Pollinated

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of moving pollen to the female parts of a flowering plant allows for fertilization and subsequent seed formation
2. This activity involves transferring pollen from male organs to female structures, which is essential for plant reproduction and seed production
3. The process whereby pollen is transferred from the male anthers to the female stigma of flowering plants, facilitating reproduction and seed development

Etymology: "Pollinated" is the past tense of "pollinate", and the verb is built from the noun "pollen" with a suffix that turns it into an action. The root is Latin "pollen", meaning fine powder, especially the finest flour, and in English the noun is borrowed in its Latin form. The stem used in the verb is "pollin-", the form the noun takes before the endings of its other cases. The verb ends in "-ate", a suffix that English took from Latin "-atus" and that forms verbs meaning to do something with or to a thing. So to pollinate is, literally, to treat a flower with pollen, supplying the powder that a plant needs before it can set seed. The sense of the process was described long before anyone understood the mechanism, so the word arrived as a technical description of an activity rather than a folk term.

Synonyms: fertilized, cross-pollinated, inseminated, seeded, spored

Antonyms: unfertilized, sterilized, barren, empty, void