Meaning & use
vine
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Meanings
nouncountable
A plant with a long, bendy stem that climbs up walls or trees or spreads along the ground.
Grammar: Countable: a vine, many vines.
Patterns
- a vine on something
- a vine climbs something
A thick vine climbed the side of the old barn.
The pumpkin vines spread across half the garden.
Ivy is a vine that clings to stone walls.
nouncountable
The plant that bears grapes, grown in rows to make wine and fruit.
Grammar: Often plural in farming: rows of vines.
Patterns
- grapes on the vine
- rows of vines
The farmer tied each vine to a wire after pruning.
Rows of vines covered the hillside above the village.
Grapes ripen on the vine through the late summer.
Word forms
| plural | vines |
|---|
Common combinations
- grape vine
- The grape vine grows over the porch.
- climbing vine
- A climbing vine covered the fence.
- ripen on the vine
- The tomatoes ripen best on the vine.
- trailing vine
- A trailing vine hung from the basket.
- prune a vine
- She learned how to prune a vine in the spring.
Synonyms and how they differ
- creeper
- Creeper is an everyday garden word for a plant that spreads along surfaces, while vine is more general and includes the grape plant.
- climber
- Climber is a gardening term for a plant trained upward, but a vine can also trail along the ground.
- liana
- Liana is a specialist word for woody vines in tropical forests, narrower than vine.
- trailer
- Trailer is a gardening term for plants that hang or spread downward, narrower than vine.
Word family
Commonly confused: vine or wine?
vine vs wine
Wine is the drink made from grapes, while a vine is the plant they grow on.
Practice
The sweet grapes were picked straight from the ___ in the sunny garden.
Choose one answer.
A vine is the plant that bears grapes. Wine, vane and vain are wrong in meaning, and vane and vain are only similar in sound.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “vine”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.