Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Mandrake
/ˈmændreɪk/noun
A Mediterranean plant of the nightshade family with a thick forked root, long used as a narcotic and credited with magical powers.
The Greek roots
μανδραγόρας
mandragóras
the mandrake plant
Literally: “the mandragoras plant”
Follow a root:μανδραγόρας1 word
The story of the word
Greek had μανδραγόρας, but Greek did not build it: the word came from somewhere east and its source is unknown. Old English borrowed the Latin form whole, as mandragora. By the fourteenth century English speakers had chewed it into mandrake, hearing a man and a drake in it because the forked root looked like a little human body, which is exactly the resemblance the folklore was built on.
- How it travelled
- unknown source → Ancient Greek → Latin → Middle English
- First recorded
- 14th century
In a sentence
Medieval herbals warn that a mandrake screams when it is pulled from the soil.
He kept a dried mandrake root in a drawer, forked like a small grey man.