Word.ws English Dictionary

zooxanthellae

zooxanthellae is the plural of zooxanthella.

Meaning of zooxanthella

Noun

zooxanthella (plural zooxanthellae)

  1. (archaic) Any of the yellow pigmentary particles, or minute corpuscles of yellow coloring matter, found in certain radiolarians.
  2. Any of various typically yellow-brown dinoflagellates (originally grouped as genus Zooxanthella) now assigned to the genera Symbiodinium and Amphidinium, notably found in coral reefs.
    • One genus, the zooxanthellae, live in symbiosis with tropical corals and other animals including clams, jellyfish and nudibranchs, providing in some cases as much as 90 per cent of the nutrients the anima needs in return for a safe home.2012, Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Granta Books, published 2013, page 289

Questions about zooxanthellae

What is zooxanthellae the plural of?
Zooxanthellae is the plural of zooxanthella.

Words near zooxanthellae in the dictionary

  1. zootypes
  2. zootypic
  3. zooxantellate
  4. zooxanthelate
  5. zooxanthella
  6. zooxanthellae
  7. zooxanthellal
  8. zooxanthellan
  9. zooxanthellans
  10. zooxanthellar
  11. zooxanthellate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: zooxanthellae (page history and authors); zooxanthella (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: “zooxanthellae.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/zooxanthellae. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.