Yesterday I finally started work on my garden, and one of the first things I did was a bit of weeding. The large crop of dandelions and other weeds in my lawn will take quite a while to remove, but in the meantime I thought I’d look at the origins of a few garden-related words.<\/p>\n
Weed<\/strong> comes from the Old English word w\u0113od<\/em> (grass, herb, weed), which is related to the Old High German word wiota<\/em> (fern), and probably comes from the Proto-Germanic word *weud-<\/em>. The verb to weed<\/strong> comes from the Late Old English weodian<\/em> [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n Words for weed in other languages include: chwynnyn<\/em> (Welsh), fiaile<\/em> (Irish), \u91ce\u8349 [y\u011bc\u01ceo – “wild grass”] (Mandarin), mauvaise herbe<\/em> (French – “bad grass”), \u96d1\u8349 [zass\u014d – “crude\/miscellaneous grass”] (Japanese).<\/p>\n Dandelion<\/strong> comes from the Middle French dent de lion<\/em> (lit. “lion’s tooth”), a calque translation of the Middle Latin dens leonis<\/em> – the leaves are shaped a bit like lion’s teeth. <\/p>\n Folk names for dandelion include tell-time<\/strong>, which refers the practice of blowing the seeds – the number of breaths needed supposedly being the hour, and the Middle English and French names piss-a-bed<\/strong> and pissenlit<\/strong>, which refer to its diuretic properties [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday I finally started work on my garden, and one of the first things I did was a bit of weeding. The large crop of dandelions and other weeds in my lawn will take quite a while to remove, but in the meantime I thought I’d look at the origins of a few garden-related words. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,104,107,111,127,129,10,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-irish","category-japanese","category-language","category-latin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}