fat hen
- noun
- UK
:
pámpano
- The leaves of fat hen can be cooked like spinach.
Examples
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Many foragers collect fat hen for use in soups and salads.
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The fat hen grows abundantly in abandoned fields across Europe and North America.
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The fat hen is often found in gardens.
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I picked some fat hens for dinner.
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Many foragers collect fat hen for use in soups and salads.
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The fat hen grows abundantly in abandoned fields across Europe and North America.
-
The leaves of fat hen can be cooked like spinach.
Synonyms
A common wild plant with soft green leaves you can cook and eat like spinach, also called lamb's quarters
Green leaves that grow wild and people collect to eat
A group of flowering plants like goosefoot, some grown for food and others as weeds
Surface Forms
Morphology
fat + hen
A B1 learner who knows 'fat' and 'hen' would most likely interpret 'fat hen' as a plump chicken; the attested meaning (a plant, Chenopodium album) is a conventionalized plant name not derivable from the literal constituents. The unusual/archaic sense given for 'fat' and the missing dictionary entry for 'hen' here further reduce compositional cues, so the botanical sense is unpredictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
The name fat hen may come from how the plant looks: its round, soft leaves made people think of a plump farm bird, so the words fat and hen give that picture. So the name now means the common wild plant often eaten as a 'vegetable' or fed to animals.
