Word.ws English Dictionary

butterfly weed

butterfly weed noun: asclepias tuberosa, a species of milkweed native to eastern North America, with clustered orange or yellow flowers.

butterfly weed: asclepias tuberosa, a species of milkweed native to eastern North America, with clustered orange or...
Image: USFWS Mountain-Prairie, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

butterfly weed (uncountable)

  1. Asclepias tuberosa, a species of milkweed native to eastern North America, with clustered orange or yellow flowers.

Origin of butterfly weed

So called because its color and nectar tend to attract butterflies.

Questions about butterfly weed

What does butterfly weed mean?
Butterfly weed means asclepias tuberosa, a species of milkweed native to eastern North America, with clustered orange or yellow flowers.
What part of speech is butterfly weed?
Butterfly weed is a noun.

Words near butterfly weed in the dictionary

  1. butterfly syringes
  2. butterfly upon a wheel
  3. butterfly valve
  4. butterfly valves
  5. butterfly watching
  6. butterfly weed
  7. butterfly-knotted
  8. butterflybush
  9. butterflyer
  10. butterflyers
  11. butterflyfish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: butterfly weed (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “butterfly weed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/butterfly_weed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.