About this dictionary

This is a dictionary for people who have only heard the word. Someone names a tree in conversation or on the radio, you go to look it up, and you have to guess the spelling from the sound before the search box will help you. That guess is what each page here is about.

The subject is the gap between the sound and the letters, so the site only covers names where a gap exists. A tree called oak or fig has nothing to explain. A tree called Elaeagnus has three vowel letters in a row for two vowel sounds, and a tree called chinquapin has a qu that does not say kw. Those are worth a page.

Slipped fingers are not the subject. Nothing here is about hitting the wrong key or reversing two letters. Every spelling on the site is one that could plausibly be written by somebody listening carefully and reasoning from English spelling habits, and several of them are more phonetically honest than the correct answer is.

The explanations stay with what is documented. Where a name has a known origin, a person, a language, a Greek or Latin root, that origin is given. Where the origin is uncertain or would need a source this site does not have, the entry describes the letters instead. There are no invented derivations here, and where two pronunciations are current the entry says so rather than picking one.

Nine trees across three groves, and seventy seven heard spellings between them. The trees were chosen for how badly their names behave, not for how common they are.

The site links nowhere outside itself and carries no scripts, no fonts fetched from elsewhere and no tracking. Everything on the page arrived with the page.