Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The pollen-producing reproductive organ of a flower, usually consisting of a filament and an anther.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The warp in the ancient upright loom at which the weaver stood upright instead of sitting; a thread of the warp; a thread.
- noun plural The supports or mainstays of a body; the fixed, firm part of a body, which supports it or gives it its strength and solidity: as, the bones are the stamina of animal bodies; the ligneous parts of trees are stamina which constitute their strength.
- noun Hence [Pl. stamina, now sometimes used as sing.] Whatever constitutes the principal strength or support of anything; power of endurance; staying power; lasting strength or vigor.
- noun In botany, the male or fertilizing organ of flowering plants.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A thread; especially, a warp thread.
- noun (Bot.) The male organ of flowers for secreting and furnishing the pollen or fecundating dust. It consists of the anther and filament.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun botany In flowering plants, the structure in a
flower that producespollen , typically consisting of ananther and afilament .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the male reproductive organ of a flower
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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It is equally correct to call a stamen a contracted petal, and a petal an expanded stamen, for no one of the organs is the type of the others, but all equally are varieties of a single abstract plant-appendage.
Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology
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The first row consists of one posterior stamen, which is generally perfect, and two abortive stamens incorporated with the labellum.
Vegetable Teratology An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants Maxwell T. Masters
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To assert that a stamen is a metamorphosed leaf means, if it means anything, that in the long sweep of time the leaf has by slow or sudden gradations changed its character through successive generations, until the offspring, so to speak, of a true leaf has become a stamen.
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Almost everybody knows that the function of the stamen is the secretion of pollen.
My Studio Neighbors William Hamilton Gibson 1873
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[11] The stamen is the male part of the plant and is made up of the anther (the pollen-bearing part of a stamen) and the filament which supports the anther.
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Consider also media (from medium), criteria (from criterion), graffiti (from graffito), and stamina (from stamen).
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Her ivory neck and face rises like a stamen from her red satin dress, perhaps evoking the Florentine fleur-de-lis.
Bronzino's Medici portraits – review James Hall 2010
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The small of her back, where the downy hair stands upright like wheat in the summer light made me think: pistil and stamen, as if back in biology class.
The Small of Her Back Con Chapman 2012
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Picture this: a light blue flower with black speckles, droopy petals, creamy stamen.
365 tomorrows » 2009 » February : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day 2009
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The plant has a slow spreading, rhizomatic root system that supports several vertically furrowed blooms, each stamen independent yet fundamentally connected.
Remembering Our Roots… « in other words [a portland feminist and queer bookstore and blog] 2009
bilby commented on the word stamen
Oh Webster's, fecundating dust!
May 29, 2012