Colocynthis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A fruit of the bitter cucumber family that is often used for medicinal purposes
2. known for its toxic properties, it has been historically utilized in herbal remedies
3. this gourd-like plant belongs to the genus Citrullus and is notable for its large, yellowish fruit

Etymology: The colocynth is a bitter desert melon, and its ancient name carried a hint of the squash family it belongs to. The Greek "kolokunthis" was a diminutive of "kolokynthē", meaning gourd or pumpkin, so the plant was in effect a "little gourd." Greek writers used the name for this very bitter fruit, which grows wild around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, and the word passed into Latin as "colocynthis" with the same sense. The word's ultimate origin lies outside Greek altogether. It is classed as Pre-Greek, meaning it belonged to a language spoken in the Aegean before Greek became dominant, and no secure Indo-European source has been found for it. Its ancestry is therefore older than the Greek language itself, which is why the ancient name survived largely unchanged across two thousand years of Latin and Greek medical writing. This word is the obsolete spelling of "colocynth", and the form "colocynthis" survives mainly as a Latinate variant. Physicians and herbalists who relied on the plant's purgative pulp inherited the name directly from classical texts.

Synonyms: bitter apple, wild cucumber