Meaning & use
Triffid
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A large, menacing, mobile plant, especially one capable of attacking people; used informally to describe any unusually aggressive or overgrown plant.
See it in a sentence
The garden had become so overgrown with brambles it looked like something from a field of triffids.
Gardeners joked about the towering, thorny hedge as their own personal triffid.
A note on using this word
The word comes from John Wyndham's 1951 science-fiction novel "The Day of the Triffids," about carnivorous walking plants, and has since entered informal British English as a playful term for any menacing-looking plant.
Words with a similar meaning
monster plant
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
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