Meaning & use
umeboshi
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Meaning
nouncountable or uncountable
A small Japanese plum that is pickled with salt and often dried, eaten with rice and used as a filling.
Grammar: Countable when you mean individual plums (one umeboshi, two umeboshi); uncountable when you mean the food in general.
Patterns
- eat umeboshi
- an umeboshi filling
- umeboshi onigiri
He packed a rice ball with umeboshi for lunch.
Umeboshi is very salty and sour, so a little goes a long way.
The restaurant serves grilled fish with a single umeboshi on the side.
Common combinations
- umeboshi onigiri
- I bought an umeboshi onigiri at the station.
- pickled umeboshi
- These pickled umeboshi have been aged for a year.
- a jar of umeboshi
- She keeps a jar of umeboshi in the fridge.
- salty umeboshi
- The salty umeboshi gave the rice a strong flavor.
Synonyms and how they differ
- pickled plum
- A plain English description that works well for learners, but it does not tell you the fruit is actually closer to an apricot.
- ume
- The shorter Japanese name for the fruit itself; umeboshi is the pickled, processed form.
Commonly confused: umeboshi or ume?
umeboshi vs ume
Ume is the fresh fruit (a kind of apricot); umeboshi is that fruit after it has been salted and pickled.
Practice
I bought two ___ at the Japanese grocery store.
Choose one answer.
Borrowed Japanese nouns like umeboshi usually keep the same form in the plural, so 'two umeboshi' is correct. Adding -s, -es, or -'s is not standard for this word.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “umeboshi”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.