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''mahogany'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔

mahogany - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

mahogany (countable and uncountable, plural mahoganies)

  • (uncountable) The valuable wood of any of various tropical American evergreen trees, of the genus Swietenia, mostly used to make furniture. [from 17th c.]
    • ✤ A very neat old woman, still in her good outdoor coat and best beehive hat, was sitting at a polished mahogany table on whose surface there were several scored scratches so deep that a triangular piece of the veneer had come cleanly away […].1
    • ✤ In 2003, at Neal Auction Company in New Orleans, an 1810s mahogany armoire inlaid with ribbons and vines brought 30,000 to $50,000).2
  • (countable) Any of the trees from which such wood comes. [from 18th c.]
  • (countable) (by extension) Any of various kinds of trees, the timber of which resembles that of trees the genus Swietenia.
  • (regional) A Cornish drink made from gin and treacle. [from 18th c.]
    • ✤ William Murdoch […] produced a bottle of port; but I chose mahogany (two parts gin and one part treacle, which Lord Eliot made us at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s as a Cornish liquor, but it seems they make it also with brandy, and often add porter to it).3
    • ✤ Next day, the fish was ‘scrowled’ on a gridiron over the fire and eaten with ‘mahogany’, a powerful mixture of black treacle and gin, a favourite tipple of Cornish fishermen for keeping out the cold!4
  • A reddish-brown color, like that of mahogany wood. [from 19th c.]
    • ✤ Better she, my dear, than a black Mrs. Sedley, and a dozen of mahogany grandchildren.5
    • ✤ mahogany:
  • (obsolete, colloquial) A table made from mahogany wood; a dining table. [19th c.]
    • ✤ Poets eat and drink without stint — and seldom at their own cost — for what man of mark or likelihood in the moneyed world is there, who is not eager to get their legs under his mahogany?6
    • ✤ Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany […]7

Adjective

mahogany (comparative more mahogany, superlative most mahogany)

  • Made of mahogany.
  • Having the colour of mahogany; dark reddish-brown.

Etymology

A word of unknown origin,8 concocted in either English or Middle Dutch from one or more exotic phytonyms and common European words.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /məˈhɒɡəni/
  • (General American) IPA: /məˈhɑɡəni/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɒɡəni

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1963, Margery Allingham, “Foreword”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 2010 December 9, Eve M. Kahn, “Exploring the Art of Louisiana Furniture”, in The New York Times ‎, archived from the original on 18 June 2020: ↩

  3. 1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 178: ↩

  4. 2006, Sara Paston-Williams, Fish: Recipes from a Busy Island, page 39: ↩

  5. 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 6, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC: ↩

  6. 1842, Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political Journal: ↩

  7. 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC: ↩

  8. Malone, Kemp (1965), “Notes on the Word Mahogany”, in Economic Botany, volume 19, number 3, →JSTOR, pages 286–292 ↩

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