Genipap

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The North and South American tree Genipa americana of the family Rubiaceae.

    "Genipap is wild and cultivated in many parts of the Amazon, especially on floodplains, from the river's mouth to the Andean foothills in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia."

  2. 2
    a succulent orange-sized tropical fruit with a thick rind wordnet
  3. 3
    The fruit of this tree, oval in shape, as large as a small orange, of a pale greenish color, and with dark purple juice, traditionally used as a colorant.

    "Unripe genipap fruits are widely used by indigenous tribes to extract the blue pigment, exposing the inside part of the fruit to the air."

Synonyms

All synonyms
genipgenipap fruit

Example

More examples

"Genipap is wild and cultivated in many parts of the Amazon, especially on floodplains, from the river's mouth to the Andean foothills in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia."

Etymology

Borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese jenipapo, from Old Tupi îanypaba. The Tupi meaning of the word is variously given as yandi-pawa or yandi-pab (“fruit for painting”), yandi-ibá-pab (“fruit of the extremities for painting”), and without citation or explanation, “breast of an old woman”.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.