Horticulture

How to spell horticulture

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce horticulture

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does horticulture mean?

1. nounThe art and science of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants.

Horticulture in a sentence

• She studied horticulture at college before opening her own plant nursery.

• The council runs evening classes in horticulture for keen gardeners.

Where does horticulture come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word was assembled in English in the seventeenth century from two Latin parts, and its makers modelled it directly on the older word 'agriculture'. The first half comes from the Latin hortus, meaning 'garden' or 'enclosed plot', a root that also lies behind the much rarer word 'orchard'. The second half traces back to the Latin colere, 'to cultivate, tend or till', through its noun cultura, the same element that gives us 'culture' and 'cultivate'. So the whole word literally means 'the tending of the garden', neatly distinguishing small-scale cultivation of plants from the field crops of agriculture. The unstressed 'i' linking 'horti' to 'culture' is the usual stumbling block, since it echoes the connecting vowel of agriculture and is easy to drop or replace with an 'a'.

How the word is built

• horti- (from Latin hortus: garden)
• cult- (from colere: to cultivate or tend)
• -ure (noun-forming suffix)