Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Cypress
/ˈsaɪprəs/noun
A tall, narrow evergreen conifer with dark scale-like foliage, long planted in Mediterranean cemeteries.
The Greek roots
κυπάρισσος
kypárissos
the cypress tree
Literally: “the cypress tree”
Follow a root:κυπάρισσος1 word
The story of the word
Kypárissos is probably not a Greek word at all but one the Greeks inherited from an older Mediterranean language, as happened with several tree names. Ovid supplied a myth regardless: a boy called Cyparissus killed his tame stag by accident and grieved so hard that Apollo turned him into the tree. Its association with graveyards is genuinely ancient, and the wood was prized because it resists rot for centuries.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
cypressed
In a sentence
Two rows of cypress mark the drive up to the farmhouse.
The coffin was cypress, chosen because it lasts.