Dagwood sandwich
- noun
- /ˈdæɡwʊd ˈsænwɪtʃ/
- US
:
sándwich Dagwood
- Setting a course for land, he put the boat on autopilot and went below to reward himself with what they used to call a Dagwood sandwich when he was a kid.
Examples
-
Renovated plantation homes nestle not far from ramshackle country stores where cashiers pile hoop cheese on homemade Dagwood sandwiches.
-
Three hours later, he came back, stoned, with half a Dagwood sandwich for me, unable to say where he'd been.
Fiction book (2000) -
There's nothing like taking two slices of bread, turkey, cranberry, and stuffing, and eating it as this giant Dagwood sandwich.
Synonyms
800
1.0
Two slices of bread with food like meat or cheese between them for a meal
2
2.1
A long bread roll split open and filled with meats, cheese, and salad vegetables
A sandwich with three slices of bread and two layers of filling
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
Dagwood + sandwich
The first element 'Dagwood' is a proper name tied to a cultural reference (the comic-strip character Dagwood Bumstead) rather than a semantically transparent modifier, so the size and multilayered sense are not derivable from the constituent meanings. A B1 learner who knows 'sandwich' and recognizes 'Dagwood' only as a name would not predict that it means a very large, stacked sandwich without prior exposure, making the expression idiomatic and unpredictable.
Etymology
Dagwood sandwich comes from an old comic strip about a man named Dagwood who piled many layers of meat, cheese and vegetables between slices of bread to make a very tall sandwich. That's why today Dagwood sandwich means 'a very large sandwich'.