Flower

How to spell flower

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce flower

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does flower mean?

1. nounThe colourful blooming part of a plant, often grown or given for its beauty or scent.
2. verbTo produce blooms, or figuratively to develop and thrive.

Flower in a sentence

• noun

  He picked a single red flower from the garden for her.

• verb

  These tulips flower early in the spring each year.

• noun

  Each flower on the rose bush opened fully in the summer heat.

• verb

  Under good management the small business began to flower.

Where does flower come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Flower came into English in the early 1200s from the Old French flour or flor, which in turn descended from the Latin flos, with its stem florem, meaning 'blossom' or 'bloom'. The Latin root literally referred to the flourishing, showy part of a plant, and it spread into many familiar relatives such as 'florist', 'florid', 'flourish', and even 'flour', which was once 'the flower of the meal', meaning the finest part of ground grain. For centuries flower and flour were simply two spellings of the same word, and only around the early 1800s did English settle 'flower' for the plant and 'flour' for the milled grain. That shared history is exactly why the two are still confused today, and remembering the 'flow' inside flower (a plant in full flow of bloom) helps keep the spellings apart.

How the word is built

• flower (from Old French flour, from Latin flos/florem 'blossom'); a single root noun with no separable affix

Words that sound like flower

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• flour: A fine powder made by grinding wheat or other grain, used in baking and cooking.