Meaning & use
apple
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Meanings
nouncountable
A round fruit with a firm, sweet or tart flesh and a thin skin, usually red, green or yellow.
Grammar: Countable for fruit (an apple), but used with no article in food terms: apple pie.
Patterns
- eat an apple
- a bag of apples
- apple pie
She packed an apple and a sandwich for lunch.
The children picked apples from the old tree.
He sliced the apple and shared it with his sister.
nouncountable or uncountable
The tree that bears this fruit, or its wood.
Grammar: Often written as apple tree for the plant itself.
Patterns
- an apple tree
- apple wood
An old apple stood at the end of the garden.
They planted a young apple near the fence.
Apple wood gives a sweet smoke when you cook with it.
Word forms
| plural | apples |
|---|
Common combinations
- apple pie
- Grandmother's apple pie was the best in town.
- apple juice
- I drink a glass of apple juice at breakfast.
- bad apple
- One bad apple in the team can spoil the mood.
- apple of my eye
- His youngest daughter is the apple of his eye.
- apples and oranges
- Comparing the two jobs is like comparing apples and oranges.
- apple orchard
- We spent the afternoon in an apple orchard.
Synonyms and how they differ
- pome
- Pome is the botanical term for fruits like apples and pears and is rarely used in everyday speech.
- crab apple
- Crab apple is a small, sour wild kind of apple, not a general word for the fruit.
Word family
- applesauce noun
- apples cooked and mashed into a soft puree
- crabapple noun
- a small sour apple
- pineapple noun
- a tropical fruit; the name originally meant pine cone
- applejack noun
- a strong alcoholic drink made from apples
Commonly confused: apple or pineapple? apple or pear?
apple vs pineapple
A pineapple is a tropical fruit with spiky skin, not a kind of apple, despite its name.
apple vs pear
A pear is a similar fruit but it is narrower at the top and has softer, grainy flesh.
Practice
What does 'one bad apple' usually mean?
Choose one answer.
The idiom refers to one bad person who can make a whole group look or act badly. The literal fruit meaning is a tempting but wrong reading in this phrase.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “apple”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.