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Barmecide

   Also found in: Encyclopedia 0.05 sec.
Bar·me·cid·al  (bärm-sdl) also Bar·me·cide (bärm-sd)
adj.
Plentiful or abundant in appearance only; illusory: a Barmecidal feast.
[After Barmecide, a nobleman in The Arabian Nights, who served an imaginary feast to a beggar.]
Barmecide [ˈbɑːmɪˌsaɪd], Barmecidal
adj
lavish or plentiful in imagination only; illusory; sham a Barmecide feast
[from the name of a prince in The Arabian Nights who served empty plates to beggars, alleging that they held sumptuous food]


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No slave appeared, but my brother remarked that the Barmecide did not fail to rub his hands as if the water had been poured over them.
The Arabian Nights by Lang, Andrew View in context
Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.
A Tale Of Two Cities by Dickens, Charles View in context
To the admirers of cities it is a Barmecide Feast: a pleasant field for the imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project, with not even a legible inscription to record its departed greatness.
American Notes for General Circulation by Dickens, Charles View in context
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