Word of the Day:
melliferous
What It Means
Of a plant or its parts: bearing any substance (such as nectar or pollen) which is collected by bees to produce honey.
Producing honey.
melliferous music
Melliferous in Context
“It is stated that honey has been found in the galleries of certain exotic species of Ants, but it is doubtful whether they have not stolen it from some other animals. However this may be, the most perfect melliferous animals are the Bees.”
Did You Know?
PIE word *mélit Learned borrowing from Latin mellifer (“honey-bearing, honey-producing, melliferous”) + English -ous (suffix forming adjectives denoting the presence of a quality, typically in abundance). Mellifer is derived from mel (“honey”) (plural form mella; ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *mélit (“honey”)) + -fer (suffix meaning ‘bearing, bringing, carrying’).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: melliferous (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “melliferous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/melliferous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
