Gardens

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈɡɑɹdn̩z/

Definitions

1. Locations where plants are cultivated, ranging from vegetables to decorative flowers
2. Plots of land arranged for growing plants including flowers, vegetables or herbs
3. Spaces designed and maintained to cultivate and display various types of plants

Etymology: The plural "gardens" is simply the plural of the noun "garden," so its history is the history of that noun. The surprising part is what the root meant: the Proto-Indo-European *gʰerdʰ- meant "to enclose" or "fence," and the Proto-Germanic descendant covered fences, hedges, pens, courtyards and houses alike. A garden was first a walled or hedged enclosure, and the sense of a plot for plants came later. The same root travelled in several directions. English "yard" is a cognate, as are German "Garten" and Dutch "gaard," and Gothic "garda" originally meant a pen for animals. Old English had its own word for a cultivated enclosure, "wyrttūn" (literally "herb-enclosure"), but Middle English "garden," borrowed from Anglo-Norman "gardin," displaced it. Because the Anglo-Norman word came from a Frankish form, English "garden" is a doublet of "jardin" in French and of "garth," an older English word that survives in place names and in Welsh. Two words from one root, then, entered English by different routes and never fully merged.

Synonyms: yards, plots, landscapes