Magnolia

How to spell magnolia

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce magnolia

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does magnolia mean?

1. nounA flowering tree or shrub bearing large, fragrant, cup-shaped blossoms, often white or pink.
2. nounA soft, creamy off-white shade commonly used for interior walls.

Magnolia in a sentence

• The magnolia in the front garden bursts into bloom every April.

• They painted the whole hallway a neutral magnolia to brighten it.

• She planted a young magnolia near the patio for its scented spring flowers.

• The landlord repaints every flat in plain magnolia between tenants.

Where does magnolia come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Magnolia is one of those words that hides a real person inside it. The botanist Charles Plumier coined the genus name in the early 1700s to honour Pierre Magnol, a French physician and botanist from Montpellier who was an early pioneer of grouping plants into families. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus then adopted the name in his formal classification system, and from there it passed into everyday English as the name of the flowering tree with its large, fragrant, cup-shaped blooms. The standard Latin suffix -ia, used across botany to turn a name into a genus, is what gives the word its smooth ending and explains why it is spelled -lia rather than the -lier you might expect from the French surname. In the twentieth century the word took on a second life as the name of a soft, creamy off-white paint colour, inspired by the pale petals of the flower. So the spelling trap, the silent slide from Magnol to magnolia, is really a fossil of a forgotten Frenchman's name.

How the word is built

• magnol- (from the surname of botanist Pierre Magnol)
• -ia (Latin suffix forming genus and plant names)