melon

Pluralmelons

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A large, round to oval fruit with a rind, borne by certain plants of the gourd family.

   The melon split open to reveal cool, fragrant flesh.

   Roadside growers piled their melons high beside the highway.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Any of various plants of the family Cucurbitaceae that are grown for food, generally other than the cucumber.

   A melon will sprawl across the whole garden unless you train it up a trellis.

   Farmers in the valley rotate melons with corn to keep soil diseases from building up.

   Note

   A grower's word that gathers several genera under one name: the true melons, the watermelons, and the winter and bitter melons too. The name came through Latin and Old French from Greek mēlopépōn, a "ripe apple" (mêlon, "apple," plus pépōn, "ripe"). The cucumber belongs to the same family but is usually left out, so the boundary is drawn by use, not by botany.

3. 3
   nounslangcountable or uncountable

   A slang word for a woman's breasts, most often used in the plural.

   A low neckline left one melon almost on display at the party.

   He muttered a crude comment about her melons and got slapped.

   Similarboob, breast

   Note

   This is crude slang that nearly always appears in the plural, as in 'squeezing her melons' in K. L. Brady's Got a Right to Be Wrong (2013). The singular turns up too. In Thomas Berger's Crazy in Berlin (1958), a woman points to 'her left melon', over the heart. That use is the single-breast meaning. The word belongs in deliberately coarse or comic speech and nowhere polite.

4. 4
   nounslangcountable

   A slang term for a person's head.

   She rapped her knuckles against his melon and told him to wake up.

   One wild pitch caught the batter right on the melon.

   Similarhead, noggin, nut, noodle

   Note

   It is most at home in a teasing command: 'Think! Use your melon!' The phrase is a playful way to tell someone to use their brains. The word also sits naturally with verbs of striking, such as a knock or a bump on the melon. It is jokey rather than insulting and belongs to casual talk.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   A light pinkish-orange color, resembling the flesh of certain melons.

   The designer chose melon for the curtains to warm up the room.

   Her dress was a pale melon that complemented her tan.

   Note

   As a color name it is a mass noun. You paint a wall in melon or choose a shade of melon, but you would not call the color 'a melon'. The same word goes directly before a noun as the color adjective, as in melon ribbons or a melon dress.

6. 6
   adjective

   Of a light pinkish-orange color, resembling the flesh of certain melons.

   The bridesmaids carried melon ribbons down the aisle.

   They repainted the cafe in melon and cream.

7. 7
   nounslangfigurativelycountable or uncountable

   Slang for a breast, especially that of an adult or adolescent woman.

   She joked that the dress flattened her into having only half a melon.

   The comic mimed cupping a single melon to get a laugh.

   Similarboob, breast

8. 8
   nouncountable

   A mass of fatty tissue in the forehead of all toothed whales, used to focus and modulate their vocalizations.

   Works like a lens focusing a beam of light, except it shapes sound instead.

   The dolphin's melon bulged slightly as it produced a rapid series of clicks.

   Researchers used scans to map the fatty tissue of the melon across several whale species.

   Note

   A zoologist's term, with nothing of the kitchen about it. The melon sits in the forehead of every odontocete, or toothed whale, and acts as an acoustic lens. It focuses and shapes the high-frequency clicks used in echolocation. The noun is ordinary and countable, as in a dolphin's melon or the melons of several species, and it carries none of the slang edge of other uses.

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