anemone

英文詞源

anemone

anemone: [16] The wild wood anemone is sometimes called the wind flower, and this idea may be reflected in its standard name too. For it comes from Greek anemónē, which appears to be a derivative of ánemos ‘wind’ (also the source of English animal and animate). However, it has also been speculated that the Greek word may be an alteration of Hebrew Na’ amān, which was an epithet applied to Adonis, the beautiful youth beloved of Aphrodite from whose blood, according to Greek legend, the anemone sprang after he was killed while boar hunting.

According to this view, anemónē arose from a folk-etymological reformulation of the Hebrew word to make it approximate more closely to the Greek for ‘wind’. The application to sea anemone began in the late 18th century.
=> animal, animate

anemone (n.)

flowering plant genus, 1550s, from Middle French anemone (16c.) and directly from Latin anemone, from Greek anemone "wind flower," literally "daughter of the wind," from anemos "wind" (cognate with Latin anima; see animus) + -one feminine patronymic suffix. According to Asa Gray, so called because it was thought to open only when the wind blows. Klein suggests the flower name perhaps originally is from Hebrew (compare na'aman, in nit'e na'amanim, literally "plants of pleasantness," in Is. xvii:10, from na'em "was pleasant"). Applied to a type of sea creature (sea anemone) from 1773.