Milk chocolate & cherry tomatoes

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In English we often find two nouns together: milk chocolate, cherry tomato, strawberry jam, grammar book.

These structures may be confusing for speakers of some languages where the same information is organised differently. Sometimes they are compound nouns, and sometimes they are collocations, combinations of words that tend to occur together very frequently rather than by chance.

The first noun gives information about the second one. A library card, a birthday card and a credit card are all different kinds of cards.

Chocolate cake, birthday cake and wedding cake are all types of cakes.

So, milk chocolate is chocolate, and cherry tomatoes are tomatoes.

milk chocolate
(chocolate that contains milk)


cherry tomatoes
(tomatoes that are as small as cherries)
 
 Sometimes we can find more than two nouns together:

milk chocolate biscuits 
(Yum!)







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