Category
Floral whorls
The rings a flower is built from, and the collective nouns botany gives them.
A flower is assembled in rings. Working inwards from the outside there are the sepals, then the petals, then the stamens, then the carpels, each set attached to the same short axis and each set called a whorl.
Most of those rings have a collective noun, and the collective nouns are the hard part. Two of them are Greek compounds that end in the word for house. The third is a Greek preposition stuck to the Greek word for flower. None of the three gives up its spelling to the ear.
3 terms in this group
- gynoecium
The gynoecium is every carpel in a flower counted as one unit: stigma, style and ovary, the part that receives pollen and ripens into fruit. Its opposite number is the androecium.
15 heard spellings
- androecium
The androecium is all the stamens of a flower taken together, filament and anther, the pollen-bearing half of the flower.
13 heard spellings
- perianth
The perianth is the outer envelope of a flower, calyx and corolla together, sepals and petals counted as one structure. Where the two are alike, as in a tulip, the parts are called tepals.
8 heard spellings