🌾 A roadside weed 🥤 A health food

barley grass

6.0

A grass that grows wild along roads and hedges and is often a weed

noun

: cebada silvestre

She identified the weed in her vegetable patch as barley grass.

Examples

Some gardeners remove barley grass to prevent it from overtaking flowerbeds.
I saw some barley grass growing along the roadside.
Barley grass quickly invades disturbed soils along rural roads.
The field was covered in barley grass this spring.
Barley grass quickly invades disturbed soils along rural roads.
Some gardeners remove barley grass to prevent it from overtaking flowerbeds.
I saw some barley grass growing along the roadside.

Synonyms

wall barley

vsbarley grass

9.9

A small wild grass that grows like a weed along roads and walls, with bristly seed heads

is the more general everyday name rather than the scientific form

Hordeum murinum

vsbarley grass

Specialized

9.9

A small wild grass that grows as a weed along roadsides and in waste ground

is the everyday common name used instead of the Latin term

Surface Forms

barley grass singular

barley grasses plural

Morphology

barley + grass

The meaning ('young green leaves or processed forms of the barley plant') is a straightforward composition of 'barley' (the cereal plant) and 'grass' (the green, narrow-leaved parts), so the phrase signals the grassy part of the barley plant or its products. This noun–noun compound follows regular English compounding patterns and is conceptually transparent and likely understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituent words.

Etymology

The noun barley grass comes from the image of young barley plants and the wild grass that often grows near barley fields and along roads. People saw it as a common 'weed', so the name now means the annual roadside grass found in waste ground.