Definitions

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

  • noun A plant that grows on rocks.
  • noun A coral with a hard skeleton.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Any one of the polyps whose substance is stony or hard, as corals and sea-fans. The older naturalists classed them with plants, whence the name.
  • noun In phytogeography, any plant which grows upon the surface of rocks or stones, aerial or submerged, with or without the presence of humus: sometimes opposed to chasmophyte (which see).

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

  • noun (Zoöl.) A hard, or stony, plantlike organism, as the gorgonians, corals, and corallines, esp. those gorgonians having a calcareous axis. All the lithophytes except the corallines are animals.

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

  • noun biology Any plant that lives grows on rocks, obtaining nourishment from rain and the atmosphere.
  • noun zoology Any organism, such as a coral, resembling a stony plant.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun plant that grows on rocks or stony soil and derives nourishment from the atmosphere

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

lith- + -phyte

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