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Glite Dictionary
curly endive

curly endive

1 6.0
A salad green with crisp curly leaves and a slight bitter taste
  • noun
  • /ˈkɜrli ˈɛndaɪv/
translation icon : endibia rizada
  • For the salad, I added some curly endive along with tomatoes and cucumbers.
  • curly endive salad

Examples

  • My favorite salad includes curly endive mixed with avocado and grilled chicken.

  • Rather than selecting one type of lettuce for your salad, choose mixed greens, which typically offer five or more colorful delicate greens such as radicchio, butter leaf, curly endive, and mache.

    Blog text (32)

  • The chef made a refreshing dish featuring curly endive topped with olive oil and lemon.

Surface Forms

curly endive singular
curly endives plural

Morphology

curly + endive

The phrase is fully compositional: 'curly' describes the shape/texture and 'endive' names the vegetable, so a learner who knows both words will infer it refers to an endive with curly/spiky leaves. The adjective+noun pattern is a standard, cross-linguistically common modifier construction, making the meaning immediately derivable for a B1 learner.

Etymology

Curly endive is a name that shows what the plant looks like: curly for its tight, spiky leaf edges and endive for the salad leaf type. So the picture of crisp green curls with a light 'bitter' taste makes it easy to remember that curly endive is a crisp, slightly 'bitter' green used in salads.