peach pit
3
3.1
- noun
- /piːt/
- But he had saved, too, had saved dried peach pits and put them in a box which Miss Foyt had sent away—the pits were used in gas masks, somehow.
Examples
-
I made a ship in a bottle once, and just for kicks, I threw a peach pit in there on top of the upper deck.
Fiction book (2002) -
I opened it to find a simple jewel, a ruby as big as a peach pit.
Fiction book (1997) -
Besides, how's a peach pit ever supposed to become a tree if you never give it the chance to grow?
-
Studying the peach pit.
Fiction book (1990) -
Before it started scabbing, it spit out a number of things: a collar button and a piece of wool collar from the shirt he had been wearing when he was hit, a shard of soft grey metal as big as a quarter dollar piece, and, unaccountably, something that closely resembled a peach pit.
Fiction book (1997) -
After eating the delicious peach, I discarded the peach pit in the compost.
-
She carefully removed the peach pit before slicing the fruit for the salad.
-
The children found a peach pit in the garden and decided to plant it to grow a new tree.
Synonyms
11
3.2
A hard inner stone in fruits like peaches
1
3.9
The hard inner part of some fruits that contains the seed
A hard stone inside some fruits that contains the seed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'the hard stone in the center of a peach' is directly and compositionally derived from 'peach' (the fruit) plus 'pit' (the hard inner stone). This simple noun–noun compound follows a common and cross-linguistic pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily understand it.
Etymology
Peach pit is the simple name for the hard part found in the middle of a peach. The word pit means a hard 'stone' or 'seed' that you remove before eating or plant to grow a new tree, so the phrase points to that inner seed.