| | CANADA YEW: origin and botanical name Taxus at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day |
 | | The Roman encyclopedia writer Pliny has taxicum venenum ‘yew poison’ which looks mighty like a miswriting of toxicon Greek ‘poison,’ ‘arrow poison.’ Taxus is possibly related to the Greek noun taxis ‘arrangement,’ perhaps so named from the pleasing symmetry of yew needles in their tidy rows. |
| | Compare an adjective used by Theophrastos, a Greek writer about plants, who described one wee specimen as taxiphyllos ‘with leaves set neatly in rows’(phyllon, Greek ‘leaf’). |
| | Another possible Greek source is the common classical Greek word for bow, toxon. |
| www.billcasselman.com /canadian_garden_words/yew.htm (934 words) |
