Other forms: ferns
A fern is the feathery green plant that grows where it is shady and damp — along a woodland path, out of a crack in a garden wall, in a pot in a cool bathroom. Its new leaves unroll from a tight little curl at the tip.
Those leaves are called fronds, and the curl at the top has its own name, a fiddlehead, because it looks like the scroll on a violin. Ferns have no flowers and no seeds; they spread by spores, the tiny brown dots in rows on the underside of the leaf, which puts them in a much older group of plants than anything that blooms. They grew in the swamp forests that became coal, long before the first dinosaurs. Bracken is the big rough fern that takes over hillsides, while maidenhair and hart's tongue are the delicate ones people keep indoors. A place planted with them is a fernery.
1nounfernA green plant with feathery divided leaves that grows in damp shady places and spreads by spores rather than seeds.
“Ferns had taken over the shady side of the garden.”
fern is a plant.
Old English fearn goes back to Proto-Germanic *farnaz and a Proto-Indo-European word *pornóm meaning feather, wing — and also fern, leaf. Someone long ago looked at a frond and named it after a feather, and the picture stuck: Dutch varen, German Farn, English fern, all the same word.
Proto-Indo-European
*pornóm — feather, wing; fern, leaf
Proto-Germanic
*farnaz — fern
Proto-West Germanic
*farn
Old English
fearn
Middle English
fern
English, today
fern
Built from
From Middle English fern, from Old English fearn, from Proto-West Germanic farn, from Proto-Germanic farnaz (“fern”), from Proto-Indo-European pornóm (“feather, wing; fern, leaf”), from p(t)erH- (“fern”). 2 Cognate with Scots fairn (“fern”), frr farne (“fern”), West Frisian fear (“fern”), Dutch varen (“fern”), German Farn, Farm (“fern”), lb Far (“fern”); also Breton raden (“fern”), kw reden (“ferns; brackens”), Welsh rhedyn (“ferns; brackens”), Latvian paparde (“fern; bracken”), spārns (“wing”), Lithuanian spar̃nas (“wing”), Bulgarian and mk папрат (“fern”), Czech kapraď (“fern”), Polish paproć (“fern”), Russian па́пороть, па́поротник (“fern”), Serbo-Croatian па̏пра̄т, pȁprāt (“fern”), Slovak papraď (“fern”), Slovene praprot (“fern”), Ukrainian па́пороть (“fern”), ckb پەڕ (“feather”), Persian پر (“feather; wing; leaf”), ask pār (“leaf”), bsh por, přor (“leaf”), prn parëg (“leaf”), Sanskrit पर्ण (“wing; leaf”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA