rock candy
3
2.2
- noun
- /rɑk ˈkændi/
- US
:
caramelo de roca
- Jeanette sucked on a stick of rock candy from the coffee bar.
- stick of rock candy
And it, and the flavor was cotton candy, rock candy.
- And it, and the flavor was cotton candy, rock candy.
Examples
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Do you have any hard rock candy for the party?
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As a matter of fact, it was in this very room that Roxy first dreamt of creating a center for cosmetology and drama while chipping a tooth on a piece of rock candy right before the ninth grade production.
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All I have is a piece of hard rock candy.
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The women got a length of cloth to make a new dress, and the children got a bit of rock candy to suck.
Fiction book (1994) -
I actually made rock candy for the first time when I was a kid after I saw Beakman do it on Beakman's World...
Blog text (16) -
They live on flapjacks, chewing tobacky, and hard-rock candy.
-
Pint-size customers line up at the counter to buy old-fashioned rock candy, licorice, and homemade fudge.
Synonyms
863
1.0
A small sweet made from sugar, often with chocolate or nuts
24
1.0
A hard sweet on a small stick that you lick or suck
7
1.0
A small sweet made from sugar that you suck rather than chew
1
1.0
A hard sweet made by boiling sugar and letting it cool
1
2.8
Large hard sugar crystals that people use to sweeten drinks and decorate food
How Hard
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is compositional: a B1 learner who knows 'rock' (stone/hard) and 'candy' (sugary treat) can infer a candy that is hard or rock-like, i.e. made of large sugar crystals. Noun+noun formation with a descriptive first element is a common, cross-linguistic pattern, so the meaning is immediately derivable from the constituents.
Etymology
Rock candy gets its name from the way the sweet is made: large, hard sugar crystals grow on a stick and look like small rocks, so the name simply means 'a hard candy made of sugar crystals'.