By Anatoly Liberman
The origin of plant names is one of the most interesting areas of etymology. I have dealt with henbane, hemlock, horehound, and mistletoe and know how thorny the gentlest flowers may be for a language historian. It is certain that horehound has nothing to do with hounds, and I hope to have shown that henbane did not get its name because it is particularly dangerous to hens (which hardly ever peck at it, and even if they did, why should they have been chosen as the poisonous plant’s preferred victims?). On the face of it, the word foxglove makes no sense, because foxes do without gloves and even without hands. The scientific name of foxglove is Digitalis (the best-known variety is Digitalis purpurea), apparently, because it looks like a thimble and can be easily fitted over a finger (Latin digitus “finger”). See more about it below. The puzzling part is fox-. It was such even in Old English (foxes glofa, though the name seems to have been applied to a different plant), so that nothing has been “corrupted,” to use one of the favorite words of 19th-century etymologists, both professional and amateurs.
It is amusing what fierce battles have been fought over the origin of the word foxglove. Walter W. Skeat broke many a spear defending the simplest etymology (foxglove is fox + glove), but neither he nor anyone else has been able to explain how the Anglo-Saxons came by this name: why fox? Regardless of the solution, reading Skeat is always a pleasure, and I will probably devote a post to a selection of quotes from his letters to the editor. With regard to foxglove, he remarked: “…everyone writes on etymology, more especially such as do not understand it.” How true, how very true! Among other things, Skeat produced an impressive list of Old English plant names with obscure references to animals in them, for example, fowl’s bean, cow-slip (not cow’s lip!), ox-heal, catmint, and hound’s fennel. And we know dog rose and wolfsbane, to mention just a few oddities. Each of them needs an explanation, and I think Skeat pooh-poohed the question too hastily. He wrote: “… [to us] such names as fox-glove and hare-bell seem senseless, and many efforts, more ingenious than well directed, have been made to evade the evidence. Yet, it is easily understood. The names are simply childish, and such as children would be pleased with. A child only wants a pretty name, and is glad to connect a plant with a more or less familiar animal. This explains the whole matter, and it is the reverse of scientific to deny a fact merely because we dislike or contemn [sic] it. This is not the way to understand the workings of the human mind, on which true etymology often throws much unexpected light.” Unfortunately, the Anglo-Saxons were not children, and though, like us, they certainly enjoyed playing with language and inventing “pretty names,” those names cannot be written off as silly or irrational. So let me repeat: foxglove does go back to a word that means exactly this (fox-glove), and all attempts to explain it as a “perversion” of some other compound or phrase are misguided, but the reason for endowing the flower with such an incomprehensible name has not been discovered.
The idea to trace foxglove to folk’s (or folks’) glove is relatively recent. It may have gained popularity after the publication of the book English Etymologies by William Henry Fox (!) Talbot (1847). We read the following in it: “In Welsh this flower is called by the beauti