pineapple
Pluralpineapples (some meanings)
Pluralpineapples (some meanings)
- 1A large oval tropical fruit with a tough, spiky, segmented skin, a crown of stiff leaves, and sweet, juicy yellow flesh around a fibrous core; also this flesh eaten fresh, canned, or cooked.
The recipe calls for diced pineapple and a splash of lime juice.
She picked out a ripe pineapple by sniffing its base.
UsageA pineapple is the whole fruit; cut up it is just pineapple: diced pineapple, a can of pineapple.
Note
In savory dishes, the fruit is older than the pizza debate suggests. Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book (1909) has a recipe that tops cream cheese on buttered white bread with finely chopped pineapple, then cuts the sandwiches into thin strips.
- 2Ananas comosus, a tropical plant native to South America whose thick stem is ringed by thirty or more long, pointed, spiny leaves.
Each pineapple plant produces just a single fruit at a time.
Farmers propagate pineapple from the leafy crown of a harvested fruit.
- 3A hand grenade, so called from its resemblance to the spiky, segmented fruit.
He lobbed a pineapple into the bunker and ducked for cover.
The old soldier called his hand grenade a pineapple.
Similargrenade
Less common meanings
- 4A hairstyle in which the hair is gathered into a high ponytail on top of the head, imitating the leafy crown of the fruit.
Many curly-haired people sleep with their hair in a pineapple to protect their coils.
She gathered her hair into a high pineapple and pinned the front back.
- 5A pale yellow color resembling the flesh of a pineapple; also called pineapple yellow.
The designer chose pineapple for the kitchen cabinets, warm and sunny.
Walls washed in pineapple gave the small room a cheerful glow.
- 6An Australian fifty-dollar note, so named because the note is yellow like the fruit.
The cab fare came to forty dollars, so he handed over a pineapple and waited for change.
A couple of pineapples should cover dinner and drinks tonight.
Similarfifty
- 7A safeword: a prearranged word spoken to signal that all activity should stop at once.
He gasped "pineapple!" and his partner immediately backed off.
If anything felt wrong, all she had to do was say pineapple.
Note
A word from the vocabulary of BDSM and sexuality, used as an interjection: it is spoken on its own as a complete signal, and it overrides any protest made as part of a scene. Its value lies in being arbitrary. A fruit name is unlikely to come up by accident, so no one can mistake it for part of the play.
- 8The woody, scaly seed cone produced by a pine or fir tree.
Note
The oldest meaning of the word, now obsolete in the standard language and surviving in dialect and heraldry. The name first belonged to the cone, and the tropical fruit borrowed it later. When reading older texts, pineapple may mean the cone of a pine or fir rather than anything tropical.
- 9A spiny, globe-shaped fish, Chilomycterus antillarum, a type of burrfish found in warm Atlantic waters.
Showing meanings only.
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Origin
From Middle English pinappel ("pinecone", literally "pine-apple" or "pine-fruit"), from Proto-West Germanic *pīnapplu. It was later applied to the fruit of the pineapple plant because of its resemblance to a pinecone; compare Middle Dutch and Dutch pijnappel and Old High German pīnapful, all meaning "pinecone". By surface analysis, pine + apple.
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 6 facts
- Pineapple comes from Middle English pinappel, meaning pinecone, literally pine-apple or pine-fruit. en.wiktionary.org
- The Middle English word derives from reconstructed Proto-West Germanic *pīnapplu. en.wiktionary.org
- The name was subsequently applied to the tropical fruit because it resembles a pinecone. en.wiktionary.org
- Middle Dutch and Dutch pijnappel mean pinecone. en.wiktionary.org
- Old High German pīnapful means pinecone. en.wiktionary.org
- The English word can be analysed as pine plus apple. en.wiktionary.org