Adenia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A genus of tropical climbing plants with swollen, often bottle-shaped stems and tuberous roots that are native to Africa and Asia
2. A tropical plant with characteristic thick, bulbous stems and climbing vines, belonging to the Passifloraceae family and prized by collectors
3. A genus of succulent vines distinguished by their abnormally thickened, fleshy stems and underground tubers found in warm African and Asian regions

Etymology: Adenia is a plant genus, and the name was coined on purpose by the French physician Armand Trousseau, who built it from the Ancient Greek "adēn", meaning "gland", plus the suffix "-ia". The choice reflects the anatomy of the plants themselves: many species in this group bear swollen, glandular-looking structures, and the name points to that feature rather than to any traditional plant lore. The word is therefore a modern scientific coinage rather than an ancient one. Greek "adēn" was a perfectly ordinary word for a gland in the body, and the suffix "-ia" is the same one found in countless botanical and medical names, often used to make a Latinized name for a genus or condition. Trousseau's coinage was then carried into the Translingual scientific vocabulary of botany and borrowed into English as the plant name.