Plant

How to spell plant

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plant

What does plant mean?

1. nounA living organism such as a flower, tree, or shrub that typically grows in soil and makes its own food from light.
2. nounA building or set of fixed machinery and equipment where goods are manufactured or power is generated.
3. verbTo put a seed, bulb, or young growth into the soil so that it can take root and grow.

Plant in a sentence

• noun

  She watered every plant on the windowsill before leaving for work.

• noun

  The car plant employs three thousand workers across two shifts.

• verb

  They decided to plant the bulbs along the garden fence this autumn.

• noun

  The office bought a tall leafy plant for the reception area.

• noun

  A fault at the power plant left the whole district without electricity.

• verb

  Farmers usually plant wheat in the cooler weeks before winter.

Where does plant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin planta, which meant a young shoot, a cutting, or a seedling ready for setting in the ground. Some scholars connect planta to the verb plantare, literally 'to drive in with the sole of the foot', since gardeners pressed cuttings into soil with their feet, and indeed planta also meant 'the sole of the foot'. Old English borrowed the noun early as plante, and after the Norman Conquest the influence of Old French planter reinforced and broadened the verb. By the later medieval period the meaning had widened far beyond gardening: people 'planted' colonies and settlements, which is why an early American settlement was called a plantation. The industrial sense (a factory or fixed equipment) grew in the 1800s from the idea of machinery firmly set or 'planted' in place. The spelling stays reassuringly simple, a rare case where the Latin root survives almost unchanged.

How the word is built

• plant (from Latin planta: a sprout, cutting, or the sole of the foot used to press seedlings in)