dragon's eye
- noun
:
ojo de dragón
- The translucent flesh of the dragon's eye is both sweet and refreshing.
Examples
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She bought a bag of fresh dragon's eye from the market to make a fruit salad.
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The dragon's eye is often confused with lychee.
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In some Asian desserts, dragon's eye is used alongside lychee for its unique flavor.
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I bought some dragon's eye fruit at the market.
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In some Asian desserts, dragon's eye is used alongside lychee for its unique flavor.
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She bought a bag of fresh dragon's eye from the market to make a fruit salad.
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The translucent flesh of the dragon's eye is both sweet and refreshing.
Synonyms
A small sweet fruit like a lychee that grows on a tropical tree
A small round sweet fruit like a lychee with soft clear flesh and thin brown shell
Surface Forms
Morphology
dragon's + eye
The meaning 'a tropical fruit (longan)' cannot be predicted from the literal parts 'dragon' + 'eye' — the phrase reads as 'eye of a dragon' and gives no cue to a fruit. Although some languages (e.g. Chinese 龙眼 literally 'dragon eye') use the same name for longan, that cross-linguistic match is a lexical coincidence rather than transparent compositional meaning for an English B1 learner who knows the constituents.
Etymology
Dragon's eye comes from an old Chinese name for the fruit. The fruit has pale, see-through flesh and a dark round seed that shows through like the dark center of an eye, so people called it a small dragon's eye, and that's why the name refers to this sweet tropical fruit.
