prickly pear

Questions about prickly pear

What is another word for prickly pear?

It depends which prickly pear you mean. In the sense “cacti having spiny flat joints and oval fruit that is edible in some species; often used as food for stock”, the synonyms are prickly pear cactus. Across all 2 senses there are 1 distinct synonyms, and they are not interchangeable with each other — this page lists them under the sense each one belongs to.

What is the opposite of prickly pear?

WordNet records no antonym for prickly pear. Antonymy in WordNet is a relation between specific word forms rather than between concepts, so it is recorded only where lexicographers judged the pairing direct. An absence here means none was recorded, not that none can be imagined.

Why are the synonyms for prickly pear split into groups?

Because prickly pear carries 2 recorded senses and each has its own set of substitutes. A single flat list would put words from unrelated meanings side by side with nothing to tell them apart, which is exactly how a writer picks the wrong one. The grouping comes from WordNet's synsets, not from an editorial judgement of ours.

Where do the synonyms for prickly pear come from?

From Princeton University's WordNet, a lexical database maintained by lexicographers since 1985. A synonym here means a word form that shares a synset with this word — a set of forms interchangeable in one recorded context. Nothing on this page is generated by a language model.

Other views of prickly pear

• Full entry for prickly pearAll 2 senses, with examples, usage labels, syllables and pronunciation.
• Rhymes for prickly pearWhether this word can be rhymed at all — it is not in the pronouncing dictionary.
• Thesaurus homeHow WordNet synsets work, and the collections built for synonym work.