Hellebore

1. n. Any plant of several species of the poisonous liliaceous genus Veratrum, especially V. album and V. viride, both called white hellebore.
2. n. A genus of perennial herbs (Helleborus) of the Crowfoot family, mostly having powerfully cathartic and even poisonous qualities. H. niger is the European black hellebore, or Christmas rose, blossoming in winter or earliest spring. H. officinalis was the officinal hellebore of the ancients.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.