root hair
- noun
- /ruːt hɛr/
- Specialized
:
pelos radiculares
- Van Noordwijk and colleagues (1992) showed that root hairs are more numerous when spaces exist between the root and the soil.
- root hairs of the plant
Examples
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The adults of these flea beetles eat leaves and flowers, and the larvae feed on the root hairs and young roots.
Academic text (1994) -
And it looks like right there at the bottom, if you can just see it right about there, there's a root hair that started to come out, that little white root hair right there.
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Worms can only digest very small things, like the hyphae that are a fourth the diameter of many root hairs.
Academic text (1995) -
They found that vertical flow constructed wetlands can achieve essentially complete BOD5 removal because of high amounts of oxygen transfer through the gravel/root hair bed.
Academic text (2009) -
The findings showed that free root hairs in the soil contained higher levels of contaminants than expected and detected the presence of uranium-loaded ion exchange resin beads.
Academic text (1995) -
Daylilies take up most of their water through fine root hairs that absorb moisture from the soil.
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Nutrients are efficiently absorbed by plants through tiny root hairs that grow from the root system.
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If a plant receives insufficient water, the root hairs will fail to function properly, causing the plant to wilt.
How Deep
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning — a hair-like projection on a plant root that absorbs water — is directly inferable from combining 'root' (underground organ) and 'hair' (fine filament). While the full botanical definition gives microscopic detail, the general concept is compositional and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would understand it.
Etymology
Root hair literally describes a tiny hair on the root that soaks up water and nutrients from the soil. That's why it means 'a small, water-absorbing part of a plant root'.