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pollen

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɒlən//
  • United States//ˈpɑlən//

A fine, granular substance produced in flowers.

noun

  1. 1

    A fine, granular substance produced in flowers.

  2. 2

    Pollen grains (microspores) produced in the anthers of flowering plants.

    In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.

  3. 3

    obsoleteFine powder in general, fine flour.

    and ther was good wyne of Gascoyne,[…]as well of pollen, as of other vitailes

    The bran, pollen and gurgions of this grain will be profitable to the miller; […]

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin pollen (“fine flour”), used by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century to describe the spores produced in the anthers of flowers.

verb

  1. 1

    To cover with, or as if with, pollen.

Forms

plural
pollens
past tense
pollened
past participle
pollened
present participle
pollening
third person singular
pollens
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).