Word.ws English Dictionary

pleuston

pleuston noun: the organisms that live floating at the surface of water.

Noun

pleuston (uncountable)

  1. The organisms that live floating at the surface of water.
    • They^([Cnidarians]) are also the dominant organisms of the marine pleuston, providing food or substrate for a variety of other invertebrates living at the air-water interface[…].1974, G. O. Mackie, “VIII: Location, Flotation and Dispersal”, in Leonard Muscatine, Howard M. Lenhoff, editors, Coelenterate Biology: Reviews and New Perspectives, Academic Press, page 313
    • These animals form the pleuston. Zaitsev (1971) differentiates between the neuston and the pleuston, while admitting that the distinction may be somewhat blurred. Both populations are associated with the surface film. That part of a pleuston animal which projects above the water surface can...1983, John E. G. Raymont, James Dennis Burton, Keith R. Dyer, Plankton and Productivity in the Oceans: Zooplankton, Pergamon Press, page 9
  2. Plants that live floating at the surface of water.

Origin of pleuston

From Ancient Greek πλεῦσις (pleûsis, “sailing”), from πλέω (pléō) + -on. The -t- is on analogy with the coordinate terms.

Words formed from pleuston

Questions about pleuston

What does pleuston mean?
Pleuston means the organisms that live floating at the surface of water.
What part of speech is pleuston?
Pleuston is a noun.

Words near pleuston in the dictionary

  1. pleurotomies
  2. pleurotomy
  3. pleurotribe
  4. pleurovisceral
  5. pleuræ
  6. pleuston
  7. pleustonic
  8. pleustophyte
  9. pleustophytes
  10. Pleuven
  11. Pleva

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pleuston (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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