orchid

英文词源

orchid

orchid: [19] Greek órkhis meant ‘testicle’ (a sense preserved in English orchitis ‘inflammation of the testicles’ [18]). The tuberous roots of the orchid supposedly resemble testicles (hence the old dialect name ballock’s-grass for various sorts of wild orchid), and so the plant was named órkhis. The Latin form orchis was taken by botanists of the 16th and 17th centuries as the basis for the plant’s scientific name (they smuggled an inauthentic d into it, under the mistaken impression that its stem form was orchid-), and it passed from there into English.

orchid (n.)

1845, introduced by John Lindley in "School Botanty," from Modern Latin Orchideæ (Linnaeus), the plant's family name, from Latin orchis, a kind of orchid, from Greek orkhis (genitive orkheos) "orchid," literally "testicle," from PIE *orghi-, the standard root for "testicle" (cognates: Avestan erezi "testicles," Armenian orjik, Middle Irish uirgge, Irish uirge "testicle," Lithuanian erzilas "stallion"). The plant so called because of the shape of its root. Earlier in English in Latin form, orchis (1560s), and in Middle English it was ballockwort (c. 1300; see ballocks). Marred by extraneous -d- in an attempt to extract the Latin stem.