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
Fazlul Haq, The Conversation, 25 Apr. 2025
As a result, there is now a growing possibility of simultaneous crop failures in two far-apart breadbaskets—something that could disrupt the global food supply and lead to malnutrition and, in some places, widespread starvation.
—Michael Oppenheimer, Foreign Affairs, 13 Oct. 2020
Ukraine is also the breadbasket of Europe and Africa — when Russia is not shelling its remaining ports.
—Trudy Rubin, The Mercury News, 11 Jan. 2025
The military has recaptured swaths of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in recent months, and pushed the paramilitaries out of a key breadbasket region in central Sudan.
—Declan Walsh, New York Times, 23 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for breadbasket
Cite this Entry
“Breadbasket.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breadbasket. Accessed 3 May. 2025.
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breadbasket
noun
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