Descriptive botanical names are names that are governed by Article 16 of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN), which rules that a name above the rank of family may be either descriptive or formed from the name of an included family. The latter leads to names such as Magnoliophyta and Magnoliopsida.
Descriptive plant names are decreasing in importance but many are still in use, such as Plantae, Algae, Musci, Fungi, Embryophyta, Tracheophyta, Spermatophyta, Gymnospermae, Coniferae, Coniferales, Angiospermae, Monocotyledones, Dicotyledones. Such descriptive names have a very long history, often preceding Carl Linnaeus. As Latin was the universal scientific language in those days such names are in good Latin, and usually take the form of nouns in the plural.
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Famous quotes containing the words botanical and/or names:
“Evolution was all over my chldhood, walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution, biological and botanical evolution.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)