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bumper crop

bumper crop

4 3.4
A much larger than usual harvest of a crop
  • noun
  • /ˈbʌmpər krɑp/
translation icon : cosecha abundante
  • In 1870, the drought ended, and many local farmers raised bumper crops of wheat, corn, and cotton.
  • produce bumper crops
  • bumper crop this year
  • harvest a bumper crop

Examples

  • And I thought Oh my gosh, we are going to have a bumper crop of pears this year.

  • This year, the farmer celebrated a bumper crop of tomatoes, much larger than last year's harvest.

  • We seem to get a bumper crop every year.

    Fiction book (1999)
  • And I was assured by the van driver that the boxes will contain a bumper crop.

  • At the end of that year, We had a bumper crop of seed mealies.

  • The country is blessed with a bumper crop, and inflationary pressures are being beaten back.

    Academic text (2017)
  • The seeds I started in my greenhouse back in February have yielded a bumper crop of tomatoes.

    Blog text (12)
  • After months of ideal weather, the village enjoyed a bumper crop of wheat, ensuring plenty of food for all.

  • Due to careful cultivation, the orchard had a bumper crop of apples, attracting many visitors for the picking season.

Synonyms

good harvest
vsbumper crop
2 1.6

A time when crops grow well and give a lot of food

is more unusually large rather than only generally high yields
bountiful crop
vsbumper crop
3.4

A large amount of food grown and gathered by farmers

is unusually large and more extreme than that kind of harvest

Antonyms

3 3.6

A season when crops do not grow enough food or produce to sell

How Large

bumper crop
4 3.4
good harvest
2 1.6
crop failure
3 3.6

Surface Forms

bumper crop singular
bumper crops plural

Morphology

bumper + crop

While 'crop' clearly refers to a harvest, the meaning of 'bumper' here ('unusually large') is not the prototypical sense learners know (e.g. a car bumper) and is not transparently derivable from the literal constituents. The phrase becomes understandable once the adjectival sense of 'bumper' is known, so the relation is partial rather than fully predictable to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Bumper crop may come from the old word bumper, which once meant a very full, overflowing cup. People began using bumper to describe something 'very large', so a bumper crop came to 'mean' 'an unusually large harvest'.