Flora

How to spell flora

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce flora

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does flora mean?

1. nounThe plants of a particular region, habitat, or period, considered collectively.
2. nounThe community of microorganisms, especially bacteria, living in a part of the body such as the gut.

Flora in a sentence

• The alpine flora of the region includes rare orchids and mosses.

• A course of antibiotics can disrupt the natural gut flora for weeks.

• The guidebook describes the local flora and the best months to see it in bloom.

• Probiotic yoghurt is marketed as a way to restore healthy intestinal flora.

Where does flora come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes directly from Latin, where Flora was the name of the Roman goddess of flowers and spring; her festival, the Floralia, was celebrated each April with garlands and games. The name itself grew from the noun flos, with the stem flor-, meaning simply 'flower' or 'blossom', the same root that gives English 'floral', 'florist' and 'flourish'. In the early 1500s naturalists began using 'Flora' as a poetic personification of plant life, and by the 1700s the great classifying botanists, Linnaeus among them, adopted it as a technical term for the entire collection of plants native to a given region, deliberately paired with 'fauna' for its animals. From the soil and gardens it later spread into medicine, where 'flora' came to mean the community of microbes living in a part of the body. Because the word keeps its tidy Latin shape with a single -l- and a plain -ora ending, it is rarely misspelt, though the silent link to 'flower' is worth remembering.

How the word is built

• flor- (from Latin flos/floris: flower)
• -a (Latin noun/feminine ending)