Palestinian plant names in Arabic and English

Start from whichever side you know. The Arabic is on the left, the English and botanical names on the right, and the last column links to the plant's full page, where every name is sourced.

▶ plays the name. The Arabic is read in a Palestinian voice from Ramallah, the English in an American one. Both are synthetic voices, made with ElevenLabs. If a name sounds wrong, please say so: how corrections work.

Two names need a warning. الحنون is often translated as “poppy.” It is an anemone, from the buttercup family, not a poppy (the poppy question). The corn poppy, الخشخاش, is listed in the table only so the two are not confused. And زعتر is often translated as “wild thyme,” but the za'atar in this index is Syrian oregano, Origanum syriacum, not a species of thyme (what is za'atar).

Five of the fifteen plants have three or more Arabic names. None has more than two English ones.

The caper, the anemone and the cyclamen each have five Arabic names recorded here; the prickly pear has two. How many names a plant has here partly reflects how much has been written down about it, so these counts are a minimum, not a measure of how much each plant matters.

The caper and gladiolus counts come from Barari, the Palestinian open-science platform for wild plants (براري — Capparis spinosa). The anemone's names come from the Palestinian ethnographer Hamza al-Aqrabawi, writing in Ultra Palestine.

Several of these names simply describe what the plant looks like.

• 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. The European name makes the same comparison: orchis is Greek for testicle.
• التين الشوكي — the thorny fig. For the prickly pear, which is neither a fig nor native to Palestine.

For eight of the fifteen plants, the English or botanical name refers to something other than the plant itself: a person, a country, a Bible verse, or a Hebrew place name.

The Arabic names mostly describe the plant. The English names mostly point somewhere else: a queen, a ridge under its Hebrew name, a Bible verse, or a country. Both kinds are real names in everyday use.

One place this can be seen at scale is the American Colony's photographic survey from around 1900: 119 plates of Palestinian plants, and not one caption carries a word of Arabic.

On 3 September 2026 we counted every Arabic plant name published on this site, across all fifteen plants, and every English name in ordinary use for the same plants.

• 33 Arabic names (the corn poppy row is a warning, not a name for any of the fifteen)
• English names: one for eleven plants, two for akkoub, the anemone, the wild carrot and the Faqqua iris
• 5 plants carrying three or more Arabic names
• 8 plants whose English or botanical name refers to a person, place or text outside Palestine