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Glite Dictionary
🦵 Long legs 🌱 Long thin stems
leggy

leggy

1 7.2
Plants grow long thin stems and few leaves when they get little light or are crowded
  • adjective
  • /ˈlɛɡi/
translation icon : esbelto
  • Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw the bulky terra-cotta pot overflowing with a leggy silver-green plant.
  • leggy plants
  • get leggy
  • become leggy

And so in the case of leggy seedlings, supporting it is not the fix.

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Examples

  • The herb in her garden looked leggy and sparse because it was overcrowded by the other plants.

  • Leggy seedlings or leggy plants or it became leggy.

  • Hypoestes will eventually produce leggy stems with smaller and smaller leaves.

    Blog text (15)

  • Well, they've already reseeded themselves and are looking leggy!

    Blog text (27)

  • They were really leggy in the greenhouse so I cut them back and they looked really sad and they have just exploded.

  • Weeds grew raucous and leggy while my flowers shriveled beyond resuscitation.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • But when I plant this back, I'm going to be burying that leggy stem quite a bit deeper than it originally was, so it'll sit better in the cell.

  • I rolled up my sleeves and started washing the spinach, snapping off the leggy stems.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • And cobwebs clouded the tops of the curtains, and the philodendron plant on the sill was leggy and bedraggled.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • If indoor plants do not receive enough sunlight, they can become leggy and weak-looking.

Synonyms

stalky
vsleggy
1 6.3

Having a long thin shape like a plant stem

is thinner and has few leaves from low light or crowding
tall-growing
vsleggy
3.4

A plant that reaches a great height with long thin stems

is caused by low light or crowding rather than natural growth habit
wiry-stemmed
vsleggy
7.7

A thin strong plant stem that bends like wire

is weakly elongated from insufficient light rather than being tough

Antonyms

bushy
22 1.3

Thick and full, spreading like a small bush, often for hair or tails

How Leggy

spindly
11 6.2
leggy
1 7.2
straggly
2 6.5

Surface Forms

leggy positive

Morphology

leggy = leg (semi-transparent) = leg + y

The suffix '-y' is used to form adjectives, but the specific meaning related to plants is not directly derived from 'leg'.

Etymology

Leggy comes from the English word leg plus the ending -y, which gives the idea 'having' or 'full of'. Imagine a plant sending up long, thin stems like legs to reach for light; that's why leggy describes plants with long, weak stems from too little light or crowding.