Orchid

How to spell orchid

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce orchid

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does orchid mean?

1. nounA flowering plant of the family Orchidaceae, prized for its exotic, often intricate and colourful blooms.

Orchid in a sentence

• She kept a delicate orchid on the kitchen windowsill.

• The florist recommended watering the orchid sparingly to avoid root rot.

Where does orchid come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek orkhis, which literally meant 'testicle'. Botanists applied that startling name because many orchid species grow from a pair of rounded underground tubers that reminded early observers of testicles. From orkhis the scientists of the Renaissance built the modern Latin family name Orchidaceae, and the everyday English form 'orchid' was effectively back-formed from that scientific label, entering common use in the early 1800s. An earlier English name for the plant was 'orchis', staying closer to the Greek, and that older form survives in some botanical writing. The unexpected detail to remember is the spelling trap: the word begins 'orch' with a hard 'ch' sounding like 'k', a clue to its Greek ancestry, and it ends in a plain '-id' rather than the '-ard' or '-ed' a writer might guess.

How the word is built

• orchid (from Greek orkhis: testicle, for the paired root tubers)
• no suffix