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
Tejal Rao, New York Times, 12 Apr. 2024
Further fueling fears of hunger in the country, farmers from Artibonite – known as the breadbasket of Haiti because of its fertile lands and rice fields – are struggling to grow and sell their crops amid the insecurity.
—Hira Humayun, CNN, 3 Apr. 2024
See all Example Sentences for breadbasket 
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'breadbasket.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Breadbasket.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breadbasket. Accessed 29 May. 2024.
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breadbasket
noun
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