Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Chrysanthemum
/krɪˈsænθəməm/noun
A garden plant of the daisy family bearing dense, many-petalled autumn blooms.
The Greek roots
χρυσός
khrysós
gold
ἄνθεμον
ánthemon
flower
Literally: “gold flower”
The story of the word
The Greek χρυσάνθεμον was a yellow field flower, probably the corn marigold, and English had the name for that plant by the 1550s. Linnaeus kept it as a genus in 1753, and when cultivated varieties came from China and Japan the old name transferred to them. The gold half turns up again in chrysalis, the pupa that looks gilded, and the flower half in anthology, which was originally a gathering of blossoms.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1550s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
chrysalisanthologychrysoliteanther
In a sentence
In Greece the chrysanthemum belongs to graves, not to dinner tables.
He grows chrysanthemums for the village show and guards them from slugs.