Word.ws English Dictionary

plant-animal

plant-animal noun: an organism having characteristics of both plants and animals; a zoophyte, later chiefly an animal with structural resemblances to a plant.

Noun

plant-animal (plural plant-animals)

  1. (archaic) An organism having characteristics of both plants and animals; a zoophyte, later chiefly an animal with structural resemblances to a plant.
    • From which Description, they [sponges] seem to be a kind of Plant-Animal that adheres to a Rock […].1665, Robert Hooke, Micrographia, section XXII
    • She had on her slide some special stuff come up from London that day […] she focussed the light on her field, and saw the plant-animal lying shadowy in a boundless light […].1915, DH Lawrence, The Rainbow, Vintage, published 2011, page 408

Forms of plant-animal

pluralplant-animals

Origin of plant-animal

From plant + animal, after French plant-animal (obsolete), from New Latin plantanimal (16th c.), after Hellenistic Ancient Greek ζωόφυτον (zōóphuton, “zoophyte”).

Questions about plant-animal

What does plant-animal mean?
Plant-animal means an organism having characteristics of both plants and animals; a zoophyte, later chiefly an animal with structural resemblances to a plant.
What part of speech is plant-animal?
Plant-animal is a noun.
What is the plural of plant-animal?
The plural of plant-animal is plant-animals.

Words near plant-animal in the dictionary

  1. plant sits
  2. plant sitted
  3. plant sitting
  4. plant teacher
  5. plant teachers
  6. plant-animal
  7. plant-animals
  8. plant-based
  9. plant-cane
  10. plant-canes
  11. plant-eater

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plant-animal (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: “plant-animal.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plant-animal. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.