dogwood tree
1
4.5
- noun
- /ˈdɔɡˌwʊd tri/
:
cornejo
- Out the window, she could see the dogwood tree, leaves bright red, and down below, the school bus stopping for a crowd of children who filed up the steps and in through the narrow door, their arms filled with lunch boxes and notebooks.
Examples
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Then there was the ice storm on Thanksgiving, which snapped our power lines and most of the branches in the dogwood trees.
Fiction book (2001) -
I loved the pink flowering dogwood trees that made canopies over the country lanes.
Blog text (19) -
Yet all the attention was just for two young men in a green yard next to a little dogwood tree.
Blog text (22) -
The little dogwood tree at the corner of Grant Drive and George Street in Hanover has come to be known as the Wish Tree.
Blog text (22) -
I hid and watched my apartment from beneath a thin dogwood tree.
Fiction book (1996) -
It is a small two-bedroom bungalow with a nice dogwood tree in the front yard.
Fiction book (1999) -
Chris Hoke decorates the dogwood tree with the extension pole his grandfather made years ago for stringing lights on the tree.
Blog text (22) -
Without fail, every Christmas season brings a little more traffic along Grant Drive and George Street, because at that intersection sits the little barren dogwood tree, gleaming with more than 25,000 twinkle lights.
Blog text (22) -
The dogwood tree in my backyard is covered in beautiful white flowers every spring.
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Every autumn, the bright red leaves of the dogwood tree create a stunning display.
Synonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is fully compositional: 'dogwood' already denotes a particular kind of tree or shrub, and adding 'tree' simply classifies it as a tree. This noun+noun naming pattern is regular and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Dogwood tree may come from an old word 'dag' meaning a small, sharp stick, so the first part dog really refers to that stick. People used the tree's very hard wood to make skewers and tool handles, and that is why the tree became known as 'dogwood'.