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leaf

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//liːf//
  • United States//lif//

The usually green and flat organ that represents the most prominent feature of most vegetative plants.

noun

  1. 1

    The usually green and flat organ that represents the most prominent feature of most vegetative plants.

    Earless ghost swift moths become “invisible” to echolocating bats by forming mating clusters close (less than half a meter) above vegetation and effectively blending into the clutter of echoes that the bat receives from the leaves and stems around them.

  2. 2

    A foliage leaf or any of the many and often considerably different structures it can specialise into.

  3. 3

    Anything resembling the leaf of a plant.

  4. 4

    A sheet of a book, magazine, etc. (consisting of two pages, one on each face of the leaf).

    Heretofore advertisers have had to buy and pay for a leaf — two pages.

  5. 5

    A sheet of any substance beaten or rolled until very thin.

    gold leaf

  6. 6

    One of the individual flat or curved strips of metal, typically made of spring steel, that make up a leaf spring.

    Lumbering down a precipitous "slideway," the Thornycroft broke two main leaves in the back spring[.]

  7. 7

    Tea leaves.

  8. 8

    A flat section used to extend the size of a table.

  9. 9

    A moveable panel, e.g. of a bridge or door, originally one that hinged but now also applied to other forms of movement.

    The train car has one single-leaf and two double-leaf doors per side.

    The bridge shear locks were repaired and the long ends of the shear locks shortened about two inches to eliminate butting of the bridge leafs against each other.

    The four separate segments of the movable bridge span, known as bridge leafs, were alternately rehabilitated while maintaining upper-level roadway and pedestrian traffic on one-half of the bridge and waterway traffic on one-half of the river channel.

    The hydraulic system lifts and rotates two 413-ft (126-m) bridge leafs, each weighing 7,500 tons, in just four minutes.

  10. 10

    In a tree, a node that has no descendants.

    The algorithm pops the stack to obtain a new current node when there are no more children (when it reaches a leaf).

  11. 11

    The layer of fat supporting the kidneys of a pig, leaf fat.

  12. 12

    One of the teeth of a pinion, especially when small.

  13. 13

    slangCannabis.

  14. 14

    A Canadian person.

  15. 15

    A particular value of the EAX register when a program runs the CPUID instruction; each leaf represents a different category of information returned about the processor.

    X86_FEATURE_HETERO_CORE_TOPOLOGY is used to identify whether the processor support heterogeneous core type by reading CPUID leaf Fn_0x80000026_EAX and bit 30. if the bit is set as one, then amd_pstate driver will check EBX 30:28 bits to get the core type.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *lewbʰ-der.? Proto-Germanic *laubą Proto-West Germanic *laub Old English lēaf Middle English lef English leaf From Middle English lef, leef, from Old English lēaf, from Proto-West Germanic *laub, from Proto-Germanic *laubą (“leaf”), from Proto-Indo-European *lowbʰ-o-m, from *lewbʰ- (“to cut off”). Cognates Cognate with Scots leaf (“leaf”), Yola laafe (“leaf”), North Frisian luuf (“leaf”), Saterland Frisian Loof (“leaf”), West Frisian leaf (“leaf”), Cimbrian loap (“leaf”), Dutch loof (“foliage”), German Laub (“leaves”), German Low German Loov (“leaf”), Luxembourgish Laf (“foliage, leaves”), Mòcheno lap (“leaf”), Vilamovian łaub, łaup, łojp (“leaf”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål løv (“leaf”), Faroese leyv (“leaf”), Icelandic lauf (“leaf”), Norwegian Nynorsk lauv (“leaf”), Swedish löv (“leaf”), Gothic 𐌻𐌰𐌿𐍆𐍃 (laufs, “leaf”); also Irish luibh (“herb, plant”), Latin liber (“bast; book”), Albanian labë (“rind”), Lithuanian lúobas (“bark; bast”), Polish łub (“bark”), Russian луб (lub, “bast”). (Internet slang: Canadian): In reference to the maple leaf as national symbol.

verb

  1. 1

    To produce leaves; put forth foliage.

    Then flowered the mead, then leafed all 'Twas caused by the runic lay.

  2. 2

    To divide (a vegetable) into separate leaves.

    The lettuce in our burgers is 100% hand-leafed.

  3. 3

    informalTo play a prank on someone by throwing a large clump or collection of leaves at them.

Forms

plural
leaves
past tense
leafed
past participle
leafed
present participle
leafing
third person singular
leafs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).