Tetrapanax

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A genus of evergreen shrubs and small trees native to East Asia, whose pith is used to make rice paper
2. Plants of an East Asian genus with large palmate leaves, best known as the source of the rice-paper plant
3. Shrubby trees from eastern Asia belonging to a single genus, prized for their soft pith and striking foliage

Etymology: Tetrapanax is the name of a genus of one plant species, the rice-paper plant (Tetrapanax papyrifer), a shrub native to Taiwan and southern China. The name is a New Latin coinage from Greek roots: "tetra-" meaning "four" and "panax," the name of a plant genus used for ginseng-like herbs, a word that itself came from Greek "panakes," meaning "all-healing." The name describes the plant's structure in a way that is hard to pin down from its label alone, since the genus was named by botanists working in the nineteenth century rather than by the ancient Greeks, who knew nothing of this shrub. The most striking feature behind the name is the pith. The plant's stem holds a soft white core that was cut into thin sheets and pressed flat to make a material often sold as "rice paper," though it is not made from rice. The name "papyrifer" refers to this papyrus-like use, which is why the species name is so often given as a joke: a plant named for paper, that is actually a sheet of pith.