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melissa

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//məˈlɪsə//

A plant of the genus Melissa, especially lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), often used medicinally.

noun

  1. 1

    A plant of the genus Melissa, especially lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), often used medicinally.

    Meliſſa, Bawme, hath an excellent vertue to alter Melancholy, bee it ſteeped in our ordinary drinke, extracted, or otherwise taken.

Etymology

From Late Latin melissa, from Ancient Greek μέλισσα (mélissa, “bee”), because the plant attracts bees.

Forms

plural
melissas
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).