Tulip

How to spell tulip

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tulip

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tulip mean?

1. nounA spring-flowering bulb plant with a single cup-shaped bloom on a tall stem.

Tulip in a sentence

• She planted a row of tulip bulbs along the garden path in autumn.

• A single red tulip stood in a vase on the kitchen table.

Where does tulip come from?

Language of origin: Other

Tulip comes ultimately from the Ottoman Turkish word for a turban, tulbend, which itself goes back to the Persian dulband, the wound headcloth that the flower's cupped petals were thought to resemble. Botanists writing in New Latin Latinised this into tulipa, and it passed into English in the late sixteenth century, most likely by way of French tulipe and the busy Dutch flower trade. The name owes its existence to a misunderstanding: early European travellers asked Turks what the bloom was called, were apparently told it looked like a turban, and took the description for the name. Curiously, the words tulip and turban are therefore cousins, both tracing back to that same Persian dulband. The flower later fed the famous Dutch 'tulip mania' of the 1630s, when single bulbs sold for the price of a house. Because the word arrived as a clean foreign borrowing, its spelling is plain and phonetic, with no silent letters to trip up a modern writer.

How the word is built

• Single root borrowed whole, from Ottoman Turkish tulbend (turban); no prefix or suffix to break down