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banana bread

banana bread

11 1.0
A sweet, moist bread made with mashed bananas often served as a snack
  • noun
  • /bəˈnænə brɛd/
: pan de plátano
  • We've got dessert, banana bread with caramel and vanilla ice cream homemade from scratch.
  • bake banana bread
  • loaf of banana bread
  • make banana bread

Although mine just literally the other day sent around banana bread to six different people.

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Examples

  • And today I made my first banana bread and I'm about to eat it with some peanut butter blueberries.

  • I look forward to being reacquainted someday soon—and sampling some of this amazing banana bread!

    Blog text (33)
  • OK, so now we're going to let our banana bread cool for over an hour, maybe two hours, not sure.

  • My sister loved the banana bread you made.

  • I brought you banana bread.

  • I was making banana bread.

    Fiction book (1994)
  • Is this a moist banana bread covered in sugar?

  • Today's pick was banana bread and Nutella.

  • People are baking bread (banana bread, for example), muffins, cookies, cakes, etc., and giving them as gifts this year.

    Blog text (30)
  • My sister loved the banana bread you made.

How Sweet

fruitcake
30 1.4
coffee cake
10 1.6
banana bread
11 1.0
bread
765 1.0

Surface Forms

banana bread singular
banana breads plural

Morphology

banana + bread

The meaning 'a sweet, moist bread made with mashed bananas' is directly and compositionally derived from the constituents 'banana' + 'bread' — a noun-noun compound where the first noun modifies the type/flavor of the second. This compounding pattern (e.g., 'pan de plátano', 'pain à la banane') is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the intended meaning.

Etymology

The compound noun banana bread comes from home cooks who mashed soft, over-ripe bananas and mixed them into a bread batter to bake a loaf. So, the name explains why it means 'a sweet, moist bread made with mashed bananas'.