Word.ws English Dictionary

sandilla

/sænˈdiː(j)ə/

sandilla noun: a watermelon.

Noun

sandilla (plural sandillas)

  1. (California, Southern, obsolete) A watermelon.
    • Two other persons, swarthy and ferocious as Bedouins, and naked as Lazzaroni, were crouching in the dirt, and sharing a sandilla (water-melon), the scarlet slices of which they ate in company; […]1852, “A Peruvian Omnibus”, in Charles Hale, editor, To-Day: A Boston Literary Journal, volume 2, page 91
    • Maj. McKinstry, commanding the United States post at San Diego, charitably marched to the rescue and kindly took the government of the twin republics in out of the cold, and bade Hercules Melendez go home and be a good boy, cultivate sandillas and have an ever open eye for jerked beef.1881, Horace Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger or, Early Times in Southern California, page 210

Forms of sandilla

pluralsandillas

Origin of sandilla

Pseudo-Hispanism, derived from misconstruction of Spanish sandía (“watermelon”) as a diminutive formation in -illa (feminine diminutive suffix).

Words that rhyme with sandilla

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sandilla

What does sandilla mean?
Sandilla means a watermelon.
What part of speech is sandilla?
Sandilla is a noun.
How do you pronounce sandilla?
Sandilla is pronounced /sænˈdiː(j)ə/.
What is the plural of sandilla?
The plural of sandilla is sandillas.

Words near sandilla in the dictionary

  1. Sandiganbayan
  2. Sandigo
  3. sandik
  4. Sandilands
  5. Sandilandses
  6. sandilla
  7. sandillas
  8. sandily
  9. Sandin
  10. sandiness
  11. sanding

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sandilla (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: “sandilla.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sandilla. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.