wild sweet pea
- noun
- US
:
guisante silvestre
- Farmers once harvested wild sweet pea as a natural source of rotenone.
Examples
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The wild sweet pea grows vigorously in the meadows of eastern North America.
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The delicate flowers of the wild sweet pea add soft color to the field each summer.
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The wild sweet pea blooms beautifully in the spring.
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Have you seen the wild sweet peas in the garden?
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Farmers once harvested wild sweet pea as a natural source of rotenone.
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The wild sweet pea grows vigorously in the meadows of eastern North America.
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The delicate flowers of the wild sweet pea add soft color to the field each summer.
Synonyms
A North American bush with soft hairy leaves and pale flowers sometimes used to kill insects
A small bush from eastern North America with soft leaves and yellow-pink flowers used to make insect poison
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun is a straightforward compositional combination of 'wild' (growing naturally), 'sweet' (pleasantly scented) and 'pea' (a pea plant), so a learner who knows the parts will infer it denotes a naturally growing, sweet‑scented pea plant. This follows regular adjective+noun formation with no idiomatic or metaphorical shift, making the meaning immediately recoverable.
Etymology
Wild sweet pea comes from the simple picture behind the name: it looks like the garden sweet pea with soft, sweet-smelling flowers but grows wild in fields and meadows rather than in gardens. People also once used it as a simple 'natural insect spray', so the name helps you remember both how it looks and why farmers noticed it.
