posy \POH-zee\,
noun:
1. a flower, nosegay, or bouquet.
2. Archaic. a brief motto or the like, as one inscribed within a ring.
HAMLET: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
OPHELIA: ’Tis brief, my lord.
HAMLET: As woman’s love.
-- William Shakespeare, 'Hamlet," 1603
This time I have to bring her in an hour a posy of the rarest flowers, and where am I to find them?
-- Andrew Lang, "The Orange Fairy Book," 1906
Posy is a variant of the word poesy, meaning "poem, poetry." Sometimes called nosegays or tussie-mussies, posies were popular accessories among fashionable women in Victorian England, and, harkening the word's literary origin, became vehicles for the floral "language of love."
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