red osier

Questions about red osier

What does red osier mean?

red osier means "common North American shrub with reddish purple twigs and white flowers". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for red osier?

Close synonyms include red osier dogwood, red dogwood, American dogwood, redbrush, Cornus stolonifera. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is red osier a common word?

red osier is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.