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Glite Dictionary
🚪 Sudden leaver 🌾 A flour sifter 🏃 One who runs away 🍽️ Quick eater 🥬 Plant gone to seed
bolter

bolter

9.4
A plant that quickly grows a flower stalk and makes seeds
  • noun
  • Specialized
translation icon : subida a semilla
  • Gardeners try to harvest lettuce before it turns into a bolter and loses its tenderness.

Examples

  • The spinach became a bolter after the sudden heat wave, making the leaves taste bitter.

  • This lettuce has become a bolter due to the heat.

  • Once a plant is a bolter, it usually stops producing edible leaves.

  • Farmers often dislike bolters because they ruin the harvest.

  • The sudden rise in temperature caused the carrots to become bolters, making them tough and inedible.

  • To prevent your basil from becoming a bolter, it's important to regularly pinch off its flowering stems.

  • After the unseasonable warmth, many cucumber plants turned into bolters, leaving the gardeners disappointed.

Surface Forms

bolter singular
bolters plural

Morphology

bolter = bolt (semi-transparent) = bolt + er

Formed from the horticultural verb 'bolt' (to go to seed); the relation is transparent in form but the botanical sense is specialized and may be unfamiliar to many learners.

Etymology

Bolter (plant that flowers quickly) comes from the verb bolt meaning to shoot up suddenly, like a straight bolt, so a bolter plant sends up a tall flowering stalk fast and becomes bitter and seedy.