Definition of "madderwort" []

• A name proposed for any plant of the same natural order (Rubiaceae) as the madder. (noun)

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• "Our ideas of what colours looked like come from stained glass of the period or paintings, but in reality they would have been quite different as they came not from pigments but from vegetable dyes, like madderwort (red), weld (yellow) and woad (blue), all from plants, to the reds of kermes and cochineal extracted from crushed insects."