Palestinian plant names in Arabic and English

Read it in whichever direction you arrived from. If you have the Arabic and want the English, find the name in the first column. If you have the English or the Latin and want to know what people in Palestine actually call the plant, start from the right.

Two entries in that table need a warning rather than a translation. الحنون is routinely rendered into English as “poppy,” and it is not one — the anemone sits in Ranunculaceae and the poppy in Papaveraceae, which is a separate question with its own answer. And زعتر is routinely rendered as “wild thyme,” which is a translation error that hardened into a fact: true thyme is Thymus, a different genus altogether.

Six of the fifteen plants in this record carry three or more Arabic names. Not one carries a second English name in ordinary use.

The pattern in that table is not an accident of how much research each plant got. It is what a working vocabulary looks like. A language names finely where hands go and coarsely where they do not — five names for the caper, whose buds are picked, salted and sold; one name for the pyramidal orchid, which is beautiful and is not a crop (Record 07).

The Palestinian open-science flora platform Barari records the caper's names and the gladiolus's four, which is where those counts come from (براري — Capparis spinosa). The anemone's come from the Palestinian ethnographer Hamza al-Aqrabawi, writing in Ultra Palestine.

Read the middle column of the index again and a habit shows up. A large share of these names are not labels at all. They are somebody telling you what the plant looks like, at the distance of a hand.

• سيف الغراب — the crow's sword. For gladiolus leaves, which are flat, stiff and stand straight up out of the ground.
• منقار العصفور — the bird's beak. For the same plant's bud: narrow, pointed, hooked slightly open at the tip.
• قرن الغزال — the gazelle's horn. For the way cyclamen petals sweep backwards.
• خصى الثعلب — the fox's testicles. For the paired underground tubers of an orchid. European botany made the identical observation and then hid it in Greek: orchis is the ancient Greek word for testicle.
• التين الشوكي — the thorny fig. For the prickly pear, which is neither a fig nor native.

You get names like “the bird's beak” from people who were pulling the plant out of a crop, not from people who saw it from a road. The vocabulary was built at working distance, and it records what mattered to somebody holding the thing.

Eight of the fifteen plants in this record carry an English or botanical name that commemorates a person, a place or a text outside Palestine. That is the count, and here is what each one names.

This is the asymmetry this record keeps meeting, set out as a list rather than argued. The Arabic name generally points at the plant. The English name generally points somewhere else — at a monarch, a mountain range under its other name, a scripture, or a country of origin that is often simply wrong. Both sets of names are in honest use. They are not doing the same job.

Where that pattern comes from is documented in one place: the American Colony's 1900 photographic survey, 119 plates of Palestinian plants, of which not one caption carries a word of Arabic.

On 3 September 2026 this record counted every Arabic plant name it has published, across all fifteen plants it holds, and every English common name in ordinary use for the same plants.

• 33 Arabic names
• 15 English common names — one per plant
• 6 plants carrying three or more Arabic names
• 8 plants whose English or botanical name commemorates a person, place or text outside Palestine

A botanical key sorts by flower parts. A village name sorts by whether the leaves are soft enough to cook in March. Those two systems do not have to agree.