Vocabulary

When searching for a Latin word in this vocabulary, remember that you have to look under the nominative singular for a noun and under the masculine nominative singular for an adjective (and for its comparative and superlative forms).

To save space, we have kept the length of entries to a minimum and not included definitions. Hence, the Vocabulary should be used in conjunction with glossaries, several of which are listed in the bibliography, and Stearn’s Botanical Latin.

Where Latin and English words of the same meaning are the same or so similar that they would appear side by side, they are listed once, under either the English or the Latin term. The Latin may be recognised by the part of speech given immediately afterwards, in brackets. Closely related terms (e.g. aequalis, aequans; alternate, alternately) are grouped in one entry.

Entries are included for many prefixes and suffixes. We indicate whether these are of Greek or Latin origin, since they should be associated with words of the same language when new epithets or terms are coined. We also indicate whether the associated word is a noun or verb (it’s rarely an adjective). Note that the declension and gender are not given for prefixes, since these are joined to a following word, but they are for suffixes since these terminate a compound word.