seedling
Americannoun
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seedlings
plural
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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:
Art provided a release for the young Kusama, whose father, a seedling merchant, was unfaithful to her mother.
From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026
This was as a result of feral goats who ate every tree seedling which then prevented the forest from regenerating.
From BBC ● May 25, 2026
This doomed seedling was part of a National Park Service planting effort to replace dozens of Joshua trees cut down by a Southern California Edison contractor tasked with protecting the company’s power lines.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 19, 2026
"It was only then that we were able to see that PEX11 is clearly involved in controlling the growth of the peroxisome during the seed to seedling stage."
From Science Daily ● Apr. 25, 2026
She plucked the seedling neatly into the mud, and it stood straight up like it had been growing there all along!
From "A Place to Belong" by Cynthia Kadohata
Hundreds of survey plots were established and thousands of seedlings were monitored.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 4, 2026
After the tree was felled, seedlings were kept in a secret National Trust centre to help preserve the legacy of the much-photographed landmark.
From BBC ● Sep. 28, 2026
And 10,000 is about the number of oak seedlings he’s entrusted to the hands of people who pledged to care for the tree that has become his mission and obsession.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 19, 2026
Two seedlings from the last known wild dendroseris neriifolia tree have arrived at Logan Botanic Garden in Dumfries and Galloway after an international rescue effort involving experts in Chile and the UK.
From BBC ● Sep. 17, 2026
Everyone else had spotty coverings of skinny, peapod-colored seedlings that they watered two, three, four times a day, depending on the weather.
From "Typical American" by Gish Jen
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
