About this dictionary
A reference for the gap between how these names sound and how they are written.
The nine names here were chosen because they are hard to spell from their sound and easy to hear said. A name with nothing to get wrong would make a worthless entry, so mosses with plain English names are absent and Greek compounds are not.
Each name page gives a plain respelling, the meaning of the parts and what the organism actually is. Under it sits one page per heard spelling, and each of those explains the single decision that produced it: a silent letter, a soft c, a Greek vowel pair, an unstressed syllable that collapsed.
Etymologies are given only where they are known. Where the origin of a spelling is uncertain, the page describes the letters instead of inventing a derivation, because a wrong etymology is worse than none.
The site links to nothing outside itself. The page list is HTML and there is no XML sitemap, deliberately.
Start at the category index, or work through the list of every page.