Hellebore
/ˈhɛlɪbɔːr/noun
A winter-flowering plant of the buttercup family, poisonous, long used as a purgative.
The Greek roots
Literally: “food that kills (disputed)”
The story of the word
Greek doctors gave hellebore for madness, which is how Anticyra, the town whose hills grew the best of it, turned into a joke: telling a man to sail to Anticyra told him he needed his head seen to. The seer Melampus was supposed to have cured the daughters of Proetus with it. Ancient readers parsed the name as ἑλεῖν plus βορά, food that destroys, but the word is probably older than Greek and that analysis is a guess made by Greeks themselves. The poison is real, and the plant is still sold for winter borders.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
In a sentence
The hellebores were out under the hedge before anything else moved.
Gerard's herbal recommends hellebore for melancholy, which one hopes nobody tried.