Sunflower

How to spell sunflower

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce sunflower

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sunflower mean?

1. nounA tall plant with a large golden flower head that turns toward the sun and produces edible seeds.

Sunflower in a sentence

• The sunflower in the garden grew taller than the fence.

• She pressed oil from each sunflower seed for cooking.

Where does sunflower come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining the native word 'sun' with 'flower'. 'Sun' descends directly from Old English 'sunne', a Germanic word for the star at the centre of our sky, while 'flower' arrived from Old French 'flour' (itself from Latin 'flos', meaning a blossom or bloom). The plant was named in the 1500s for the obvious resemblance of its broad golden head to the sun's disc, and because its young heads track the sun across the sky in a movement called heliotropism. The botanical genus name 'Helianthus' echoes this idea directly, built from the Greek 'helios' (sun) and 'anthos' (flower), so the English name is essentially a plain translation of the scientific one. Because both halves are familiar everyday words, the spelling holds no real surprises beyond remembering it is written as a single solid word.

How the word is built

• sun (the star)
• flower (bloom); a transparent compound noun