Costa Rica
16
1.0
- proper noun
- /ˈkoʊstə ˈriːkə/
:
Costa Rica
- (BEEPING) WOMAN ON PA: Ladies and gentlemen, American Airlines is announcing flight number 1243 to Costa Rica.
- forests of Costa Rica
- president of Costa Rica
- resources in Costa Rica
Where do you, I mean, where do you, where do you get all your food in Costa Rica?
- Where do you, I mean, where do you, where do you get all your food in Costa Rica?
- My father and I always joked that Costa Rica calls themselves the Switzerland of Central America.
- The massive change was I went to South America, to Costa Rica and done Ayah, Oscar, how you done that?
- I mean, at the place some people go to Chile or Costa Rica, you know, foreign Honduran somewhere.
- And so I see Costa Rica, I see Dominican, and then there was one other one Hawaii.
- Places like Costa Rica and places like even Ecuador is pretty good at they're good at it.
- Jungles, Costa Rica, Central America, some mountains in the Alps in Europe, home in Wales, Little Island in the UK.
Examples
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Every year, tourists flock to Costa Rica to experience its beautiful beaches and lush rainforests.
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A brief census of a mangrove forest in Costa Rica turned up forty-four species of breeding land birds.
Academic text (1990) -
I own an island off the coast of Costa Rica.
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The mountains of Costa Rica.
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The Republic of Costa Rica.
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What happened to lying on a beach in Costa Rica for the next twenty years?
Fiction book (2002) -
More than 60 percent of Costa Rica's territory is suitable only for forests.
Academic text (1992) -
And since the abolition of its armed forces 62 years ago, Costa Rica has never suffered a coup.
Academic text (2011) -
Since then, agreements have been reached with Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Costa Rica, and Honduras.
Academic text (1990) -
I do not regret a single cent that I've spent on traveling to Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Colombia.
Synonyms
A country in Central America with a stable government and rich wildlife
Surface Forms
Morphology
Costa + Rica
Costa Rica is a proper name (toponym) rather than a compositional English phrase; the listed constituents are not English lexical items here, so a B1 learner who knows English words would not derive the meaning 'a Central American country' from them. Even if a learner recognized the Spanish roots meaning 'rich coast', that literal reading does not reliably signal that the expression denotes a sovereign country, making the expression non-compositional for typical English learners.
Etymology
The name Costa Rica comes from Spanish and literally means 'rich coast'. Costa means 'coast' and rica means 'rich'. One popular story says early Spanish visitors saw gold and other valuable things on the shores and called the place that, so the name stuck as the 'country' name.