cuckoo bread

9.9

A plant with three-part heart-shaped leaves and white flowers with purple veins often in damp woods

noun

: pan de cucú

The shady forest floor was dotted with cuckoo bread blooming in early spring.

Examples

Botanists identified several clusters of cuckoo bread alongside the stream.
Children used to collect cuckoo bread leaves to press in their notebooks.
Look at that beautiful cuckoo bread over there!
I spotted a patch of cuckoo bread in the forest.
The shady forest floor was dotted with cuckoo bread blooming in early spring.
Botanists identified several clusters of cuckoo bread alongside the stream.
Children used to collect cuckoo bread leaves to press in their notebooks.

Synonyms

Oxalis acetosella

vscuckoo bread

Specialized

9.8

A small forest plant with three heart-shaped leaves and white flowers with purple veins

is the common name used instead of the Latin form

common wood sorrel

vscuckoo bread

7.4

A small forest plant with three heart-shaped leaves and white flowers with purple veins

is the scientific label rather than the everyday name

Surface Forms

cuckoo bread singular

cuckoo breads plural

Morphology

cuckoo + bread

The parts 'cuckoo' (a bird) and 'bread' (baked food or here not clearly defined) do not provide a transparent link to a specific plant species; the botanical meaning cannot be compositionally derived from these constituents. Because the second constituent is even unclear in the input and there is no predictable cross‑linguistic logic tying bird + bread to a flower, a B1 learner who knows the words would not infer the plant meaning.

Etymology

Cuckoo bread may come from a simple spring picture: one popular story says people saw the flowers when the bird cuckoo sang and children sometimes used the soft leaves like little bread to hold food. So today cuckoo bread is the name for that small wildflower that grows in woods.