🎯 A blow tube 🌱 A plant attacker

pea shooter

1 4.8

A narrow tube you blow small dried peas through to hit a target

noun
/piː ˈʃuːtər/

: tirador de guisantes

My pea shooter broke yesterday.

Examples

The children took turns aiming their pea shooter at the target on the fence.
As a child, he used a pea shooter to knock over empty cans in the backyard.
She made a homemade pea shooter out of a straw and some dried peas.
The teacher confiscated the pea shooter after students used it in class.
The pea shooter is a classic toy.
He carefully loaded dried peas into his pea shooter before the game began.
With a loud puff, she sent a pellet flying from her pea shooter towards the cardboard box.

Synonyms

peashooter

vspea shooter

4.0

A simple tube toy you blow into to shoot small peas

has identical meaning but written as two separate words

Surface Forms

pea shooter singular

pea shooters plural

Morphology

pea + shooter

The compound combines 'pea' (a small round seed) and 'shooter' (one that shoots), so a learner who knows both words can readily infer an entity that fires peas as projectiles. This is a straightforward, compositional noun phrase following transparent English compounding patterns, making the meaning accessible to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Pea shooter comes from a very simple toy: a narrow tube you blow through to send a dried pea flying at a target. Because it literally 'shoots' peas, the name became the common word for that small toy.