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About this Glossary

ASCII version originally compiled by: Bob Riffle 71270.3070@compuserve.com

HTML conversion by: Karen Fletcher, fletcher@prairienet.org

BOTRTS, Botanical Roots - by Bob Riffle

Some word parts ("arizon-" and "terminal-") are (or should be ) obvious; others which seem obvious may be a case of "faux-amis" ("false friends"), as they say in French: Alpinia, a genus in the ginger family is NOT named for alpine regions, but rather for one Propser Alpinus, an Italian physician.

I have not attempted to cover all forms of which a word-part might par- take, and I have purposefully varied the Latinized endings, even when I couldn't think of having encountered an example of, say, the neuter ending ("um") of a word-part. I've not given all POSSIBLE forms and endings for each part, rather my attempt has been to show (especially to the novice to all this "double-talk") the variety AMONG endings and hope that he will get a feel for not only the use of the word part but also its possible permutations, so that when he sees the word "procera" or "procerus" or "procerum," he will recognize it as meaning "tall," and when he encounters "bifrons" he will be able to put two parts together and get "two" and "leaf."

And I've not even THOUGHT about including parts which honor proper names, such as "schottii, bernardii, farnesiana, berlandieri" etc. Most are somewhat obvious, and probably nothing to be done about those that aren't - except make this ditty many times its present length!.

Most word parts here cited are usually prefixes and are denoted with the dash FOLLOWING the part; a few are mostly suffixes and, therefore, are cited with the dash preceding the part.) With suffixes, the desig- nation, "(...)" indicates that it is seldom the actual ending of the descriptive, and that it usually has one of the endings listed below.

Endings of the descriptives are usually Latinized, and the most common Latinized endings are: -a
-ans
-ea
-ens
-es
-is
-ix
-or
-ox
-um
-us