prickly pear

Questions about prickly pear

What does prickly pear mean?

prickly pear means "cacti having spiny flat joints and oval fruit that is edible in some species; often used as food for stock". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for prickly pear?

Close synonyms include prickly pear cactus. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is prickly pear a common word?

prickly pear is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.