Definitions

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

  • noun Any of several plants of the genus Helianthus of the composite family, especially H. annuus, having tall coarse stems and large, yellow-rayed flower heads that produce edible seeds rich in oil.
  • noun A brilliant yellow to strong or vivid orange yellow.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A plant of the genus Helianthus, so named from its showy golden radiate heads.
  • noun The rock-rose or sun-rose. See Helianthemum.
  • noun The marigold, Calendula officinalis, from its opening and closing with the ascent and descent of the sun.
  • noun In civil engineering, a full-circle protractor arranged for vertical mounting on a tripod.
  • noun In writing-telegraphs and other electrical instruments and apparatus, a series of alternate conducting and insulating segmental pieces or tablets symmetrically arranged in circular form, each conducting piece being connected with a source of electricity and also with the ground.

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

  • noun Any plant of the genus Helianthus; -- so called probably from the form and color of its flower, which is large disk with yellow rays. The commonly cultivated sunflower is Helianthus annuus, a native of America.

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

  • noun Any plant of the genus Helianthus, so called probably from the form and color of its floral head, having the form of a large disk surrounded by yellow ray flowers; the commonly cultivated sunflower is Helianthus annuus, a native of America.
  • noun colour a bright yellow, like that of the flower petals.

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

  • noun any plant of the genus Helianthus having large flower heads with dark disk florets and showy yellow rays

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

sun +‎ flower

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Examples

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  • a town in Alabama, USA

    February 26, 2008

  • '“People sometimes ask “What is the big deal about sunflower?�? says David Lentz, professor of biological sciences... “First of all, sunflower is one of the world's major oil seed crops and understanding its ancestry is important for modern crop-breeding purposes," Lentz says. "For a long time, we thought that sunflower was domesticated only in eastern North America, in the middle Mississippi valley — Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois. This is what traditional textbooks say. Now it appears that sunflower was domesticated independently in Mexico."'

    Science Daily

    April 30, 2008