french-fried potatoes vs potato

french-fried potatoes and potato both are nouns.

Word	Noun	Adjective	Verb	Adverb
french-fried potatoes	Yes	No	No	No
potato	Yes	No	No	No

As nouns, potato is a hypernym of french-fried potatoes; that is, potato is a word with a broader meaning than french-fried potatoes:

Other hypernyms of french-fried potatoes include Irish potato, murphy, spud, tater, white potato.

french-fried potatoes (noun)	potato (noun)
strips of potato fried in deep fat	an edible tuber native to South America; a staple food of Ireland
	annual native to South America having underground stolons bearing edible starchy tubers; widely cultivated as a garden vegetable; vines are poisonous