kudzu vine

American

[kood-zoo] / ˈkʊd zu /

noun

a fast-growing Chinese and Japanese climbing vine, Pueraria lobata, of the legume family, now widespread in the southern U.S., having tuberous, starchy roots and stems: used for fiber, as food and forage, and to prevent soil erosion.

Etymology

Origin of kudzu vine

1900–05; < Japanese kuzu, earlier kudu, of uncertain origin

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

In the Mississippi River, it is Asian carp; in the Everglades, Burmese pythons; in the Great Lakes, Russian zebra mussels; in the South, Indochinese kudzu vine.

From The Wall Street Journal

"All I've ever wanted / was to kiss crevices, pry them open, / and flourish within dew-slick / hollows," he explains, writing in the voice of a kudzu vine.

From Los Angeles Times

From the kudzu vine to the gypsy moth to the Burmese python surge in the Everglades, we often discover the impact of a species only when it’s too late.

From New York Times

Another major difference is that Eastern China is largely blessed with fertile, rainy climate which means that all manners of greenery run rampant; this is after all the region which gifted us with kudzu vine.

From Scientific American

But that's not only extraordinarily difficult, it can also backfire — just ask anyone in the southeastern U.S. about the inexorable advance of the imported invasive species the kudzu vine.

From Time

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023