Cordgrasses

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Coarse grasses of salt marshes and tidal mudflats, the plural form of the cordgrass genus Spartina that stabilizes coastal soil
2. Tough salt-tolerant marsh plants of the Spartina genus, referred to collectively as several kinds of cordgrass growing along shorelines
3. Hardy wetland grasses found in coastal marshes, the plural name for members of the Spartina group that bind sediment near the sea

Etymology: "Cordgrasses" is simply the plural of "cordgrass," a noun for salt-marsh grass plants. The word is a plain compound: "cord" and "grass," both inherited from very old roots. "Grass" comes from Old English "græs," which traces back to a Proto-Germanic form, while "cord" came into English through Old French "corde" from Latin "chorda," itself borrowed from Greek "khordḗ," meaning gut or string. So the Greek sense of a twisted animal gut used for strings is the ancestor of the sense we now use for a rope or thread. The "cord" in "cordgrass" has nothing to do with rope or string in the usual sense. The name points to the plant's tough, fibrous stems and the way its stalks bind together in dense, wiry clumps across the marsh. Compounds like this, pairing a descriptive word with a plant name, are common in English for naming grasses and sedges.

Synonyms: spartina