Wellingtonia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A massive evergreen conifer of California's Sierra Nevada, known as the giant sequoia and once widely called by this name
2. The giant redwood species native to the Sierra Nevada mountains, one of the largest and longest-lived trees on Earth
3. An enormous coniferous tree of western North America, formerly classed under a separate genus name and now called Sequoiadendron

Etymology: The giant sequoia, the tree now called Sequoiadendron giganteum, was first described in 1853 under the name Wellingtonia gigantea. That name honoured the Duke of Wellington, the soldier who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and who died in 1852, the year before the tree was named. Botanists soon found the name could not stand, because "Wellingtonia" had already been used for a different plant, and the rules of plant naming made the tree's original name invalid. The word "wellingtonia" therefore survives mainly as the common nickname of the tree, a name that was once the official scientific one. The duke's name was attached to a tree that grows in the Sierra Nevada of California, a choice that reflected the mid-nineteenth-century habit of honouring British heroes with new species names.

Synonyms: giant sequoia, sierra redwood