A Dictionary Of Botanical Terms

Lexikon

A particularly versatile reference work for all those needing a guide to botanical terminology and plant structure.

An excerpt from the PREFACE: THE task of selecting what terms should be included in any branch of science offers many difficulties: in the case of botany, it is closely linked on with zoology and general biology, with geology as regards fossil plants, with pharmacy, chemistry, and the cultivation of plants in the garden or the field. How far it is advisable to include terms from those overlapping sciences which lie on the borderland is a question on which no two people might think alike. I have given every word an independent examination, so as to take in all which seemed needful, all, in fact, which might be fairly expected, and yet to exclude technical terms which really belong to another science. Words in common use frequently have technical meanings, and must be included; other technical words are foreign to botany, and must be excluded. Thus "entire" must be defined in its botanic sense, and such purely geologic terms as Triassic and Pleistocene must be passed by. The total number of rare alkaloids and similar bodies recorded in pharmacologic and chemical works, if included, would have extended this Glossary to an inconvenient size; I have therefore only enumerated those best known or of more frequent mention in literature, or interesting for special reasons. Many words only to be found in dictionaries have been passed by; each dictionary I have consulted contains words apparently peculiar to it, and some have been suspected of being purposely coined to round off a set of terms. The foundations of the list here presented are A. Gray's "Botanical Text-Book," Lindley's "Glossary," and Henslow's "Dictionary," as set forth in the Bibliography. To these terms have been added others extant in the various modern text-books and current literature, noted in the course of reading, or found by special search. The abstracts published in the "Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society" afforded many English equivalents of foreign terms.... ....The total numbers included in this Glossary amount to about 16,000, that is, nearly three times as many as in any other previous work in the language. The derivations have been carefully checked, but as this book has no pretension to be A philological work, the history of the word is not attempted; thus in "etiolate" I have contented myself with giving the proximate derivation, whilst the great Oxford dictionary cites a host of intermediate forms deduced from stipella. The meaning appended to the roots is naturally a rough one, for to render adequately all that may be conveyed by many of the roots is manifestly impossible when a single word must serve. The accent has been added in accordance with the best discoverable usage; where pronunciation varies, I have tried to follow the best usage; in some words such as "medullary" I have given the accent as it is always spoken, though all the dictionaries, except Henslow's, accent it as "med'ullary." When words have become thoroughly anglicised, it would have been mere pedantry to accent them otherwise; we say or'ator, not as in Latin, ora'tor. The accent does not imply syllabic division, but when the accent immediately follows a vowel, that vowel is long; if one or more consonants intervene, then the vowel is short; thus ca'nus, cas'sus, as though they were printed ca-nus, cas-sus [both pronounced with a short a as in "ah]; in a few instances the pronunciation is also given when the word would otherwise be doubtful as to sound.