could Speak:

     As her fingers became raisined by the soap suds, she wondered what Eliza was up to.

8. (intransitive) To form wrinkles; to become wrinkled.
   • 1998, Witness - Volume 12, page 151:

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

   • 2016, RaeAnne Thayne, Renegade Father:

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

   • 2023, Karin Lin-Greenberg, You Are Here:

     He can barely imagine it, but years and years from now, the day will come when his skin will have raisined, and even something as simple as sweeping the floor will no longer be easy.

• Iranis, Sirian

Inherited from Old French raisin, from Late Latin racīmus, from Latin racēmus. Doublet of racème, a borrowing.

• IPA^(key): /ʁɛ.zɛ̃/, /ʁe.zɛ̃/

• audio

  (file)

raisin m (plural raisins)

1. grape
2. a size of paper (having such a watermark)
3. a bright red lipstick

• “raisin”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

• resin, resyn, reysyn, roisin
• raisine, raysine, reisine (feminine)

From Late Latin racīmus, from Latin racēmus.

• (archaic) IPA^(key): /rai̯ˈzin(ə)/
• (classical) IPA^(key): /rei̯ˈzin(ə)/, (northern) /roi̯ˈzin(ə)/

raisin oblique singular, m (oblique plural raisins, nominative singular raisins, nominative plural raisin)

1. grape
2. cluster or bunch of grapes
3. raisin (dried fruit)

• French: raisin
• Norman: raisin, rouaisin
• Picard: rosin, reusin, rojin, roisin, rouaisin
• Walloon: reujin, rouaijin, roijin

Borrowings:

• Godefroy, Frédéric, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IX^e au XV^e siècle (1881) (raisin, supplement)
• raisin on the Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub
• Walther von Wartburg (1928–2002) “racēmus”, in Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (in German), volume 10: R, page 12