Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Orchid
/ˈɔrkɪd/noun
A flowering plant of the family Orchidaceae, known for elaborate and often symmetrical blooms.
The Greek roots
ὄρχις
órkhis
testicle
Literally: “testicle”
Follow a root:ὄρχις1 word
The story of the word
Dioscorides named the plant for its paired underground tubers, which hang together and look like testicles. Botanists writing in Latin assumed the stem was orchid-, which is why we have an orchid rather than an orchis. Doctors kept the true stem, so an inflamed testicle is orchitis and an undescended one is cryptorchidism.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1845
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
orchitiscryptorchidismorchiectomy
In a sentence
She keeps three orchids on the bathroom windowsill because they like the steam.
The orchid put out one flower spike in four years.