Definition of "whorled" [whorled]

• Having or forming whorls or a whorl: whorled flower parts; a whorled textile pattern. (adjective)

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.

• "We recognized headwaiters and porters, pool boys and cabaret singers, whorled barnacles for fingertips."
• "It was a world inhabited by sea creatures and whorled growths, forms with a pleasing balance of rigid symmetry and organic irregularity."
• "The ancestral state in other characters is equivocal: e.g., bisexual vs. unisexual flowers, whorled vs. spiral floral phyllotaxis, presence vs. absence of tepal differentiation, anatropous vs. orthotropous ovules."