Poppy

How to spell poppy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce poppy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does poppy mean?

1. nounA plant with showy, papery flowers, often bright red, whose seeds and sap have been used in cooking and medicine.

Poppy in a sentence

• A single red poppy swayed at the edge of the cornfield.

• She pinned a paper poppy to her coat for the remembrance service.

Where does poppy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Poppy descends from the Latin papaver, the Romans' name for the bright flowering plant, and it is one of the oldest plant names in English. The Latin word passed into Old English as popig or popaeg, and over the centuries the spelling smoothed down through Middle English popi to the modern poppy. The same papaver root survives in the plant's formal botanical name, Papaver, and in papaverine, a compound drawn from the opium poppy. Because the original Latin had only a single p in the middle, the doubled pp of the English form is a later spelling habit rather than something inherited from the root. The flower has long carried strong associations, from the sleep-inducing opium poppy of the ancient world to the red remembrance poppy worn since the First World War.

How the word is built

• popp- (from Latin papaver: poppy)
• -y (noun ending)