CUCUMBER

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does cucumber mean? 

• CUCUMBER (noun)
  The noun CUCUMBER has 2 senses:

1. a melon vine of the genus Cucumis; cultivated from earliest times for its cylindrical green fruit

2. cylindrical green fruit with thin green rind and white flesh eaten as a vegetable; related to melons

  Familiarity information: CUCUMBER used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CUCUMBER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A melon vine of the genus Cucumis; cultivated from earliest times for its cylindrical green fruit

Classified under:

Nouns denoting plants

Synonyms:

cucumber; cucumber vine; Cucumis sativus

Hypernyms ("cucumber" is a kind of...):

melon; melon vine (any of various fruit of cucurbitaceous vines including: muskmelons; watermelons; cantaloupes; cucumbers)

Meronyms (parts of "cucumber"):

cucumber; cuke (cylindrical green fruit with thin green rind and white flesh eaten as a vegetable; related to melons)

Holonyms ("cucumber" is a member of...):

Cucumis; genus Cucumis (cucumbers; muskmelons)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Cylindrical green fruit with thin green rind and white flesh eaten as a vegetable; related to melons

Classified under:

Nouns denoting foods and drinks

Synonyms:

cucumber; cuke

Hypernyms ("cucumber" is a kind of...):

veg; vegetable; veggie (edible seeds or roots or stems or leaves or bulbs or tubers or nonsweet fruits of any of numerous herbaceous plant)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "cucumber"):

gherkin (small prickly cucumber)

Holonyms ("cucumber" is a part of...):

cucumber; cucumber vine; Cucumis sativus (a melon vine of the genus Cucumis; cultivated from earliest times for its cylindrical green fruit)

 Context examples 

Grafting is common in the farming of watermelon, tomato and cucumber.

(Grafting helps pepper plants deal with drought, SciDev.Net)

These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed in visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and dressing a salad and cucumber.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

An orally available nutritional supplement and proprietary formulation containing extracts from the sea cucumber, sea sponge, shark fin, sea urchin and the marine grass Sargassum, with potential antioxidant, antitumor, anti-angiogenic and immunomodulating activities.

(Nutraceutical TBL-12, NCI Thesaurus)

Cucumber seed oil is used primarily in skincare preparations.

(Cucumber Seed Oil, NCI Thesaurus)

It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race- horses and cucumbers.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)