dandelion

This cheerful yard invader started life as a little bit of animal anatomy. Medieval French speakers looked at the jagged leaves and called it dent de lion — literally “lion’s tooth” — because those leaves really do look as if a beast took a bite out of them. English borrowed the phrase in the late 14th century and then crunched it down into dandelion, which is the sort of phonetic shrinkage that makes etymologists grin. The same toothy little dent shows up in dental, dentist, and dentition, while lion roars on in leonine and lionize, so the plant is basically wearing a name made from a mouth and a mane. And if you’ve ever blown the seed head apart like a tiny white dandelion clock, you’ve already done the thing the name never mentions but the plant clearly was built to do: look fierce, then drift away in a puff.