Describing a flower with separate, non-fused sepals (the leaf-like structures that protect a flower bud).
From Greek 'chorizein' (to separate) plus 'sepalum,' derived from a blend of 'sepal' and older botanical Latin. This term became standard in systematic botany during the 1800s.
The difference between chorisepalous and gamosepalous flowers helped botanists organize thousands of species, but modern DNA evidence shows these visual tricks don't tell the real story of plant evolution!
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