pumpkin head
1
6.3
- noun
- /ˈpʌmpkɪn hɛd/
:
calabaza
- You can see him not picking up Barnes right before he gets the ball and smashes all over his teammate's pumpkin head.
Examples
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The children were delighted to see all the pumpkin heads decorating the neighborhood for the Halloween festival.
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That's why the story went around that Buster was a pumpkin head.
Fiction book (1990) -
Come on, little pumpkin head.
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Hey, is it cool with you guys if I explode one of these pumpkin heads?
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Their shells were decorated Road Warrior-style with homemade tribal totems, tinsel, and pumpkin heads.
Fiction book (2001) -
Summer saw the damp, wilted white of women's dresses and men's suits, the brilliant yellow of beer wagons... fall brings bright-colored leaves whisked from trees, the deep orange of pumpkin heads at the windows on Halloween...
Academic text (1998) -
For Halloween, we carved a spooky face into a large pumpkin head and placed it on the porch.
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Our jack-o'-lantern, a classic pumpkin head, flickered with light as night fell on Halloween.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound meaning is directly derivable from the constituents: a ‘head’ made of a ‘pumpkin’ or a person whose head resembles a pumpkin. Noun‑noun composition of this type is a regular, transparent pattern in English (and parallels exist in many languages), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer the meaning.
Etymology
Pumpkin head comes from the Halloween tradition of carving a pumpkin into a face and putting a light inside so it looks like a glowing head on a porch. That's why a carved gourd is a 'decoration' and a person who wears a pumpkin or looks like one can be called a 'pumpkin head'.