Moss Spelling Dictionary
Somebody says the name of a moss out loud. You go to look it up and have to guess how it is written. This dictionary collects those guesses and explains what the ear could not have known.
Bryophyte and lichen names are transliterated Greek, Latin diminutives and the occasional surname. That leaves silent letters, a c that says k, another c that says s, and vowel pairs whose sound depends entirely on which word they landed in. None of it is audible.
Every page here starts from one spelling somebody typed and works backwards to the letter that went missing. There are no typos on this site: transposed letters and slipped fingers belong to a different kind of dictionary.
Three groups, nine names
Mosses
Cushion, turf and haircap mosses, whose genus names are Greek compounds that most people meet out loud before they ever see them written.
- polytrichum 12 spellings
- leucobryum 9 spellings
- rhytidiadelphus 12 spellings
Lichens
Reindeer lichen, tube lichen and tree moss: Greek names whose first letters are the ones the ear never hears.
- cladonia 8 spellings
- hypogymnia 12 spellings
- pseudevernia 9 spellings
Liverworts and hornworts
Two thallose liverworts and a field hornwort, carrying a French surname, a Latin diminutive and a Greek horn between them.
- marchantia 8 spellings
- lunularia 11 spellings
- anthoceros 11 spellings
The category index lists the categories side by side, and the page list is the full index of every page here.