Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various flowering plants that are not monocotyledons, having two cotyledons in the seed and usually flower parts in multiples of four or five, leaves with reticulate venation, pollen with three pores, and the capacity for secondary growth. The dicotyledons, which include the eudicotyledons and the magnoliids, are no longer considered to form a single valid taxonomic group.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A plant which produces an embryo having two cotyledons.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) A plant whose seeds divide into two seed lobes, or cotyledons, in germinating.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun botany A plant whose seedling has two cotyledons.
  • noun botany, historical Any plant in what used to be the Dicotyledones.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun flowering plant with two cotyledons; the stem grows by deposit on its outside

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From di- ("two") + cotyledon ("embryonic leaf").

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Examples

  • "cotyledon" and "dicotyledon" -- I should not have been surprised; but they blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense of the meaning of punctuation.

    Change in the Village George Sturt 1895

  • In the Border Ranges, approximately 140 dicotyledon genera are Gondwanan in origin, including rain forest genera (Nothofagus, Ceratopetalum, Akania) and non-rainforest genera such as Cassinia, Bauera, Hibbertia, and Leucopogon.

    Eastern Australian temperate forests 2008

  • One of these determinables is number of cotyledons under which fall the determinates acotyledon, monocotyledon, and dicotyledon.

    Determinates vs. Determinables Sanford, David H. 2006

  • I will describe as examples the reproduction of a moss, a fern, and a dicotyledon.

    Scientific American Supplement, No. 531, March 6, 1886 Various

  • Beginning with the cryptogams, the system proceeds from the monocotyledon to the dicotyledon, and closes with the coniferæ.

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 8: Infamy-Lapparent 1840-1916 1913

  • "A primrose by the river's brim," whether "a yellow primrose 'tis to him," or a dicotyledon, may be outwardly described more and less well; but we require for that purpose only the rudiments of literary prose.

    Platform Monologues 1902

  • Mammal, amphibian, coleoptera, dicotyledon, cryptogam, -- all these terms, which, if they were translated into the language of a peasant, would be seen to record very simple observations, yet do lend a kind of formal majesty to ignorance.

    Romance Two Lectures Walter Alexander Raleigh 1891

  • Nothing could be more useful than botany-those who could not distinguish between a dicotyledon and a monocotyledon could certainly never rightly grasp the nature of a hedgerow.

    Hodge and His Masters Richard Jefferies 1867

  • -- The engraving conveys the impression that the leaves are parallel-veined; but the coca is a dicotyledon, with the under surface of the leaf strongly marked with veins, of which two, in addition to the midrib, run parallel with the margin.

    The Andes and the Amazon Across the Continent of South America James Orton 1853

  • They have a double seed-leaf which means they are a dicotyledon.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] Ashcraft 2010

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