Botany

How to spell botany

6 letters · 3 syllables

15 of the 90 people asked to spell botany in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is botony. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

botony botany

What people typed instead

• botony5 people
• bottany4 people

How to pronounce botany

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does botany mean?

1. nounThe scientific study of plants, including their structure, growth, and classification.

Botany in a sentence

• She studied botany at university before becoming a horticulturist.

• The museum holds a vast collection of botany specimens pressed into albums.

Where does botany come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek botanē, which meant a plant, a herb, or even the grass of a pasture, and which was itself built on the verb boskein, meaning 'to feed' or 'to graze', so the original idea was literally fodder for grazing animals. From botanē the Greeks formed the adjective botanikos, 'relating to plants', and Latin took this in as botanicus. English borrowed the adjective 'botanic' in the early 1600s, and the noun 'botany', the study of plants itself, was coined a little later in the same century by simply attaching the noun-forming '-y'. The middle syllable is the spelling trap: it is an unstressed schwa (bot-uh-ny), which tempts writers toward 'botony' or 'botiny' when there is in fact a plain 'a' from the Greek root botanē. Knowing the plant-feeding sense of that root can help fix the 'a' firmly in mind.

How the word is built

• botan- (from Greek botanē: plant, herb, pasture)
• -y (noun-forming suffix)