Have you ever stopped to think about some of the names we give our plants? I spend a fair amount of time looking at plants, whether I’m teaching foraging, walking through the woods or simply noticing what is growing around me, and every now and then something catches my attention that sends me down one of those little rabbit holes of research.
This time it was the word ‘wort’.
You don't have to look very far before you start finding it. St John's wort, Ragwort, Mugwort, Nipplewort, Woundwort and Soapwort are all plants we can encounter in the UK, and there are plenty more. It is one of those words that seems to have survived in our plant names even though we don't really use it as a word in everyday conversation anymore.
So what does it actually mean?
Well, it turns out that ‘wort’ is a very old word. The Old English form was wyrt, and it was used for a plant, herb, root or vegetable. In other words, it wasn't originally describing a particular type of plant at all. It was simply a word for a plant or herb, and over time it has remained attached to the names of many species.
I had a look at what the dictionaries have to say about it, and the Oxford English Dictionary treats ‘wort’ in this sense as an archaic word, which seems about right when you think about how rarely we use it on its own today. Cambridge Dictionary still recognises -wort as something used in the names of some plants, particularly those with a history of herbal use. So although the word itself has largely disappeared from everyday English, it has managed to hang on in our plant names.
Once you know that, some of the names start to make a little more sense.
Take St John's wort, for example. The ‘wort’ part is simply telling us that it is a plant, while St John’s refers to its association with St John the Baptist and his feast day. The plant we generally mean in the UK is Hypericum perforatum, a plant that has an impressive history of folklore and traditional use.
Then there is Woundwort. Hedge Woundwort, Stachys sylvatica, is one of several plants that have carried this name, and the name reflects its traditional association with wounds. This is something I find particularly interesting when I'm teaching plant identification, because suddenly the name isn't just another thing to remember. It starts to give you a little bit of information about how people once viewed the plant.
Soapwort, Saponaria officinalis, is another nice example because the name gives us a pretty good clue. The plant contains saponins which produce a lather when the plant is agitated in water, and historically it was used as a natural cleaning agent. So here the first part of the name is telling us something about what the plant could do, while ‘wort’ is simply the old word for the plant itself.
Ragwort, Jacobaea vulgaris, is perhaps a little less obvious. The ‘rag’ part is generally associated with the ragged appearance of its leaves, although, as with many old common names, there isn't always a completely certain explanation for where every part of a name came from. That's another thing worth remembering when looking into plant names. We often have a very plausible explanation, but plausible isn't necessarily the same thing as proven.
Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris, is another one where things become less certain. There are several explanations for the ‘mug’ part of the name, including associations with its use in drinks, but the exact origin isn't as clear cut as some of the other examples. What we can say with much more confidence is that the ‘wort’ part goes back to that old word for a plant or herb.
And this is where I think it gets really interesting.
We tend to think of plant identification as being about recognising the shape of a leaf, the colour of a flower, the arrangement of the leaves or perhaps the habitat in which something is growing. All of those things are obviously important, but the names themselves can contain clues to a completely different part of the story.
People didn't name the plants around them simply because they needed labels for a field guide. These were plants they lived alongside. They gathered them, ate some of them, used others for medicine, made things from them and developed beliefs and stories around them. Their names were often practical descriptions, reminders of uses or associations that made sense to the people using them at the time.
Of course, we have to be a little careful here because it is very easy to look at an old plant name and create a nice explanation for it that sounds convincing but isn't actually supported by the evidence. I've certainly fallen into that trap myself. Once you start looking into the history of plant names you quickly discover that some are well understood, some are debated and some have been explained in several completely different ways over the years.
Liverwort is a good example of how names can change and develop. The name was historically associated with the idea that some of these plants resembled the liver or could be used in connection with liver complaints. Today, however, liverwort is the common name for a group of small non-flowering plants, and the name tells us more about its history than it does about what the plant actually is.
The same applies to Nipplewort, Lapsana communis, whose name has traditionally been associated with its use for sore or cracked nipples. Whether every traditional use attached to an old plant name was genuinely effective is a completely different question, of course, and one that shouldn't be confused with the origin of the name itself.
That distinction is quite important because ‘wort’ doesn't mean medicinal plant. It is tempting to think that it does, particularly when you find so many plants with ‘wort’ in their name that have some history of medicinal or practical use, but that isn't what the word originally meant. Wyrt was simply a word for a plant, herb, root or vegetable.
It makes me wonder how many other words we still use without really knowing where they came from.
I think that is one of the things I enjoy most about learning about the natural world. You start off trying to identify a plant and before you know it you're looking into Old English, traditional medicine, folklore, people's relationship with the landscape and the way our language has changed over hundreds of years. One subject leads into another, and suddenly something that looked like a simple plant name has opened up a much bigger story.
This is also why I enjoy teaching our courses and spending time with people who are just beginning to look more closely at the natural world. You don't need to know hundreds of species to start with. In fact, I think there is something quite rewarding about knowing a handful of plants really well and understanding not just what they look like, but where they grow, what they were traditionally used for and why they have the names they do.
So next time you come across a plant with ‘wort’ in its name, have a look at it a little differently. The word itself is a small piece of our linguistic history, and the bit that comes before it may tell you something about how people once saw, used or understood that plant.
It might not always give you the whole story, and sometimes we simply don't know exactly where a name came from, but that is part of the fun.
After all, when you start looking closely enough at the natural world, there always seems to be another story waiting to be found.