Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Heliotrope
/ˈhiːliətroʊp/noun
A garden plant with fragrant purple flowers, and by extension the pinkish-purple colour of those flowers.
The Greek roots
ἥλιος
hḗlios
sun
τροπή
tropḗ
a turning
Literally: “sun turner”
The story of the word
Greeks gave the name to plants believed to follow the sun across the sky, and Ovid used the belief for the story of Clytie, who watched Helios until she rooted in the ground and became a flower. The same word names a green jasper flecked with red, the bloodstone, on the theory that it reflects the sun in water. Gauss then borrowed it in 1821 for a surveying instrument that flashed sunlight from a mirror between distant stations, visible for tens of kilometres.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
heliumheliocentricphototropismtropic
In a sentence
The heliotrope by the door smells of cherry pie on warm evenings.