butterwort
any small, carnivorous plant of the genus Pinguicula, having leaves that secrete a viscid substance in which small insects are caught.
Origin of butterwort
1Words Nearby butterwort
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024
How to use butterwort in a sentence
This is the butterwort (Pinguicula), and it is not a bad name, for the leaves remind one of butter.
The Romance of Plant Life | G. F. Scott ElliotThere are three British species of butterwort (Pinguicula), similar in structure and habit, all growing in bogs and on wet rocks.
Field and Woodland Plants | William S. FurneauxFrom no catalogue of quaint plants could the butterwort be omitted.
The Call of the Wildflower | Henry S. SaltHe could watch the butterwort curving round the edges of its wan green foliage upon the captured limbs of fly or aphis.
Charles Darwin | Grant AllenThe order to which the butterwort and the bladderworts belong also afforded valuable results.
Life of Charles Darwin | G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
British Dictionary definitions for butterwort
/ (ˈbʌtəˌwɜːt) /
a plant of the genus Pinguicula, esp P. vulgaris, that grows in wet places and has violet-blue spurred flowers and fleshy greasy glandular leaves on which insects are trapped and digested: family Lentibulariaceae
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
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