Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Petal
/ˈpɛtəl/noun
One of the coloured segments forming the corolla of a flower.
The Greek roots
πέταλον
pétalon
leaf, thin plate
Literally: “a thin spread sheet”
Follow a root:πέταλον1 word
The story of the word
The Greek noun came from πετάννυμι, to spread out, and meant anything beaten or opened flat: a leaf, but equally a sheet of gold, and the plate on the high priest's forehead in the Septuagint. Botanists of the seventeenth century took it as their technical term and English had petal by 1704. Flowers had petals for a very long time before anyone had a word that meant only that.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1704
In a sentence
A single petal had blown onto the windowsill and dried there flat as paper.