wax crayon
- noun
- /wæks ˈkreɪən/
- He allowed me to take Clarissa into the office, where she spent most of the day sitting underneath my desk, holding her rabbit and drawing pictures with fat wax crayons.
Examples
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During art class, the students enjoyed creating vibrant drawings with wax crayons.
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With the neat movements of a jeweler, she showed them how she would draw a design with a wax crayon on a plastic sheet, sprinkle black stencil powder on the wax, and press the powdery outline to the skin.
Fiction book (1991) -
Then I've got the wax crayons from Tiger and the egg and chick from Tiger.
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The child happily colored a picture of a rainbow using her wax crayon.
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She packed several wax crayons into her backpack for the drawing activity at school.
Synonyms
A stick of colored wax used for drawing, often by children
How Soft
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: a 'crayon' is a drawing stick and 'wax' specifies the material it is made from, so the phrase denotes a crayon made of wax. This material-based modification is cross-linguistically common (e.g. French 'crayon de cire', Spanish 'lápiz de cera'), so a B1 learner who knows both words would readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Wax crayon is a name that describes the object: a small stick of wax used for drawing and coloring, and crayon just means a drawing stick. Because the soft wax rubs off on paper and leaves bright color, the name simply tells you it is 'a colored drawing tool'.