Word.ws English Dictionary

tick-trefoil

tick-trefoil noun: one of several species in the genus Desmodium in the legume family.

tick-trefoil: one of several species in the genus Desmodium in the legume family
Image: Dinesh Valke from Thane, India, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

tick-trefoil (plural tick-trefoils)

  1. One of several species in the genus Desmodium in the legume family

Forms of tick-trefoil

pluraltick-trefoils

Origin of tick-trefoil

From tick + trefoil (“three-leaved”). Tick refers to the plant's loments – pods that break apart into segments that each contain one seed – which have small hooked hairs that allow the segments to stick to clothes, hair, or fur, similar to the way a tick clings on with its legs.

Questions about tick-trefoil

What does tick-trefoil mean?
Tick-trefoil means one of several species in the genus Desmodium in the legume family.
What part of speech is tick-trefoil?
Tick-trefoil is a noun.
What is the plural of tick-trefoil?
The plural of tick-trefoil is tick-trefoils.

Words near tick-trefoil in the dictionary

  1. tick-tock biological clock
  2. tick-tock model
  3. tick-tocked
  4. tick-tocking
  5. tick-tocks
  6. tick-trefoil
  7. tick-trefoils
  8. tickable
  9. tickbean
  10. tickbeans
  11. tickbird

Source and license

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