Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Geranium
/dʒəˈreɪniəm/noun
A hardy garden plant with rounded leaves and clusters of pink, red or white flowers.
The Greek roots
γέρανος
géranos
crane (the bird)
Literally: “little crane”
Follow a root:γέρανος1 word
The story of the word
The seed head ends in a long beak-like spike, so the Greeks named the plant for the crane; English country speech arrived at the same picture on its own with cranesbill. Linnaeus kept γεράνιον as the genus in 1753. Most plants sold as geraniums are in fact Pelargonium, named for the stork by exactly the same logic, which is why the two names stay tangled in every garden centre.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
pelargoniumgeraniol
In a sentence
The geraniums on the balcony survived a summer nobody watered them.
Her geranium cuttings root in a jam jar every time.