chloroplast
/ˈklɔːɹəʊˌplæst/noun
chloroplast is a noun meaning “An organelle, found in the cells of green plants and in photosynthetic algae, where photosynthesis takes place, characterized by a high concentration…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-H-L-O-R-O-P-L-A-S-T and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 5 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of chloroplast is chloroplasts.
What does chloroplast mean?
noun
- 1
An organelle, found in the cells of green plants and in photosynthetic algae, where photosynthesis takes place, characterized by a high concentration of chlorophyll and two membranes.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce chloroplast?
- /ˈklɔːɹəʊˌplæst/
Chloroplast has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-ncalif-chloroplast.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of chloroplast
- chloroplasts plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is chloroplast?
Chloroplast appears about once in every 5 million words in written English, the 65,913th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Chloroplast in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense photosynthetic organelle:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | chloroplaste |
| German | Chloroplast |
| Portuguese | cloroplasto |
| Spanish | cloroplasto |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does chloroplast come from?
From chloro- + -plast.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).