blight canker
- noun
- Specialized
:
cáncer de fuego
- The old tree showed signs of fire blight cankers on its branches, causing concern for the gardener.
Examples
-
This Rome Beauty apple tree inside an arborsphere at the Appalachian Fruit Research Station in Kearneysville, West Virginia, has been pruned to remove all fire blight cankers.
Academic text (1997) -
To prevent the spread of fire blight, it is crucial to remove any cankers from infected plants.
-
Gardeners often apply treatments to trees afflicted with fire blight cankers to protect healthy growth.
Synonyms
1
8.5
A disease that makes dead areas on tree bark and branches
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound follows a regular modifier–head pattern: 'blight' names the disease and 'canker' names a lesion, so a learner who knows both words can infer it refers to a canker caused by blight. Although specialized botanical jargon, the meaning is compositionally predictable from the constituents rather than idiomatic.
Etymology
Blight canker comes from two simple images: blight is a plant disease that makes leaves and branches die, and a canker is a sore or dead patch on a stem or branch. So when the disease makes that kind of sore on a tree, people call it a 'blight canker', which is why the term means 'a sore or dead patch on a branch caused by fire blight'.