jambu fruit
- noun
- Indian
- The jambu fruit tree in our garden produces pink, bell-shaped fruits every spring.
Examples
-
The jambu fruit is often sold in local markets alongside mangoes and lychees.
-
She enjoyed the refreshing taste of chilled jambu fruit on a hot afternoon.
-
I love eating jambu fruit in the summer.
-
Have you ever tried jambu fruit?
-
She enjoyed the refreshing taste of chilled jambu fruit on a hot afternoon.
-
The jambu fruit is often sold in local markets alongside mangoes and lychees.
-
The jambu fruit tree in our garden produces pink, bell-shaped fruits every spring.
Synonyms
A tropical fruit like a small apple with crisp, slightly sweet flesh
How Sweet
Surface Forms
Morphology
jambu + fruit
The phrase is compositionally regular (modifier + noun), so structurally transparent: it denotes the fruit of 'jambu'. However 'jambu' is a low-frequency, culture-specific lexical item (not derivable from its parts or from cross-linguistic regularities), so a B1 learner who only knows 'fruit' would not recover the specific meaning without knowing 'jambu'. This partial predictability makes the expression semi-transparent.
Etymology
Jambu fruit may come from the Malay word jambu, used for a bell-shaped, pink 'rose apple' that people ate from trees across South and Southeast Asia. That's why today jambu fruit means the sweet, crunchy tropical fruit you find in local markets.