So I’m still playing Wordle (UK dictionary) and up comes:
sepal
I got it - but only by luck. Do you know it?
Honestly, I was paying attention at school (which was from 1957 - 1971 
)
For reference, here’s my previous thread…
Have you heard of this word? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
do you have a definition?
IANAH but in horticulture:
sepals are beneath petals in a flower. they’re green and like leaves, but part of flower.
I know it, but maybe only because it comes up in crossword puzzles occasionally.
Never heard of it here.
Yep. From about 50 years ago in Botany 101. And lots of crosswords since then.
Ditto.
Huh. I do daily crosswords, and I guess it’s one of those words that I fill in from the crosses (orthogonal clues), as it’s never stuck. I mainly stick with the New York Times, and going back to 1994, it’s appeared 35 times, so just over once a year on average, mostly late-week puzzles (which are more difficult.) Last time it appeared was in November of 2023.
Also checked the original word lists for US Wordle (which the NYTimes later curated, so some changes were made), and it, like “codon” from the thread before, is not on the target word list, but is included as an acceptable guess.
Learned it in high school biology
I’m a teacher, and I encountered the word for the first time yesterday in one of my class textbooks.
Learned it in HS bio class looong ago.
I’m curious – why are you spoilering the word when it’s impossible to answer your question without knowing the word?
To give clairvoyants a fair chance.
Simple explanation - I meant to post originally that I reached the state of:
SE?AL
and had no idea how to continue…
(Luckily one of my previous guesses gave me the P.)
Apologies for messing up 
- but thanks for all your responses.
Do I know it? It was the answer to a clue in a crossword puzzle I did yesterday.
And my knowledge of it predates doing crosswords. Going back to grade school (I guess that level would be called “middle school” today) it was part of a plant diagram where we had to learn all the terms.
Yup, learned it in biology at school. I’ve probably seen it mentioned occasionally since.
Yup. Don’t remember when I learned it.
I probably learned it from crossword puzzles. If I had learned it in a Biology class, I probably would have forgotten it if it didn’t frequently rear its head in puzzles.
I might not have been able to define it with precision, but would have said, “it’s like a petal.” I’ve known it since school days.
I once had a green rose, which is a mutation where all of the flower petals were replaced by sepals. It stayed small and died after a few years, I don’t know if the cultivar is inherently weak or if I had a dud individual.
Learned it in biology, too.
Probably forgot it soon after, too.
But any backyard gardener will encounter it frequently, and someone who does word puzzles gets hit with it as a nice, useful word with all common letters. Unlike codon it’s been in the language for 200 years.