Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Pelargonium
/ˌpɛləˈɡəʊniəm/noun
A genus of southern African plants, sold in nurseries under the wrong name of geranium.
The Greek roots
πελαργός
pelargós
stork
Literally: “stork plant”
Follow a root:πελαργός1 word
The story of the word
L'Héritier separated the genus in 1789 and named it for the seed head, a long beak like a stork's. That is the same joke as geranium, from γέρανος, crane, and the two genera were split precisely because botanists could tell the beaks apart. Gardeners never adopted the change, so the scented plants on every windowsill are pelargoniums that everybody calls geraniums.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
geraniumpelargonic
In a sentence
The pelargoniums on the balcony survive drought better than anything else out there.