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Glite Dictionary
mountain spinach

mountain spinach

7.2
A leafy plant from Asia with edible leaves used like spinach
  • noun
  • /ˈmaʊntən ˈspɪnɪtʃ/
translation icon : espinaca de montaña
  • Her favorite dish includes sautéed mountain spinach mixed with garlic and olive oil.

Examples

  • Chopped mountain spinach garlic, cilantro, hot and black peppers finished with lemon and olive oil.

    Stay (2020)

  • We enjoyed a salad made with fresh mountain spinach from the garden.

  • Having grown up on mountain spinach, pinecones, and potages made from primrose and nettles, he found the mansion-house supper was wonderfully bourgeois.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • The recipe for the soup calls for tender leaves of mountain spinach as a key ingredient.

Synonyms

Atriplex hortensis
vsmountain spinach
  • Specialized
9.9

A leafy plant like spinach that you can cook and eat

is the common culinary name used for its edible leaves
garden orache
vsmountain spinach
9.9

A leafy plant like spinach that you cook or eat raw

is the culinary leaf name rather than the horticultural or scientific label

Surface Forms

mountain spinach singular
mountain spinaches plural

Morphology

mountain + spinach

The compound is compositionally regular: 'mountain' modifies 'spinach', so a learner who knows both words can infer it denotes a type of spinach associated with mountains or named for that trait (i.e., a leafy vegetable related to spinach). This noun+noun naming pattern is common cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner knowing the constituents would very likely grasp the meaning.

Etymology

Mountain spinach may come from old gardeners who found a plant with edible leaves growing on hills and used it like regular spinach. The word mountain points to where it often grew and spinach shows how people cooked its leaves, so today the name means a plant used as a 'leafy vegetable'.