Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of numerous plants in the tropical genus Heliconia, often cultivated for their showy inflorescences with bright red, orange, or yellow bracts.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as Heliconius.
  • noun A genus of monocotyledonous plants founded by Linnæus in 1767, belonging to the natural order Musacæ, and characterized by free sepals, short corolla-tube, and ovary-cells having one ovule.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) One of numerous species of Heliconius, a genus of tropical American butterflies. The wings are usually black, marked with green, crimson, and white.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of genus Heliconia of flowering plants.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin Helicōnia, genus name, coined by Carolus Linnaeus after Greek Helikōn, Helicon, the mountain in Greece where the Muses were said to dwell (in punning reference to the fact that species of the genus Heliconia resemble banana plants, classified in the closely related genus Musa).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the genus name.

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