Sun embodied by articles with endlessly lurid references (8)
I believe the answer is:
thesauri
'references' is the definition.
(thesaurus is a kind of reference)
'sun embodied by articles with endlessly lurid' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
'sun' could be 's' (abbreviation) and 's' is found within the answer.
'articles' could be 'thea' (definite article 'the', indefinite article 'a') and 'thea' is present in the leftover letters.
The remaining letters 'uri' is a valid word which might be clued in a way I don't see.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for thesauri that I've seen before include "Dictionaries" , "Word books" , "Reference works providing synonyms" , "Word founts" , "References" .)