Yellowcress

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A low herbaceous plant of the mustard family that bears small yellow flowers and grows in wet or disturbed ground
2. Any of several small wild plants in the cabbage family, known for their clusters of bright yellow blossoms and their watery habitats
3. A hardy marsh or roadside herb with yellow four-petaled flowers, belonging to the mustard family of cruciferous plants

Etymology: Yellowcress is about as transparent as plant names get: "yellow" plus "cress," the name given to a family of peppery leafy plants. The yellow in the name points to the flowers, which are small, bright, and clustered on the stems of these mustard-family herbs. Cress itself is an older English word, going back to Old English "cærse," and it was attached to a range of sharp-tasting greens long before botanists started sorting plants into families. The interest lies in the word's second half. Cress was never a precise botanical term; gardeners and country speakers applied it loosely to many pungent, fast-growing leaves, so a compound like this one simply describes a cress whose flowers are yellow, distinguishing it from its relatives in the same group. Because the name was built from ordinary English parts rather than borrowed or coined from Latin or Greek, it tells you exactly what the plant looks like and where it lives, without any learned detour.