plant [OE] Old English plante meant ‘seedling’ from Latin planta ‘sprout, cutting’. Use of the word in the phrase plant yourself somewhere dates from the early 18th century. Later that century plant came to be used for ‘things installed’, such as machinery or large pieces of apparatus. The related plantation [LME] described the action of planting seeds. It came to be an ‘estate for the cultivation of crops such as coffee or tobacco’ [E18th], then ‘the settling of people in a conquered or dominated country’: in the late 19th century it described the earlier establishment of English landowners in Ireland.