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
Flowers polygamous; ovary 2-celled, forming a samara, like that of Elm.
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, ripening in October but remaining on the tree during the winter, is a one-seeded samara, spirally twisted, borne in crowded clusters.
From Forest Trees of Illinois How to Know Them by Fuller George D.
Characteristics of the Tree: Height, 40'-60'; diameter, 12"-18"; small, slim, upright branches; bark, brown or ashy, great, shallow, longitudinal furrows; leaves, 10"-12" long, pinnately compound, 7 to 9 leaflets, covered with down; fruit, single samara.
From Wood and Forest by Noyes, William
They would run swiftly out upon the ends of the small branches, reach out for the maple keys, snip off the wings, and deftly slip the nut or samara into their cheek pockets.
From Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers by Burroughs, John
Warsh “acknowledged that nominal and real yields had increased materially between meetings,” CBA’s Samara Hammoud says in a research report.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 30, 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
Australia's Samara Weaving reprises her starring role in the sequel, which sees her forced once again to run a gauntlet, this time against multiple families.
From Barron's ● Mar. 22, 2026
Scream queen Samara Weaving has an extraordinary yell: shrill, feral and ferocious, like a mongoose before it goes on the attack.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 19, 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.
