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(chiefly botany) Having three or more lobes or veins arising from a common point.
Although palmate leaves are typical of most Western maples, a number of species have leaves without lobes.
(botany, of leaves) Having more than three leaflets arising from a common point, often in the form of a fan.
1909, Eleanor Stockhouse Atkinson, “In the Tree Tops”, in The How and Why Library:
The horse chestnut, buckeye and hickory trees have palmate leaves. That is, the broad oval leaflets are all set around the tip of a common leaf stem, spreading in a circle, like the ribs of a palm leaf fan.
The word is rare outside of technical writing, and hardly ever qualifies things other than leaves.
A compound leaf with more than three leaflets (trifoliate) radiating from the same point is more usually called palmate or palmately compound to avoid ambiguity.
While "palmated" is a more usual term when referring to webbed appendages, "palmate" is often found in zoological nomenclature as the Latin term for both meanings is palmatus.
