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Glite Dictionary
banana bracket

banana bracket

9.1
An unusual tournament setup that makes winners hard to predict
  • noun
  • Slang
translation icon : torneo impredecible
  • The office pool used a banana bracket, making it nearly impossible to predict a winner.

Examples

  • Every year, fans joke about how their banana bracket gets busted in the first round.

  • Analysts laughed at the coach's suggestion to follow a banana bracket instead of traditional seeding.

  • What a banana bracket!

  • The banana bracket was unexpected!

  • Fans often complain that their banana bracket always leads to surprising outcomes during the tournament.

  • During March Madness, many participants prefer a banana bracket for its unpredictable twists.

  • His choice of a banana bracket for the fantasy league left everyone guessing who would win.

Surface Forms

banana bracket singular
banana brackets plural

Morphology

banana + bracket

The noun 'bracket' transparently indicates a tournament grouping, but the modifier 'banana' is a literal fruit whose figurative use (as in 'bananas' = crazy/silly) is informal and not predictable from the constituent meaning alone. Because understanding the intended sense — an odd or unpredictable bracket — depends on knowing that metaphorical slang, the expression gives a partial clue but is not fully derivable by a B1 learner who only knows the literal words.

Etymology

The term banana bracket may come from imagining a bracket bent like a banana, a funny curved shape that makes the tournament look strange and hard to predict. So it now means 'an unpredictable or unconventional tournament structure'.