breadfruit
Americannoun
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breadfruits
plural
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a large, round, starchy fruit borne by a tree, Artocarpus altilis, of the mulberry family, native to the Pacific islands, used, baked or roasted, for food.
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the tree bearing this fruit.
noun
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a moraceous tree, Artocarpus communis (or A. altilis ), of the Pacific Islands, having large round edible starchy usually seedless, fruit
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the fruit of this tree, which is eaten baked or roasted and has a texture like bread
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of breadfruit
Vocabulary lists containing breadfruit
Pacific Islands - Introductory
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Pacific Islands - Middle School and High School
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In “The Caribbean Cookbook,” the starch is either rice or “ground provisions,” the Anglophone term for yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, breadfruit and other staples.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 17, 2026
The air above Palau's pristine waters smells of salt and breadfruit, and on calm mornings in Koror, Palau's commercial centre, the whirr of dive boat engines echoes across the bay.
From BBC ● Nov. 23, 2025
Nearshore fishing was good, but there were no breadfruit trees, no church, no school, and only one plywood structure to shield older islanders from the elements.
From Slate ● Jul. 22, 2025
In 1778, British explorer Capt. James Cook was welcomed when he anchored off the Hawaiian islands by locals eager to trade cuttlefish, breadfruit and pigs for nails and iron tools.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 19, 2023
Each was nearly the size of an infant bonobo, and a few breadfruit were enough of a meal for the whole group.
From "Endangered" by Eliot Schrefer
And beyond the reef and beyond the blue, nestling among cocoanut trees and bananas, umbrella trees and breadfruits, oranges, mangoes, hibiscus, algaroba, and passion-flowers, almost hidden in the deep, dense greenery, was Honolulu.
From The Hawaiian Archipelago by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and breadfruits.
From Dickens As an Educator by James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes
A little back from the breach, and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to find a cluster of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson
It is in the counting of breadfruit only,202 4 breadfruits = 1 pona = 4.
From The Number Concept Its Origin and Development by Levi Leonard Conant
I have walked in one, with equal admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge breadfruits, eating bananas and stumbling among taro as I went.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
