Lotus

How to spell lotus

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lotus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lotus mean?

1. nounAn aquatic plant with large floating leaves and showy flowers, regarded as sacred in several Asian cultures.

Lotus in a sentence

• A pink lotus floated on the still surface of the temple pond.

• The gardener planted a single lotus in the deepest part of the water feature.

Where does lotus come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word arrived in English through the Latin lotus, which the Romans had taken directly from the Greek lotos, a name applied loosely to several quite different plants. In Greek tradition the lotos was most famous as the fruit eaten by the Lotus-eaters in Homer's Odyssey, a food said to make travellers forget their homeland and drift into contented idleness. The same Greek name was also attached to the sacred water lilies of Egypt and India, and it is that aquatic flower that the modern English word usually brings to mind. English picked the term up in the late 1500s, keeping the Latin spelling almost unchanged, which is why it ends in the slightly unexpected -us rather than the more English-looking -is. The plant later gave its name to the cross-legged 'lotus' posture in yoga, and the underlying Greek root has stayed remarkably stable across more than two thousand years.

How the word is built

• lotus (whole word, from Greek lotos: a plant name)