air plant

See synonyms for air plant on Thesaurus.com
noun
  1. an epiphyte.

  2. Also called life plant. a tropical plant, Kalanchoe pinnata, of the stonecrop family, having pale green flowers tinged with red and new plants sprouting at the leaf notches.

Origin of air plant

1
An Americanism dating back to 1835–45

Words Nearby air plant

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

How to use air plant in a sentence

  • How should they guess that alongside her religious fervor a human love grew ethereally like an air plant?

    Duffels | Edward Eggleston
  • A plant growing attached to another plant, but not parasitic; an air-plant.

  • In other words, this apparatus will make money as a liquid air plant, and furnish you oxygen as a by-product.

    The Air Trust | George Allan England
  • It may begin life as an air plant, fixing its roots in the crotch of another tree, in which a chance seed has lodged.

    Trees Worth Knowing | Julia Ellen Rogers
  • M. Sommeiller developed the Colladon idea and constructed the compressed air plant illustrated in Fig. 2.

British Dictionary definitions for air plant

air plant

noun
  1. an epiphyte, esp an orchid of the large Old World tropical genus Aerides, grown for its white scented flowers spotted with red, purple, or rose, or a bromeliad, esp of the genus Tillandsia

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Scientific definitions for air plant

air plant

The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2011. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.