cultivate
verb
Simple meaning
To grow plants, notably crops.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
kuhltuhvaytSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈkʌltəveɪt
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
verb
To grow plants, notably crops.
To turn or stir soil in preparation for planting or as a method of weed control between growing crop plants.
Prepare for crops
figurative
To nurture; to foster; to tend.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: To grow plants, notably crops.
Used this way, cultivate is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Prepared for raising crops by plowing or fertilizing.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Widely cultivated herb with aromatic leaf stalks that are eaten raw or cooked.
Any of numerous varieties of crab apples cultivated for their small acidic (usually bright red) fruit used for preserves or as ornamentals for their blossoms.
Arable land that is worked by plowing and sowing and raising crops.
European biennial having a long fusiform root that has been made palatable through cultivation.
Plants that are grown for their produce.
Yields the staple food of 50 percent of world's population.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- cropnoun
- cannabisnoun
- marijuananoun
- cultivatedadjective
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.