lamb curry

1 2.3

A dish of lamb cooked in a spicy sauce like Indian food

noun
/læm ˈkɜri/

: curry de cordero

Living in a family of carnivores, I often have plates of lamb curry or chicken sitting on the table in front of me (no beef!).

Examples

I had lamb curry last night and I'm shittlng out a Buick.

The Sweetest Thing (2002)
Lamb curry with currants and dates?

The Secret Life of Words (2005)
- Lamb curry.

Adam's Rib (1949)
"I hate lamb curry."

Fiction book (1994)
We got veggie korma, lamb curry, samosas.

Honeymoon (2014)
There's often a lamb curry, but she changes the offerings, most of which are gluten- and dairy-free, each week.

Blog text (13)
I ordered the lamb curry, which arrived steaming and full of aromatic spices.
At the new restaurant, the lamb curry is their most popular dish, praised for its rich flavor.
For dinner, we enjoyed lamb curry served with basmati rice and a side of naan.

Synonyms

lamb

vslamb curry

133 1.0

Meat from a young sheep for eating

is a prepared spiced South Asian meat dish rather than raw ingredient

curry

vslamb curry

117 1.4

A spicy dish of meat or vegetables cooked in a thick sauce served with rice

is a specific version with that meat cooked in a spiced sauce

Surface Forms

lamb curry singular

lamb curries plural

Morphology

lamb + curry

The meaning 'a curry dish made with lamb' is directly and compositionally derived from combining 'lamb' (meat from a young sheep) with 'curry' (a spiced stew/sauce); a B1 learner who knows both words will infer it denotes a curry featuring lamb. This is a common, productive food-noun compounding pattern (e.g., 'chicken curry') found cross-linguistically, so the expression is immediately comprehensible.

Etymology

Lamb curry paints a simple picture: lamb is the meat and curry comes from a word in India for a hot, spiced sauce or 'stew'. So the name means 'lamb cooked in a spiced sauce', which is the dish you order today.