dicotyledon

American  

[dahy-kot-l-eed-n, dahy-kot-l-] / daɪˌkɒt lˈid n, ˌdaɪ kɒt l- /

noun

Botany.

1. any angiospermous plant of the class (or subclass) Dicotyledoneae, producing seeds with two cotyledons and having an exogenous manner of growth.

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dicotyledon British  

/ daɪˌkɒtɪˈliːdən, ˌdaɪkɒt- /

noun

1. any flowering plant of the class Dicotyledonae , normally having two embryonic seed leaves and leaves with netlike veins. The group includes many herbaceous plants and most families of trees and shrubs

2. primitive dicotyledon . any living relative of early angiosperms that branched off before the evolution of monocotyledons and eudicotyledons. The group comprises about 5 per cent of the world's plants

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dicotyledon Scientific  

/ dī′kŏt′l-ēd′n /

1. An angiosperm that is not a monocotyledon, having two cotyledons in the seed. The term dicotyledon serves as a convenient label for the eudicotyledons, the magnoliids, and a varied group of other angiosperms, but it does not correspond to a single taxonomic group.

2. Compare monocotyledon See more at eudicotyledon leaf magnoliid

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Other Word Forms

• dicotyledonous adjective

Etymology

Origin of dicotyledon

First recorded in 1720–30, dicotyledon is from the New Latin word Dicotyledones a pre-Linnean grouping of such plants. See di- ¹, cotyledon

Compare meaning

How does dicotyledon compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:

• monocotyledon vs. dicotyledon

Example Sentences

There are no other examples among the currently sequenced dicotyledon genomes that contain a sole single copy of an ancestral chromosome.

From Nature • Jun. 10, 2014

Nothing could be more useful than botany-those who could not distinguish between a dicotyledon and a monocotyledon could certainly never rightly grasp the nature of a hedgerow.

From Hodge and His Masters by Jefferies, Richard

This will bring up the terms dicotyledon and monocotyledon.

From Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; from Seed to Leaf by Newell, Jane H.

I will describe as examples the reproduction of a moss, a fern, and a dicotyledon.

From Scientific American Supplement, No. 531, March 6, 1886 by Various

Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon!

From The Warriors by Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown