seedling
Americannoun
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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:
In both cases, peroxisomes expanded during the seed to seedling stage as expected.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 25, 2026
During apple season, neighbors drop barrels of seedling apples on the lawn for Kaiser’s experiments.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025
Unlike a few of the seedling apples we’d tasted—some of which foragers evocatively call “spitters”—this was fruit I’d cut up to serve with thick slices of cheddar.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025
It’s the seedling of a vision the corps dreamt up just a few years ago.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 10, 2024
In his picture, the seedling is growing out of the top of a man's large head.
From "Counting by 7s" by Holly Goldberg Sloan
Adult Joshua trees are more resilient than seedlings, but they can still succumb to intense heat waves and drought.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 19, 2026
The government has promised to compensate for the swathes of trees cut down by planting seedlings in Haryana -- a northern state next to New Delhi.
From Barron's ● May 18, 2026
"In the beginning, everybody had the seedlings, so the crossing and then the seed pods give plants, but we at Floricultura introduced meristems," Stefan Kuiper tells me.
From BBC ● May 14, 2026
It will be useful monitoring seedlings, Stockfish said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 23, 2026
This morning, while checking on my experiment in the growth of hydroponic flax, I’d noticed the paper I’d taped to my desk lamp to concentrate the beam onto the seedlings.
From "Ungifted" by Gordon Korman
Definitions 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.
