Mimosa
/mɪˈmoʊzə/noun
A genus of sensitive plants, and loosely the yellow-flowered acacias sold by florists under that name.
The Greek roots
Literally: “the imitator”
The story of the word
Mimosa pudica folds its leaves at a touch, and the botanists who named it decided the plant was imitating an animal's flinch, so they built the name on μῖμος, an actor in the short comic sketches the Greeks called mimes. Most of what florists sell as mimosa is not a Mimosa at all but an acacia. The cocktail took its name from the flower's colour in the 1920s and has nothing to do with the plant's manners.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The children spent an afternoon touching the mimosa leaf by leaf until it stopped responding.
Mimosa comes into flower in Provence in February, weeks before anything else.