Bract meaning

brăkt
bracts
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A leaflike or scalelike plant part, usually small, sometimes showy or brightly colored, and located just below a flower, a flower stalk, or an inflorescence.
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A modified leaf, usually small and scalelike, sometimes large and brightly colored, from whose axil grows a flower or inflorescence.
noun
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A modified leaf growing just below a flower or flower stalk. Bracts are generally small and inconspicuous, but some are showy and petallike, as the brightly colored bracts of bougainvillaea or the white or pink bracts of flowering dogwoods.
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(botany) A leaf or leaf-like structure from the axil out of which a stalk of a flower or an inflorescence arises.
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Other Word Forms

Noun

Singular:
bract
Plural:
bracts

Origin of bract

  • From Latin bractea gold leaf perhaps from Greek brakhein to rattle

    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

Bract Sentence Examples

  • Except where it is terminal it arises, like the leaf-shoot, in the axil of a leaf, which is then known as a bract.

  • In the male flower the receptacle is "concrescent" or inseparate from the bract in whose axil it originates.

  • Thus a bract may be regarded, with Haeckel, as a modified umbrella of a medusa, a siphon as its manubrium, and a tentacle as representing a medusan tentacle shifted in attachment from the margin to the sub-umbrella; or a siphon may be compared with a polyp, of which the single tentacle has become shifted so as to be attached to the coenosarc and so on.

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