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Glite Dictionary
underripe

underripe

1 3.9
Not fully grown or ready to eat, often for fruit
  • adjective
  • /ˌʌndəˈraɪp/
translation icon : inmaduro
  • All of your fruits come in a single variety, the size and texture of an underripe baseball.
  • underripe fruit
  • underripe melon
  • underripe pear

Examples

  • Since the bananas were still underripe, they had a chalky texture and no sweetness.

  • The building, with brick the color of an underripe peach's flesh, was shaped like a narrow-tipped triangle in order to fit into the severe bight of the street corner.

    Fiction book (1999)

  • But in its native Mexico, it is preferred green and slightly underripe as the basis for a spicy salsa.

    Academic text (1995)

  • To develop the cantaloupe lexicons, for example, she brought in panelists and presented them with a range of melons, some that were underripe, mature, very mature, and so on.

    Academic text (2005)

  • I read somewhere that in modern prefab housing the lack of good circulation approximates the artificial conditions created in a greenhouse and, therefore, infant growth is accelerated and children grow up like hothouse vegetables—overgrown but underripe.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • The salad tasted unpleasant because it included underripe tomatoes that were too hard to chew.

  • I prefer to use underripe mangoes in my smoothies because they add a nice tartness.

Synonyms

unripe
vsunderripe
3 2.7

Not fully grown and not ready to eat or use

is used especially for fruit and vegetables rather than abstract ideas
unripened
vsunderripe
4.2

Not fully grown and not ready to eat, like green fruit and vegetables

is a general everyday term for food that is not ready

Antonyms

ripe
63 1.0

Fully grown fruit ready to be eaten or harvested

How Ripe

overripe
7 3.0
ripe
63 1.0
underripe
1 3.9

Surface Forms

underripe positive

Morphology

underripe = ripe (transparent) = under + ripe

The prefix 'under-' here means 'insufficiently' and combines directly with 'ripe' to give the literal sense 'not fully ripe', which is readily inferable by learners.

Etymology

The word underripe combines under and ripe, where under here means 'not enough' and ripe means 'ready to eat'. So an underripe fruit is literally 'not ready' to eat and is often hard or sour.