Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🌳 A baobab fruit 🍞 A sticky pastry
monkey bread

monkey bread

9.9
A large fruit of the baobab tree with soft edible pulp
  • noun
  • South African
translation icon : pan de mono
  • The villagers gathered monkey bread from the baobab trees for their evening meal.

Examples

  • The tangy flavor of monkey bread is popular in many West African desserts.

  • I saw a monkey bread fruit at the market.

  • Researchers studied the nutritional value of monkey bread in the local diet.

  • The monkey bread has a unique texture.

  • The villagers gathered monkey bread from the baobab trees for their evening meal.

  • The tangy flavor of monkey bread is popular in many West African desserts.

  • Researchers studied the nutritional value of monkey bread in the local diet.

Surface Forms

monkey bread singular
monkey breads plural

Morphology

monkey + bread

The head noun 'bread' signals the lexical category (a baked product), so a learner would infer it is some kind of bread/pastry, but the specific sense — a sweet, pull-apart, cinnamon-coated pastry — is not predictable from 'monkey' and is essentially an arbitrary or conventional name. Because part of the meaning (that it is a bread) is recoverable but the detailed culinary sense is not, it is best classified as semi-transparent.

Etymology

Monkey bread may come from people seeing monkeys eat the big, pulpy fruit of the baobab tree, which acted like a simple 'bread' for animals and people. So the name came to mean 'the large baobab fruit'.