What does dicot mean?
A dicot, short for dicotyledon, is a flowering plant whose embryo bears two seed leaves, called cotyledons. This group includes many familiar plants — beans, sunflowers, roses, oaks, and maples among them. Dicots typically show netted leaf veins, flower parts in fours or fives, and a ring arrangement of vascular tissue in their stems, in contrast to monocots such as grasses and lilies, which have one seed leaf and parallel veins. The word is an informal but extremely common abbreviation, favored in classrooms, field guides, and garden writing, while the fuller term "dicotyledon" appears in formal botanical texts. Although recent classification schemes no longer group all traditional dicots into a single lineage — most now fall within the eudicots — the term remains useful for describing plants by these readily observable traits.
nounA dicot is an informal short form of "dicotyledon": a flowering plant whose embryo has two seed leaves (cotyledons). Dicots characteristically have broad leaves with netted veins, flower parts in multiples of four or five, and vascular tissue arranged in a ring.
- A flowering plant (angiosperm) whose seed has two embryonic leaves or cotyledons; short for "dicotyledon".
"Beans, oaks, and roses are all familiar examples of a dicot."
"The botanist identified the seedling as a dicot by counting its pair of first leaves."
"Unlike grasses and other monocots, a typical dicot shows branching veins across each leaf."
Regular English plural; often used generically to refer to the group as a whole.
"Dicots generally show reticulate venation in their leaves."
"Dicot" is botany's favorite abbreviation — scientists say the full word "dicotyledon" so rarely that the nickname has practically become the official name.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of dicot
"Dicot" arose as a clipped, colloquial shortening of "dicotyledon", a term built on Greek roots: "di-" meaning "two", and "cotyledon", from Greek kotyledon, denoting a cup-shaped hollow and later applied botanically to a seed leaf. The term entered scientific Latin in botanical nomenclature and passed into English usage as plant taxonomy developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its sibling term "monocotyledon", formed with the prefix "mono-" (one), shares the same root and describes the other major flowering-plant grouping.
How dicot is actually used
"Dicot" is an everyday shorthand used widely in biology teaching, gardening, and popular science writing; "dicotyledon" is preferred in formal taxonomic contexts. Note that modern classification systems (APG) no longer treat traditional dicots as a single clade, since some early-diverging lineages are excluded from eudicots.
Easily confused with dicot
A monocot has one seed leaf and typically parallel-veined leaves (like grasses and lilies), whereas a dicot has two seed leaves and usually netted veins.