Dragonwort

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A herbaceous plant of old European herbal tradition, historically prescribed as a remedy for snakebite and other ailments
2. An old name for several medicinal herbs, particularly bistort, valued in earlier centuries for treating poisons and wounds
3. A plant name from herbal lore, applied to certain flowering herbs once believed to cure bites and fevers

Etymology: Dragonwort's name comes from a Greek word that meant "little serpent." In ancient Greek, "drakontion" was the name of a plant with a snake-like root, and the herb was valued as a remedy against serpent bites. The name passed into Medieval Latin as "dracontium," and then into Old French, where a form close to "draguncia" was in use. Middle English took it up as "dragaunce" or "dragunce," and the English word was eventually shaped into the modern "dragonwort." The Latin and French forms were distorted along the way. Medieval Latin speakers apparently treated the plural of "dracontium" as if it were a singular noun, producing "draguncia" and "dragancia," and these altered shapes were what travelled into French and then English. The result is a word whose ancestry runs back to a Greek name for a serpent-like plant, though the modern English spelling reflects the later addition of "dragon" and "wort."