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Glite Dictionary
bottle gourd

bottle gourd

6.1
A climbing plant with hard, bottle-shaped fruit used as food or dried to make containers
  • noun
  • /ˈbɑːtəl ɡʊrd/
translation icon : calabaza
  • The local market sells fresh bottle gourds that are perfect for soups and stews.

Examples

  • According to tradition, Haya men and women are required to drink banana beer out of bottle gourds (Lagenaria sp.) having different shapes.

    Academic text (1990)

  • In many cultures, dried bottle gourds are used as containers for storing water.

  • For the festival, they decorated the hall with brightly colored bottle gourds and flowers.

Synonyms

Lagenaria siceraria
vsbottle gourd
  • Specialized
9.9

A climbing plant with hard, bottle-shaped fruits used to make containers and musical instruments

is the common English name used for the same plant

Surface Forms

bottle gourd singular
bottle gourds plural

Morphology

bottle + gourd

The noun compound denotes a type of gourd that is bottle-shaped, so its meaning is directly built from 'bottle' (shape/use) + 'gourd' (vine fruit). This straightforward, compositional noun-noun pattern is cross-linguistically common and would be understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituent words.

Etymology

Bottle gourd is named for its hard fruit that looks like a bottle and is a gourd, and people dried it to make a 'container' for water or food. So the name reminds us of both its shape and its use as a 'vegetable' or a useful 'container'.