horse nettle
- noun
- /hɔrs ˈnɛtəl/
- US
:
ortiga de caballo
- The bright yellow berries on the horse nettle looked tempting, but I knew they were toxic.
Examples
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Farmers often remove horse nettle to prevent it from spreading among their crops.
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Be careful when walking through the fields—horse nettle can cause skin irritation if touched.
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The horse nettle is often found in gardens.
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Many farmers struggle with horse nettles in their fields.
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Be careful when walking through the fields—horse nettle can cause skin irritation if touched.
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Farmers often remove horse nettle to prevent it from spreading among their crops.
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The bright yellow berries on the horse nettle looked tempting, but I knew they were toxic.
Synonyms
A prickly weed that lives many years with pale yellow flowers and yellow berries, often in fields and gardens
A rough prickly weed with pale yellow flowers and small yellow berries that can be poisonous
A prickly weed with pale yellow flowers and yellow berry-like fruit found in the southeastern United States
A rough prickly plant from North America with pale yellow flowers and small berries
Surface Forms
Morphology
horse + nettle
The compound 'horse nettle' is transparently interpretable as a type of nettle: a learner who knows 'nettle' (a prickly plant) and 'horse' will infer it denotes a particular variety or larger/associated nettle. This follows regular English noun–noun compounding patterns, so the general plant meaning is predictable even if exact botanical details are not.
Etymology
Horse nettle may come from how farmers first named the plant: nettle shows it is a stinging, prickly plant and horse points to fields where horses would brush against it or where it was thought fit only for animals. So horse nettle means a rough, prickly 'weed' with pale yellow flowers and yellow berry-like fruit.
