yaupon
US/ˈjoʊˌpɑn/
yaupon noun: the yaupon holly, Ilex vomitoria, an evergreen holly shrub with white flowers and red or yellow berries, found in the south-eastern United States.
Noun
yaupon (countable and uncountable, plural yaupons)
- The yaupon holly, Ilex vomitoria, an evergreen holly shrub with white flowers and red or yellow berries, found in the south-eastern United States.
- Yaupon is evergreen like the American holly and the familiar hollies of Christmas decorations, but the leaves of yaupon are small and smooth-edged rather than prickly. Easy to chew and blandly tasty, they would not stand out in a tossed salad.2002, Connie C. Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms
- “I found some yaupon and made some tea. It's North America's only native caffeinated plant. Well, dahoon, but you're not gonna find that in --”2025 February 23, Dave King, “Star-Tel-Lite” (7:25 from the start), in Common Side Effects, season 1, episode 5, spoken by Marshall Cuso (Dave King)
- A tea-like drink, "black drink", brewed from the leaves of this holly (or, sometimes, Ilex cassine).
Forms of yaupon
| plural | yaupons |
|---|---|
| alternative form | yapan |
| alternative form | yopon |
| alternative form | youpon |
| alternative form | yupon |
| alternative form | yawpan |
| alternative form | yaupan |
Origin of yaupon
From a Catawba word, most likely yap, yop, yą (“tree”), with the second element being either a diminutive suffix or pą (“leaf”) (resulting in the compound yąpą); alternatively, perhaps directly from a longer form of the word for leaf, 'yap'hâ.
Questions about yaupon
- What does yaupon mean?
- Yaupon means the yaupon holly, Ilex vomitoria, an evergreen holly shrub with white flowers and red or yellow berries, found in the south-eastern United States.
- What part of speech is yaupon?
- Yaupon is a noun.
- How do you pronounce yaupon?
- Yaupon is pronounced /ˈjoʊˌpɑn/ (US).
- What is the plural of yaupon?
- The plural of yaupon is yaupons.
Words near yaupon in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: yaupon (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “yaupon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/yaupon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.