WEEDS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does weeds mean? 

• WEEDS (noun)
  The noun WEEDS has 1 sense:

1. a black garment (dress) worn by a widow as a sign of mourning

  Familiarity information: WEEDS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• WEEDS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A black garment (dress) worn by a widow as a sign of mourning

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

weeds; widow's weeds

Hypernyms ("weeds" is a kind of...):

garment (an article of clothing)

Domain usage:

plural; plural form (the form of a word that is used to denote more than one)

 Context examples 

Each spring, summer, and fall, trees, weeds, and grasses release tiny pollen grains into the air.

(Hay Fever, NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases)

Producing sorgoleone in other crops would potentially give those plants the ability to fight weeds and reduce reliance on synthetic herbicides.

(Transferring Sorghum’s Weed-Killing Power to Rice, U.S. Department of Agriculture)

A poisonous chemical used to kill weeds and pests.

(Arsenic, NCI Dictionary)

Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

They also include chemicals to control weeds, rodents, mildew, germs, and more.

(Pesticides, Environmental Protection Agency)

He felt that his blighted affections were quite dead now, and though he should never cease to be a faithful mourner, there was no occasion to wear his weeds ostentatiously.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Amitrole is a widely used herbicide for nonfood croplands to control annual and perennial grass type weeds, pondweeds and broad leaf.

(Amitrole, NCI Thesaurus)

The researchers found that there are many areas of the genome that define each species, and these are maintained by natural selection, which weeds out the foreign genes.

(Butterflies are genetically wired to choose a mate that looks just like them, University of Cambridge)

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

From time to time as they advanced they saw strange lean figures scraping and scratching amid the weeds and thistles, who, on sight of the band of horsemen, threw up their arms and dived in among the brushwood, as shy and as swift as wild animals.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)