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Glite Dictionary
bull tongue

bull tongue

9.9
A heavy plow with one wide blade that breaks soil for cotton
  • noun
  • Archaic
translation icon : arado de un solo surco
  • The farmer used a bull tongue to break the tough soil before planting cotton.

Examples

  • Old barns in the South sometimes still house a rusty bull tongue plow.

  • Replacing the blade on a bull tongue can be difficult due to its unique shape.

  • The farmer used a bull tongue to plow the field.

  • Many bull tongues are designed for heavy-duty work.

  • The farmer used a bull tongue to break the tough soil before planting cotton.

  • Replacing the blade on a bull tongue can be difficult due to its unique shape.

  • Old barns in the South sometimes still house a rusty bull tongue plow.

Synonyms

single-furrow plow
vsbull tongue
  • Specialized
8.6

A farming tool with one blade that cuts one furrow

is heavier and used mainly in cotton fields rather than for general soil turning

Surface Forms

bull tongue singular
bull tongues plural

Morphology

bull + tongue

Although 'tongue' can mean a projecting piece, the combination 'bull tongue' referring specifically to a heavy plow is specialized agricultural jargon and not transparently a plow to a B1 learner who knows 'bull' and 'tongue'. The constituents do not reliably signal 'plow' (the meaning requires domain knowledge or prior exposure), so the expression is effectively idiomatic for learners at this level.

Etymology

Bull tongue may come from the plow's wide, flat blade that looks like a bull's tongue. That's why the name came to mean a 'heavy plow' with a single wide blade used in cotton fields.