Word.ws English Dictionary

cheatgrass

/ˈt͡ʃiːtɡɹɑːs/

cheatgrass noun: bromus tectorum, drooping brome, native to Europe, thought to create an ecology prone to annual fires in many US areas.

cheatgrass: bromus tectorum, drooping brome, native to Europe, thought to create an ecology prone to annual...
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cheatgrass (countable and uncountable, plural cheatgrasses)

  1. Bromus tectorum, drooping brome, native to Europe, thought to create an ecology prone to annual fires in many US areas
    • It took maybe nine or ten years more of westward drift, over the rolling prairie, through the cheatgrass, the sage grouse exploding skyward […]2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage, published 2007, page 98

Forms of cheatgrass

pluralcheatgrasses

Origin of cheatgrass

From cheat + grass (reputedly because farmers felt cheated when wheat yields were lower because of cheatgrass invading their fields).

Questions about cheatgrass

What does cheatgrass mean?
Cheatgrass means bromus tectorum, drooping brome, native to Europe, thought to create an ecology prone to annual fires in many US areas.
What part of speech is cheatgrass?
Cheatgrass is a noun.
How do you pronounce cheatgrass?
Cheatgrass is pronounced /ˈt͡ʃiːtɡɹɑːs/.
What is the plural of cheatgrass?
The plural of cheatgrass is cheatgrasses.

Words near cheatgrass in the dictionary

  1. cheaters
  2. cheaters never prosper
  3. cheatery
  4. cheatest
  5. cheateth
  6. cheatgrass
  7. cheatgrasses
  8. Cheatham
  9. Cheatham County
  10. Cheathams
  11. cheatier

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cheatgrass (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.

Last updated:

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