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Glite Dictionary
pink lady

pink lady

1 6.7
A sweet pink cocktail made with gin, brandy, and grenadine
  • noun
  • /pɪŋk ˈleɪdi/
translation icon : pink lady
  • After dinner, I ordered a pink lady to enjoy at the bar.

Examples

  • Oh, I've had a pink lady.

    Topper (1937)

  • Here, have a pink lady.

    Topper (1937)

  • I'll be playing a pink lady today.

    Tin Cup (1996)

  • A pink lady.

    The Boys in the Band (1970)

  • It was a gesture she would repeat tirelessly in the weeks that followed, closing around her the arms of the doctors, medical students, nurses, technicians, social workers, chaplains, and pink ladies who wove past her bedside.

    Fiction book (1994)

  • The bartender mixed a refreshing pink lady with gin, brandy, and lemon juice.

  • At the party, everyone loved the pink lady cocktails served in elegant glasses.

Surface Forms

pink lady singular
pink ladies plural

Morphology

pink + lady

The meaning 'a specific cocktail' cannot be predicted from the constituents 'pink' (a colour) and 'lady' (a woman); this is a conventionalized drink name rather than a compositional description. Because the compound is a lexicalized proper name for a beverage, a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words would not reliably infer the cocktail meaning without prior exposure.

Etymology

The cocktail pink lady gets its name from its pale pink colour and the word lady, which made the drink sound gentle and elegant. The mix of 'gin', red syrup and egg white makes that soft pink froth, so the name came to mean this particular 'cocktail'.