wax bean

1 3.1

A yellow bean with edible pods eaten as a vegetable

noun
/wæks biːn/

: judía amarilla

For a delicious side dish, steam the wax beans until tender and serve them with a sprinkle of salt.
yellow wax beans
green wax beans
trim the wax beans

Examples

And then here is the gold crop wax bean, and those are more of a yellow cream bean.
But I think even even if they would have came out right around the same time, the yellow wax bean just wow, really, really produced well.
To prepare a healthy salad, add blanched wax beans along with cherry tomatoes and feta cheese.
The recipe calls for one cup of chopped wax beans to enhance the flavor of the vegetable stir-fry.

Synonyms

yellow bean

vswax bean

1.6

A long thin vegetable with yellow pods that you eat

is a bean plant type with yellow edible pods described more generally

Surface Forms

wax bean singular

wax beans plural

Morphology

wax + bean

The head noun 'bean' clearly signals this is a kind of bean, so learners will understand the general category. However, 'wax' does not transparently convey the salient property (yellow, edible pods) to an average B1 learner — it is ambiguous (beeswax, verb to wax, etc.) and does not reliably map to 'yellow bean' cross-linguistically. Therefore the compound is only partially predictable from its parts.

Etymology

Wax bean is named for the plant's smooth, pale yellow pods that look a little like wax, so people used the word wax with bean to describe it. That clear picture of a yellow, shiny pod helps explain why wax bean means a type of edible yellow bean today.