crash blossoms
crash blossoms is the plural of crash blossom.
Meaning of crash blossom
Noun
crash blossom (plural crash blossoms)
- A sentence, often a news headline, that is subject to incorrect interpretation due to syntactic and/or lexical ambiguity.
- Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The Guardian: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.”2010 January 27, Ben Zimmer, “Crash Blossoms”, On Language, in New York Times Magazine, archived from the original on 01 Feb 2010
Questions about crash blossoms
- What is crash blossoms the plural of?
- Crash blossoms is the plural of crash blossom.
Words near crash blossoms in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: crash blossoms (page history and authors); crash blossom (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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Cite this entry: “crash blossoms.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crash_blossoms. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.