Etymograph

English

plant

Plant comes from Middle English plante, from Old English plante, from Proto-West Germanic *plantu, from Latin planta ‘sprout, shoot’.

  1. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEplanta‘sprout, shoot, cutting’
  2. Proto-West Germanicc. 200–500 CE*plantu‘plant’reconstructed
  3. Old Englishc. 450–1150plante‘young tree or shrub’
  4. Middle Englishc. 1150–1500same form
  5. Englishearliest quotation c. 1590–1592plant

attested reconstructed ? uncertain or disputed

Lineage

  1. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEplanta‘sprout, shoot, cutting’
  2. Proto-West Germanicc. 200–500 CE*plantu‘plant’reconstructed
  3. Old Englishc. 450–1150plante‘young tree or shrub’
  4. Middle Englishc. 1150–1500same form
  5. Englishearliest quotation c. 1590–1592plant

Earliest quotation: c. 1590–1592, William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: “It engenders choler, planteth anger.”

The story

Broader sense of "any vegetable life, vegetation generally" is from Old French plante. The factory and machinery senses comes from the Latin sense of "any vegetable production that serves to propagate the species," which refers to something that produces.

Linked words

through Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂k-

launch, peel, plague, lance, fling, plaintive, 11 more

through Latin planta ‘sprout, shoot, cutting’

clan, 9 more

Today it means

noun An organism that is not an animal, especially an organism capable of photosynthesis, and typically a small or herbaceous organism of this kind, rather than a tree.

Language periods are conventional ranges, not dates for this word.

Etymograph / Latin planta / plant

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