snowdrop

noun

1. Any of the 20 species of the genus Galanthus of the Amaryllidaceae, bulbous flowering plants, bearing a solitary, pendulous, white, bell-shaped flower that appears, depending on species, between autumn and late winter or early spring, all native to temperate Eurasia.

   “A flower that first in this sweet garden smiled, / To virgins sacred, and the Snow-drop styled.”

   “Tufts of primroses grew under the still leafless trees; the hepatica had succeeded the snowdrop.”

   “White Ladies did not mean snowdrops, by their pretty old English name, ghosts in white cere-clothes, or belles in white tarlatan.”

   “[I]t was considered unlucky to decorate a room with cut snowdrops. The name death's flower relates to an old belief that a solitary snowdrop indicates impending death, with suggestions that it was inauspicious to bring snowdrops indoors.”

2. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of Snowdrop (“a Royal Air Force police officer”).
3. A Royal Air Force police officer.

   “For quotations using this term, see Citations:Snowdrop.”

verb

1. (Australia, ambitransitive, slang)To steal clothing (especially women's underwear) from a clothesline.

   “MS: There was a lot of snowdropping in those days? / SL: Oh, I've never actually stooped to snowdropping; I used to go into shops. Boosting, man, boosting. But you learn how to survive.”

   “‘Snowdropping’ is the business of some poor sods who, often from laundry drying on a clothes line, pinch items of ladies’ underwear, take them away and sniff them.”

   “It'll be like snowdropping clothes from a clothesline. We'll snowdrop a baby.”