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banana bread

banana bread

8 1.0
A sweet, moist bread made with mashed bananas often served as a snack
  • noun
  • /bəˈnænə brɛd/
translation icon : 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
25 1.4
coffee cake
9 1.6
banana bread
8 1.0
bread
805 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'.