1570–80; < New Latin; Latin samara, samera elm seed
A samara is a tree fruit that has wings and usually just one seed. You may have seen samaras spinning through the air after falling from trees, which is why they are sometimes called helicopter seeds. People call samaras lots of different things, including keys, wingnuts, and whirlybirds. The name samara comes from the Latin for "elm seed," but some other trees that produce samaras are maple, ash, and sycamore trees. When a samara gets blown off a tree, it spins away through the air on its thin wings. This allows the seed to be dispersed far from its parent tree, where it has a better chance of growing into a new tree.
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Acorns and winged maple keys, whose scientific name is a samara, are also fruit.
From Textbooks ● Apr. 25, 2013
Fruit a 2-celled and 2-seeded samara, winged all round, nearly orbicular.—Shrubs, with 3-foliolate leaves, and greenish-white small flowers in compound terminal cymes.
From The Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States Including the District East of the Mississippi and North of North Carolina and Tennessee by Gray, Asa
The fruit is an oblong samara, about an inch long.
From Wayside and Woodland Trees A pocket guide to the British sylva by Step, Edward
The fruit is a samara, or key, winged similarly to that of a sugar maple, but smaller.
From Forest Trees of Illinois How to Know Them by Fuller George D.
It also feeds on the samara of maple, as we reared the moth in June, 1881, from larvæ infesting these winged seeds that had been collected by Mr. A.J.
From Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 by Various
Older people who are upsizing are opting for features that they hope will help them age comfortably in their big homes, said Samara Goodman, an interior designer based in the Washington, D.C., area.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 17, 2026
Daveigh Chase, the former child actor best known for voicing Lilo in Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” and portraying the haunting figure Samara in “The Ring,” has died at age 35.
From Salon ● Jun. 19, 2026
Samara is less vulnerable to artificial intelligence than more traditional enterprise-software companies, which often operate on seat-based models that can be replaced over time by AI tools.
From Barron's ● Jun. 4, 2026
Principal investigator Marilia Samara reported that all instruments, including technology demonstrations, performed as planned and that the mission returned high-quality data.
From Science Daily ● Feb. 17, 2026
On June 9 and 10, 1918, they occupied Samara and advanced to Ufa, in the Urals, where they were able to seize the railroads by which European Russia obtained its food supplies from Siberia.
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.
