ginger nut
- noun
- /ˈdʒɪndʒə nʌt/
- UK
:
galleta de jengibre
- At the party, everyone loved the ginger nuts as a tasty snack.
Examples
-
- Good dunkers, them ginger nuts.
-
Or the ginger nut gets it!
-
She enjoyed a cup of tea with a crispy ginger nut on the side.
-
He dipped his ginger nut into the hot chocolate for extra flavor.
Synonyms
4
4.2
A small crisp cookie flavored with ginger often eaten at holidays
3
3.0
A crisp round cookie made with ginger and spices like cinnamon
2
2.3
A small crisp round cookie with ginger and warm spices
Surface Forms
Morphology
The constituent 'ginger' clearly signals the spice/flavour, and 'nut' can suggest something small and round, so a learner might infer a small ginger-flavoured item. However the specific sense 'a crisp biscuit' is lexicalized and not directly derivable from 'nut' (it is not actually a seed), so the precise food type is not fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
Ginger nut may come from old small, hard cakes flavored with ginger. The word nut here meant 'a small, hard thing' rather than a real nut, so the name came to mean the spicy, crunchy biscuit people enjoy with tea today.