apple pie

plural apple pies · alternative apple-pie

1. countableuncountableA pie or tart made with a filling of cooked apples.

   The enticing, homey scent of apple pie wafted into the hallway as she beckoned them into her lair.

   2011 April 12, Beth Kendrick, chapter 29, in The Bake-Off, New York, N.Y.: New American Library, →ISBN

2. countablefigurativelyuncountableAnything positive that is quintessentially American.

   Hanks has often been called our generation's answer to James Stewart, and the similarities are certainly there. With his shared "gee shucks" sweetness and apple pie Americanness, Stewart also appeared in many war films and family dramas.

   2021 February 9, Christina Newland, “Is Tom Hanks part of a dying breed of genuine movie stars?”, in BBC

   2 more examples

   […] what we've been waiting for so long: a positive but never Pollyanish play about gays leading lives which are neither some bizarre caricature taken from heterosexual fantasy nor even more nuclear and apple-pie normal than any straight lives anyone has ever heard of.

   1981 December 12, Andrea F. Loewenstein, “Gay Theatre Verité”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 21, page 10

   She was a refugee, not to America but from within America: a Mom and apple pie America, an America of the past that was being rapidly transformed by material inventions, and by the freeways, malls, and drive-in banks cited in the song Big Science as landmarks on the road to town.

   2021 April 8, Margaret Atwood, “‘It has never been more pertinent’ – Margaret Atwood on the chilling genius of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

3. UKcountabledialectaluncountableAny of various willowherbs.

present singular third person apple pies · participle present apple pieing · participle past apple pied · past apple pied · alternative apple-pie

1. transitiveOf a bed, to make an apple-pie bed.

   Synonyms: shortsheet