Other forms: plants, planted, planting
A plant is any living green thing that grows out of the ground — a tree, a rose bush, the basil dying slowly on the kitchen windowsill. It has roots, it stays where it is, and it grows towards the light.
As a verb, to plant is to put a seed or a young plant into the soil: plant potatoes, plant a tree for a new baby. From there the word spreads. You plant a flag, plant a kiss on someone's cheek, plant yourself in the best chair and refuse to move. A plant is also a factory or industrial site — a power plant, a car plant, the plant closed in the eighties. And in stories about crime and spying, a plant is something put somewhere on purpose to deceive: the police were accused of planting the evidence, and the enthusiastic man in the audience turned out to be a plant.
1nounplantA living thing that grows in soil, has roots and leaves, and does not move about.~90%
“The plant on the windowsill needs water twice a week.”
2verbseedTo put a seed or a young plant into the ground so that it grows.~2%
“They planted an apple tree at the end of the garden.”
3verbfirmlyTo put something firmly in a particular place.~2%
“He planted both feet on the step and refused to move.”
4nounfactoryA factory or large site with machinery where something is made or produced.~2%
“The power plant supplies half the region.”
5verbhideTo hide something somewhere secretly in order to make someone look guilty.~2%
“The defence claimed the knife had been planted in his car.”
6nounplacedA person placed secretly in a group or an audience in order to spy or to deceive.~2%
“The man who asked the first question was a plant.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
plant is a living thing.
Plant comes from Old English plante, a young tree or shrub newly set in the ground, borrowed early from Latin planta, a sprout, shoot or cutting; the broad sense of any growing green thing arrived later through Old French. Its strangest relative is clan, which is the same Latin word again, having travelled through the Celtic languages — a clan is a planting, an offshoot.
Old English
plante
Middle English
plante
English, today
plant
From Middle English plante, from Old English plante. From Middle English plante, from Old English plante (“young tree or shrub, herb newly planted”), from Proto-West Germanic plantu, from Latin planta (“sprout, shoot, cutting”). Broader sense of "any vegetable life, vegetation generally" is from Old French plante. a doublet of clan (borrowed through Celtic languages) and a doublet of planta (directly from Latin). The verb is from Middle English planten, from Old English plantian (“to plant”), from Latin plantō, later influenced by Old French planter. Compare also Dutch planten (“to plant”), German pflanzen (“to plant”), Swedish plantera (“to plant”), Icelandic planta (“to plant”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA