mammee apple
- noun
- /mæmi ˈæpəl/
- US
:
mamey
- She enjoyed the sweet, orange flesh of a mammee apple for dessert.
Examples
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The market stall was selling ripe mammee apples fresh from the Caribbean.
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The tall mammee apple tree provided shade as well as delicious fruit.
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I found a ripe mammee apple at the market.
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Have you ever tasted a mammee apple?
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She enjoyed the sweet, orange flesh of a mammee apple for dessert.
-
The market stall was selling ripe mammee apples fresh from the Caribbean.
-
The tall mammee apple tree provided shade as well as delicious fruit.
Synonyms
A tropical tree with sweet fruit used in jams and desserts
A tropical tree that grows large round fruits with sweet flesh and thick skin
A tropical tree that produces large sweet fruit and hard wood like mahogany
A tropical tree that grows fruit you can eat
Tropical trees that make a large edible fruit with one seed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun–noun compound directly denotes the fruit of the mammee tree, so a learner who knows 'mammee' (a tropical tree) and 'apple' (a fruit) can compositionally infer 'mammee apple' as the edible fruit of that tree. This kind of straightforward referential compounding is cross-linguistically common and follows regular English noun–noun formation, making it transparent to B1 learners who know the constituents.
Etymology
Mammee apple was first the name of the round fruit, and people then used the same name for the tall tree that makes those fruits. So today mammee apple can mean the fruit itself or the 'tree' that bears it.
