Fieldwort

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small wildflower of the gentian family that grows in open grassland and has purplish, bell-shaped blooms
2. A slender herbaceous plant in the gentian family, found in dry meadows and pastures across Europe
3. Any of several low-growing meadow plants of the gentian family, notable for their pale purple flowers

Etymology: Fieldwort is a compound of two plain English words: "field" and "wort," the Old English word for a plant or herb. The name goes back to Old English "feldwyrt," which referred to the gentian, and it passed into Middle English in forms such as "feldewort" and "feltwyrt." The sense of the word was thus fixed early on as a name for a particular plant rather than a general term for something growing in a meadow. The "field" in the name is the open, cultivated or unenclosed land where the plant grows, while "wort" preserves the old word for herbs that survives in names like "St John's wort" and "mugwort." Many plant names in English took this form, pairing a habitat or feature with "wort" to tell one herb from another. Here the habitat half of the name does the distinguishing work.