Somebody said the name out loud. Now you have to write it down.
Nine orchard trees whose names give the ear one thing and the page another, and seventy seven of the spellings people reach for when they have only ever heard them.
Three groves
A grove name is usually a loan. It comes from Cantonese or Greek or Powhatan, or from the surname of a chemist in Melbourne, and it arrives in English already carrying a spelling that was settled somewhere else. Then English says it a third way.
Every page here starts from a spelling somebody typed after hearing the word, and works backwards to the letter that betrayed them: a c that went soft, a qu that is only a k, a silent e holding a consonant in place, a vowel too weak to have a colour.
Nine trees
kumquat
Citrus japonica
KUM-kwot
The word came into English through Cantonese, where gam gwat means golden orange.
citrange
× Citroncirus webberi
SIT-rinj
The name is two words welded together, citrus and orange, so its spelling is inherited rather than invented.
elaeagnus
Elaeagnus angustifolia
el-ee-AG-nus
Linnaeus built the name out of two Greek words, elaia for the olive and agnos for the chaste tree, and the Greek ai came into Latin as ae.
ceratonia
Ceratonia siliqua
seh-ruh-TOH-nee-uh
Greek keras, horn, named the tree for the shape of its pod.
jujube
Ziziphus jujuba
JOO-joob
The word reached English through Old French from medieval Latin jujuba, which had already worn the Greek zizyphon down almost past recognition.
pistachio
Pistacia vera
pi-STASH-ee-oh
English took the Italian spelling pistacchio, dropped one c, and then refused to say the letters the Italian way.
chinquapin
Castanea pumila
CHINK-uh-pin
The word is Virginia Algonquian, written down by English colonists in the early 1600s who used the spelling habits they had.
How the entries are built
- Each tree has its own page with the plain respelling and the reason its name is awkward.
- Under it sits one page for every heard spelling, with the two words set letter against letter.
- The marked letters are the graft point: where what you heard stops matching what you have to write.