If you have a lawn you’ll likely think of dandelions as a bit of a menace; but somehow not as much of a menace as a large carnivorous cat might be. So at first it might seem strange that the word dandelion actually means “teeth of a lion.”

The reason is actually only that dandelion leaves are edged with deeply toothed serrations which must have reminded some ancient French gardener of large teeth.

Although dandelions seem sometimes to be everywhere, looking at what people have called them over the ages makes me think that the number of people who have appreciated them is small.

Dandelion appears first in the surviving English written record in the late 1300s according to the American Heritage Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary hasn’t gotten around to this important word in its revisions for the third edition and so their first citation is 1513. But that shouldn’t be a knock against the OED because the French dictionary Robert seems to have a first citation of 1596 and the word is French for heaven’s sake.

Back around that time dandelions were also being called cankers in various parts of England—surely not a term of endearment.

Evidently there was a superstition that picking dandelions would make you wet your bed. For this reason another name for the plant was pissabed. I see this in Oxford University Press’ Dictionary of English Folklore; however dandelion is in fact used as a diuretic so in this case the folklore seems to be true. In fact in French the dandelion is still commonly called pissalit; lit meaning “bed.”

The English have traditionally slagged the Irish so the fact that dandelions were also called Irish daisies should come as no surprise.

I said the number of people who appreciated dandelions was small; maybe what I should have said was that the people themselves that appreciate dandelions are often small. Blowing all the seeds off the dandelion puffball must be part of almost everyone’s childhood experience; this lead to a few other names for dandelions.

One version of the seed-blowing game counted how many times a child’s puff was needed to blow all the seeds away; from this the child told the time—”what o’clock it was.” From there the dandelion got named a clock in the 1800s.

Once all those seeds have been blown away the remaining core has a smooth appearance with pores. This was likened to the shaved heads of monks and priests so that as early as 1300 the plant was called priest’s crown. I see citations here for that name as recently as 1944. Monk’s head has citations spanning 1400 to 1936. That’s it for today.

For new subscribers, the name of my book is Carnal Knowledge – A Navel gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia. It’s about the words we use for our bodies which means there are two kinds of words in there: words you know like elbow or palm; and words you don’t know like the name of that little bump that covers the hole into your ear. For the ones you know the book tells you something you probably didn’t know about the word or the body part. For the ones you didn’t know—like you probably didn’t know that bump even had a name—well now you will know.

ISBN # 0312371217