Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Aeonium
/iˈoʊniəm/noun
A succulent plant of the Canary Islands and North Africa, bearing rosettes of fleshy leaves on bare stems.
The Greek roots
αἰώνιος
aiṓnios
everlasting, age-long
Literally: “everlasting”
Follow a root:αἰώνιος1 word
The story of the word
αἰών is an age or a lifetime, the whole span of a thing. Greek writers on plants used the derived name for a houseleek that stayed green through drought and went on living after it was pulled from the ground, and Webb and Berthelot revived the word for the Canary rosettes in the 1840s. Church Greek took the same root for eternity, so aeon and the liturgical phrase about the ages of ages come from the same place.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
aeoneon
In a sentence
A black aeonium in a terracotta pot needs almost nothing from you.
The aeonium had gone leggy reaching for the window.