💰 Unexpected money 🍏 Fruit on ground

windfall

1 5.1

A fruit that has fallen from a tree and is often picked up to eat

noun
/ˈwɪndˌfɔl/

Archaic

: fruto caído

City parks can sometimes offer a windfall of nuts or other edible plants.
windfall apples

Examples

Windfall apples litter the ground here.

Fiction book (1999)
In this way, I bring my apples home, my windfall fruit, to eat.

Fiction book (1999)
This chimpanzee stumbles across a windfall of overripe plums.
After the storm, we found a windfall of apples scattered on the ground.
During our hike, we discovered a windfall of wild berries by the path.
The children were excited to collect the windfall fruits that had dropped from the trees.

Antonyms

picking

1 1.3

Gathering fruit or crops by hand

Compounds

windfall profit

5 5.0

A large unexpected gain of money from an event you cannot control

Surface Forms

windfall singular

windfalls plural

Morphology

windfall = wind + fall (transparent) = wind + fall

A straightforward compound meaning an object that has fallen because of the wind; directly inferable from its parts.

Etymology

Windfall originally meant fruit that the wind made fall from a tree, so people could gather it without picking. That's why a windfall can still mean fruit or other things that have 'fallen' from a tree after a storm.