y doing the work of i
licopodium
The first vowel is y.
y doing the work of i
This y is the Greek letter upsilon, and it survives in English wherever a Greek word does: cycle, hydro, myco, lyric. In this name it belongs to lykos, the wolf. The clubmoss is a wolf's foot, and the letter that makes it a wolf rather than a nonsense syllable is the y.
The class
A Greek upsilon, written y in English and sounding like a plain i.
Same name
Other spellings recorded for lycopodium
The name