Colophon
About this dictionary
Ferns, horsetails and clubmosses, letter by letter.
The
The problem it addresses
Fern names came into English through botanical Latin, and botanical Latin took most of them straight from Greek without adjusting the spelling. The result is a vocabulary where almost nothing is written the way it sounds. A Greek chi arrives as ch and says k. A Greek upsilon arrives as y and says eye. A Latin diminutive ends in a doubled l you cannot hear. Somebody who has only heard the name has no way to guess any of it.
How
How the names were chosen
Nine to start with, three in each group, all of them genuinely difficult to write down from the sound. A name only earns a place here if the ear and the spelling actually disagree. There is no entry for bracken and there will not be one, because there is nothing in bracken to get wrong.
How
How the respellings work
The line marked say is a plain respelling with the stressed syllable in capitals, not phonetic notation. It is meant to be read out loud by somebody who has never seen a pronunciation key. Where a name is said more than one way in practice, the entry says so rather than picking a winner.
Where
Where the explanations come from
The Greek and Latin roots, the commemorative names and the binomials are standard botanical record. Where an origin is disputed or simply unknown, the entry describes the letters instead of inventing a derivation. A wrong etymology would be worse than none.
The
The marks on the plate
The comparison block borrows a fern's own notation. Sori are the round spore clusters that sit in rows on the underside of a frond, and a ripe one is rust brown. On these pages a filled rust mark sits under every letter position where the heard spelling and the written spelling disagree. A hollow ring means the two agree.
How
How it grows
Nine names is a start, not a limit. Cystopteris, ceterach, adiantum, polystichum, phegopteris, ophioglossum, huperzia and isoetes are all waiting, and each new name is rolled independently, so nothing already published shifts when one is added.