Planter

How to spell planter

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce planter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does planter mean?

1. nounA decorative pot, box, or trough in which plants are grown.
2. nounA person who sows or sets plants, or who owns and runs a plantation.
3. nounA farm machine that drills or sets seed into the soil.

Planter in a sentence

• She filled the ceramic planter with fresh compost and herbs.

• The seasonal planter moved down the rows setting each seedling by hand.

• The tractor towed a six-row planter across the field at dawn.

• A wooden planter ran the length of the balcony railing.

• The colonial planter kept detailed ledgers of the estate's crops.

• He calibrated the planter to drop one seed every few centimetres.

Where does planter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word grows out of the noun 'plant', which English took from the Latin planta, a word that meant a sprout, a shoot, or a cutting ready to be set in the ground. Interestingly, planta also meant the sole of the foot, and the link is the verb plantare, 'to press into the soil with the foot', which is just how a gardener firms a young seedling. Old English borrowed 'plant' very early, and the agent and instrument ending '-er' was later attached in the ordinary native way to mean 'one who, or that which, plants'. By the 1400s 'planter' described a person who set crops, and the meaning later widened to a machine that sows seed, then to the decorative box or pot that holds growing plants. The same planta root also lies behind 'plantation' and even 'plantar', the medical adjective for the underside of the foot.

How the word is built

• plant (from Latin planta: a sprout or cutting)
• -er (agent or instrument suffix)