Ferns of the woodland floor
dryopteris
say dry-OP-ter-iss
Dryopteris filix-mas
The buckler ferns and shield ferns, the coarse shuttlecocks of British and European woodland. Every syllable after the first is unstressed, and that is where the spelling comes apart.
What it is
The plant
Dryopteris filix-mas is the male fern, one of the commonest large ferns of oak and beech woods, with fronds a metre or more long rising in a ring from a scaly crown. The Latin name means male fern, given to separate it from the lady fern, Athyrium filix-femina, which is finer and paler and grows in the same ground.
Why
Why the letters and the sound disagree
Two Greek words joined: drys, an oak, and pteris, a fern. The oak fern, for the woods it grows in. The p in the middle is fully pronounced, which is worth noticing, because the same pteris at the start of a word loses its p entirely: Pteridium is said te-RID-ee-um. English only drops the p when it has nothing in front of it.
Recorded
Spellings people arrive at
- dryoptarisan unstressed voweldryopteris, with an e.
- dryopteresan unstressed vowelBecause pteris ends in is.
- drieopterisy doing the work of iNo. One letter, y.
- dryopterasan unstressed vowelWrite dryopteris and the order will find it.
- dryopterusan unstressed vowelThe name ends -is.
- driopterisy doing the work of idryopteris. The first vowel is y.
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