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meadowsweet

/ˈmɛdoʊˈswit/noun

meadowsweet is a noun meaning “A Eurasian perennial flowering plant of Rosaceae family, Filipendula ulmaria” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled M-E-A-D-O-W-S-W-E-E-T, and it appears about once in every 24 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of meadowsweet is meadowsweets.

What does meadowsweet mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A Eurasian perennial flowering plant of Rosaceae family, Filipendula ulmaria.

  2. 2

    Any plant of the genus Spiraea of the Rosaceae family, native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere and consisting of about 80–100 species of shrubs.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce meadowsweet?

  • UK /ˈmɛdəʊswiːt/
  • US /ˈmɛdoʊˈswit/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-meadowsweet.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of meadowsweet

  • meadowsweets plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is meadowsweet?

Meadowsweet appears about once in every 24 million words in written English, the 148,541st 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).

Meadowsweet in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense Filipendula ulmaria:

LanguageWords
Frenchreine-des-prés
GermanMädesüß
Portugueseulmeira, ulmária
Spanishreina de los prados, altarcina, florón

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 meadowsweet come from?

Corruption of mead sweet, from use in making mead.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).