Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Asphodel
/ˈæsfədɛl/noun
A tall Mediterranean lily with pale spiked flowers, long associated with the dead.
The Greek roots
ἀσφόδελος
asphódelos
asphodel plant
Literally: “asphodel”
Follow a root:ἀσφόδελος2 words
The story of the word
Homer put the ordinary dead in a meadow of asphodel, and the plant earned the job honestly: it grows on poor overgrazed ground where nothing else bothers, flowering grey-white across empty hillsides. Greeks planted it on graves and ate the roasted tubers in hard years. English took the word twice, once straight from Greek and once through a Dutch phrase de affodil, which came back as daffodil.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
In a sentence
By May the whole slope above the village was asphodel and stones.