Word.ws English Dictionary

alligator pear

alligator pear noun: an avocado.

Noun

alligator pear (plural alligator pears)

  1. (Caribbean, Louisiana, Southern US, dialectal, especially) An avocado.
    • There was a tree just behind which bore alligator pears, and all about were the cocoa-nuts which gave the land its revenue.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, “chapter 52”, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC

Forms of alligator pear

pluralalligator pears

Origin of alligator pear

The "alligator" is likely an alteration of Spanish aguacate, perhaps influenced by the similarity in texture between the skin of the fruit and of an alligator.

Questions about alligator pear

What does alligator pear mean?
Alligator pear means an avocado.
What part of speech is alligator pear?
Alligator pear is a noun.
What is the plural of alligator pear?
The plural of alligator pear is alligator pears.

Words near alligator pear in the dictionary

  1. alligator juniper
  2. alligator junipers
  3. alligator leather
  4. alligator lizard
  5. alligator lizards
  6. alligator pear
  7. alligator pears
  8. alligator pepper
  9. alligator saw
  10. alligator saws
  11. alligator shear

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: alligator pear (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-alligator pear.wav.

Cite this entry: “alligator pear.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/alligator_pear. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.