Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A broad-leaved herb other than a grass, especially one growing in a field, prairie, or meadow.
Wiktionary
- n. Any non-woody flowering plant that is not a grass.
Etymologies
- From Ancient Greek φορβη (phorbe, "food"), from φορβειν (phorbein, "graze") (Wiktionary)
- From Greek phorbē, fodder, from pherbein, to graze. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“For example, not everyone knows that a "forb" is a wildflower.”
“Placement of high densities of ungulates on a grassland clearly removes poaceae and other forb biomass at a rapid rate.”
“In the tall-grass prairie of Iowa, for example, typical grasses are big bluestem and little bluestem; a typical forb is black-eyed Susan.”
“While sand sagebrush and prairie grasses such as sand dropseed, sand bluestem, and big sandreed may create a continuous plant cover in portions of Ecoregion 25j, the shrub and forb cover may be sparse in dune areas.”
“Today Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine are common, along with lodgepole pine and some aspen parkland with a sagebrush and forb understory.”
“This class of European grasslands often include considerable hectarage that have been partially cultivated by humans, are which are, in fact, effective refugia for grass and forb taxa that might otherwise have become extinct.”
“I would suggest that any tall forb that enjoys the prairie life style would be a natural for your fans.”
“I don't know the name of this flower - looks like a forb - or species of fly visiting this tall wild flower I found in an open-field in Groningen, the Netherlands.”
“Meadows are dominated by the sedge (Kobresia pygmaea) in association with many dicotyledenous forb species, most of which belong to genera common throughout the Himalayan alpine region.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘forb’.
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WWF WTF?
Ever play "Words With Friends" with someone and they throw down some strange, unlikely group of letters that makes even the most mild and squeaky clean tongued person say "whiskey tango foxtrot"? ...
oorie, sangar, merl, cwm, doum, weir, jura, invar, lawine, tapa, waw, shog and 376 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, F
felony, frolic, fend, fuselage, farthingale, freewheeling, frigorific, flummery, fancypants, felsitic, flagstone, flageolet and 295 more...
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wiredweird's Words
cubane, diyne, logit, cnidoblast, fid, witling, probit, nullipara, menstruum, scrotal, carbonium, amitotic and 107 more...
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Words Covered in Faery Dust (F)
words that evoke magic, mystery, mayhem, magnificence or anything else that glimmers in the grass
faery, fairy cross, fairy ring, falcon, fare-thee-well, farewell-summer, farthing, faun, fawn, felicitous, felicity, fencing and 109 more...
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Words that were new to me
but now they're not because I looked them up. In cases of polysemy or homography, *of course* it was the oddest meaning that stumped me. ;)
Procrustean bed, idem sonans, hob, backcap, quango, cheap-jack, pantechnicon, churrigueresco, chopfallen, maritorious, supererogation, catimini and 212 more...
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Hedgepiglet
Words for things both tangible and nonanthropic
rorqual, vellus, wrasse, rainbow bee-eater, tinkershire, lemonquat, boomslang, tufted vetch, cubeb, nipplefruit, madapple, wad and 447 more...
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Lifeforms with which I'd like to comm...
Perhaps by means of animal communication.
mould, seaweed, teenager, cheesemite, dugong, spoonbill, new caledonian bu..., forb, titan arum, hydroblab, actuary, william shatner and 6 more...
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SwanySwan's Words
funner, squircle, synchronicity, micawber, forb, mell, psilanthropy, digerati, looby, nabob, noob, xerosis and 17 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for forb.

treeseed Forbs are herbaceous flowering plants that are not graminoids (grasses, sedges and rushes). The term is frequently used in vegetation ecology, especially in relation to grasslands, to refer to broad-leaved (dicot) herbs. Forbs represent a guild of plant species with broadly similar growth form, which in ecology is often more important than taxonomic relationship.
In addition to its use in ecological studies, the term forb may also be used for subdividing popular guides to the wildflowers of a region, together with other categories such as ferns, grasses, shrubs and trees. This approach is not followed in formal regional floras, which are usually organised taxonomically.
_Wikipedia Feb 12, 2008
sionnach You get a bunch of them together and before you know it it's all classic Harleys and Faberge eggs and quixotic flat-tax presidential bids. Jan 16, 2008
yarb Best word I've discovered in some time. Jan 15, 2008