Magnoliids

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A large botanical group of flowering plants that includes magnolias, laurels, and pepper plants, classified together by shared evolutionary ancestry
2. The taxonomic grouping of early-diverging flowering plants such as magnolias, bay laurels, and black pepper, defined by genetic lineage
3. Flowering plants belonging to a broad evolutionary lineage that contains magnolias, laurels, and many tropical trees and shrubs

Etymology: Magnoliids are named after the magnolia, the flowering tree whose genus was named in honour of the French botanist Pierre Magnol, who lived from 1638 to 1715. The name works by attaching the suffix "-id" to "magnolia", a pattern taken from zoology, where "-id" marks members of a family, as in "cichlid" or "canid". The ending has a longer ancestry than the name itself. "-id" descends from Latin "-idēs", borrowed from Greek "-ids", which in turn was built from the Greek word "eidos", meaning "form" or "shape", so the suffix once carried the sense of "resembling" or "of the form of". That is why a magnoliid is, at root, something shaped like a magnolia in its relationships, even though the modern usage is purely a label for a group.