Cycad
/ˈsaɪkæd/noun
A palm-like seed plant with a thick trunk and a crown of stiff pinnate leaves.
The Greek roots
Literally: “palm (through a copying error)”
The story of the word
The name rests on a copying mistake. Theophrastus wrote about an Egyptian palm called κόϊξ, and somewhere in the manuscript tradition the accusative plural κόϊκας turned into κύκας, which eighteenth-century botanists picked up as Cycas for a group of plants that are not palms at all. Cycads are gymnosperms, closer to conifers than to anything in a coconut grove, and they were dominant land plants while dinosaurs walked past them.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
In a sentence
The cycad in the courtyard has put out one new crown of leaves in six years.
Every part of the plant is toxic, which is why cycad seeds have to be leached for days before anyone eats them.