artichoke plant
- noun
- /ˈɑrtɪˌʧoʊk plænt/
:
alcachofa
- In Mediterranean cuisine, the artichoke plant is valued for its delicious edible flower buds.
Examples
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At the farmer's market, I bought a fresh artichoke plant that I plan to grow in my backyard.
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Highway 5 seemed to stretch on forever, past fields of spiky artichoke plants and a grove of windmills.
Fiction book (1995) -
The chef harvested several large artichoke plants from her garden for the upcoming dinner party.
Synonyms
34
3.1
A large edible flower head of a plant from the Mediterranean often eaten as a vegetable
A large plant with a round, spiky flower head eaten as a vegetable
A Mediterranean plant with a large edible flower head called the artichoke
How Cultivated
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: an 'artichoke plant' is simply the plant that produces artichokes, which a learner who knows 'artichoke' and 'plant' can infer. This is a literal noun+noun combination with no idiomatic or metaphoric shift and follows a common cross-linguistic naming pattern, so it is immediately understandable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Artichoke plant comes into English from old Italian and Spanish names that first came from Arabic and were used for the same vegetable. Because those names pointed to the large, layered bud people eat, today artichoke plant means the plant grown for its 'edible flower head'.