Tabebuia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A genus of tropical American trees valued for their showy flowers and dense, durable timber
2. Tropical trees native to the Americas, prized for brilliant blossoms and strong, long-lasting wood
3. A group of flowering tropical American trees whose showy blooms and hard timber make them notable

Etymology: Tabebuia is a genus of trees and shrubs native to the Americas, best known for showy flowers in pink, yellow and purple, and the word reached English as a learned borrowing of its scientific name. The genus name was created by botanists rather than inherited from any everyday language, so it belongs to the same family of coinages as other plant genera given Latinized names for classification. The name itself is a taxonomic label: in the system of binomial nomenclature, a genus name is a formal category that groups closely related species, and "Tabebuia" was assigned to this group of trees in that formal scheme. English speakers adopted it unchanged, so the word in common use is simply the scientific genus name carried over into everyday vocabulary, most often for the trees themselves or their timber.