breadbasket
noun
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Breadbasket has been used as slang in English since at least the mid-1700s. (It has been used even longer to mean literally a basket for holding bread.) It can refer to the stomach as an actual digestive organ ("his breadbasket rumbled with hunger"), but these days it's more commonly applied to the general stomach area ("rested her hands on her breadbasket"). No one is quite sure of the exact origins of the use, but it’s likely that there’s some connection between the basket used to hold bread and the basket where the bread ends up after a person eats it. Breadbasket has also come to refer to an area that supplies an important amount of grain ("the breadbasket of the country").
Examples of breadbasket in a Sentence
Uzodinma Iweala, Foreign Affairs, 21 June 2022
However, the war has transformed the continent’s breadbasket into potentially the world’s worst famine for 40 years, with 50% of Sudan’s population requiring humanitarian aid.
—Charlie Campbell / Dubai, TIME, 29 Nov. 2024
The city battles toxic air every winter, and authorities say much of the smoke comes from farmers illegally burning paddy stubble to clear their fields in the neighboring breadbasket states of Punjab and Haryana.
—Reuters, NBC News, 24 Oct. 2024
Gang members brandishing automatic rifles stormed through a town in Haiti’s main breadbasket region, killing at least 70 and forcing over 6,000 to flee, causing widespread shock even in a country grown accustomed to outbreaks of violence.
—Reuters, NBC News, 5 Oct. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Breadbasket.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breadbasket. Accessed 30 Dec. 2024.
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breadbasket
noun
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