Other forms: pollens
Pollen is the yellow dust that flowers exchange to make seed. Covered in pollen, the pollen count, pollen on the car.
It carries the male cells, and it travels by insect, by wind or occasionally by water. Wind-pollinated plants — grasses, birch, plane trees — produce enormous quantities and cause most hay fever, while insect-pollinated flowers make far less. The pollen count is broadcast in summer for exactly that reason. Note pollinate, pollinator, and that pollen grains survive for thousands of years, which makes them central to archaeology.
1nounpollenThe fine dust flowers exchange to make seed.
“Bees carry pollen from flower to flower as they collect nectar.”
pollen is a plant substance.
Latin pollen means fine flour or dust, and the botanical sense was assigned by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. So the substance is named after flour, which is a fair description of how it looks and behaves.
Latin
pollen — fine flour
English, today
pollen
Latin pollen (“fine flour”), used by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century to describe the spores produced in the anthers of flowers.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA