Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Hyacinth
/ˈhaɪəsɪnθ/noun
A spring bulb that throws up a dense spike of waxy, heavily scented flowers.
The Greek roots
ὑάκινθος
hyákinthos
a dark blue flower
Literally: “the hyakinthos flower”
Follow a root:ὑάκινθος1 word
The story of the word
Apollo loved the youth Hyakinthos and killed him with a badly thrown discus; the flower came up from the blood. The -nth- in the Greek name marks the word as pre-Greek, inherited from whatever was spoken in the Aegean before Greek arrived, like labyrinth and Corinth. Whatever the ancients meant by it was probably not our hyacinth — larkspur and iris are both better candidates.
- How it travelled
- Pre-Greek → Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
jacinthhyacinthine
In a sentence
The hyacinths in the hall were so strong she had to move them outside.
He forces hyacinth bulbs in a dark cupboard every October.