What does "bastard" mean?

Bastard: (Sugar Refining) (a) An inferior quality of soft brown sugar, obtained from the sirups that (b) A large size of mold, in which sugar is drained.

Additional senses

  1. 2.A sweet Spanish wine like muscadel in flavor. Brown bastard is your only drink. Shak.
  2. 3.A writing paper of a particular size. See Paper.
  3. 4.Begotten and born out of lawful matrimony; illegitimate. See Bastard, n., note.
  4. 5.Lacking in genuineness; spurious; false; adulterate; -- applied to things which resemble those which are genuine, but are really not so. That bastard self-love which is so vicious in itself, and productive of so many vices. Barrow.
  5. 6.Of an unusual make or proportion; as, a bastard musket; a bastard culverin. [Obs.]
  6. 7.(Print.) Abbreviated, as the half title in a page preceding the full title page of a book. Bastard ashlar (Arch.), stones for ashlar work, roughly squared at the quarry. -- Bastard file, a file intermediate between the coarsest and the second cut. -- Bastard type (Print.), type having the face of a larger or a smaller size than the body; e.g., a nonpareil face on a brevier body. -- Bastard wing (Zoöl.), three to five quill feathers on a small joint corresponding to the thumb in some mam malia; the alula.
  7. 8.To bastardize. [Obs.] Bacon.

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