seedling
Americannoun
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seedlings
plural
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a plant or tree grown from a seed.
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a tree not yet 3 feet (1 meter) high.
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any young plant, especially one grown in a nursery for transplanting.
noun
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A young plant, especially one that grows from a seed rather than from a cutting.
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See Note at germination
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of seedling
Vocabulary lists containing seedling
Plants (Botany) - Introduction
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Plants (Botany) - Middle School
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Plants (Botany) - High School
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Art provided a release for the young Kusama, whose father, a seedling merchant, was unfaithful to her mother.
From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026
This was as a result of feral goats who ate every tree seedling which then prevented the forest from regenerating.
From BBC ● May 25, 2026
In the shade beneath the fading giant, a seedling had sprouted.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 19, 2026
"The peroxisome gets even larger during the seed to seedling stage, when the plant is relying on fatty acids for energy, before shrinking back down to its normal size once the plant can photosynthesize."
From Science Daily ● Apr. 25, 2026
She lowered a seedling into a hole and gently pressed the earth firm around its slender stem.
From "Beyond the Bright Sea" by Lauren Wolk
Hundreds of survey plots were established and thousands of seedlings were monitored.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 4, 2026
A box of seedlings was discovered in the kitchen.
From BBC ● Sep. 24, 2026
For the first eight years, he was a one-man operation working out of his backyard He began handing off the seedlings to others.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 19, 2026
Two seedlings from the last known wild dendroseris neriifolia tree have arrived at Logan Botanic Garden in Dumfries and Galloway after an international rescue effort involving experts in Chile and the UK.
From BBC ● Sep. 17, 2026
Were that to happen, the seedlings might all be killed by a single drought or frost, leaving no seeds to propagate the species.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
