sugarplum

4 6.8

A small round sweet made of sugar often with fruit or nuts

noun
/ˈʃʌɡərˌplʌm/

Archaic

: dulce

What's up, sugarplum?
Sugarplum Fairy
visions of sugarplums
little sugarplum

Examples

Thank you, sugarplum.

St. Vincent (2014)
Okay, come on, sugarplums, it's past your bedtimes.

JFK (1991)
- Have a good day at school, sugarplum!

Who's Driving Doug (2016)
Right back at you, sugarplum.

The Great Gilly Hopkins (2015)
Thanks so much for having me over, sugarplum.

Being John Malkovich (1999)
Sugarplum, can I steal you for a sec?

Beast Mode (2020)
He actually called her "my little sugarplum"?

Jingle All the Way 2 (2014)
Why so glum, sugarplum?

Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort (2014)
"Allegra popped the last sugarplum into her mouth, then leaned forward, squinting at the maid.

Fiction book (1991)
At the fair, I bought a sugarplum from the candy stall and enjoyed its sweet flavor.

Synonyms

sweet

vssugarplum

76 1.0

A small sugary food eaten after a meal

is a small round or oval confection often containing fruit or nuts

sugar candy

vssugarplum

3 1.0

A hard sweet made by boiling sugar and letting it cool

is a small round or oval confection often containing fruit or nuts

Surface Forms

sugarplum singular

sugarplums plural

Morphology

sugarplum = sugar + plum (semi-transparent) = sugar + plum

The components 'sugar' + 'plum' are clear, but the confectionary sense may not involve an actual plum, making the relation slightly non-literal.

Etymology

The word sugarplum is simply sugar plus plum, and long ago a 'plum' could mean 'a sweet treat' or 'a fruit preserved in sugar'. That's why a sugarplum came to mean a small, round sweet or candy.