Definition of "cycad" []

• Any of various palmlike gymnospermous cone-bearing evergreen plants of the division Cycadophyta, native to warm regions and having large pinnately compound leaves. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Ms. Coelho, who not only can wax poetic about the female epiphytic cycad in the Botanical Garden's New World Lowland Rainforest exhibit or the incendiary Capsicum chinense peppers in the Edible Garden area but who also spars gamely with chipmunks on her own property, in Putnam Valley couldn't have been more generous with her time or patient with my level of horticultural idiocy."
• "The bird bends down to delicately lift an orangish fruit—the seed of a cycad?"
• "One of the long-necked creatures neatly bit off the crown of a cycad and continued its lumbering progress with huge fronds dripping from its not too capacious mouth."