Bract meaning

brăkt
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.
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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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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

  • nearest to the supporting stem, becomes in course of growth turned to the anterior or lower part of the flower nearest to the bract, from whose axil it arises.

  • The seeds, or properly fruits, are contained singly in a stony involucre or bract, which does not open until the enclosed seed germinates.

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

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

  • 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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