Wyrtweard

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An Old English term for a person who tends and guards herbs, plants and cultivated growth in a garden
2. A historical word for a herb keeper, one who looks after medicinal plants and the garden where they grow
3. Old English for a warden of herbs, a caretaker responsible for the plants and vegetation of a plot

Etymology: Wyrtweard is an Old English compound built from "wyrt", meaning "plant" or "herb" (the source of modern "wort", as in St John's wort), and "weard", meaning "guard" or "keeper", the same root that gives "ward" and "warden". Put together, it named a person who looked after a garden or a store of herbs. The word is recorded in Old English glossaries and texts, where it translates Latin terms for a gardener or herbalist. Its most useful feature is the transparency of its parts: a reader can see at once that a "wyrt" was a cultivated plant, not a wild one, and that the job was one of watching over rather than simply growing.