Names of Plants in India

This site makes an attempt to gather and share common names of the plants found in India. The common names are just as important as the scientific names. Strangely -- 1) some of the names are not common at all, and we may find them not known to us -- 2) some of the common plants have no name at all !! ... and note: while a plant may be known by many different names, the same name may be applied to several different plants (in context of different places).

Building of this site is going to be a slow perennial process. Present activity is populating the names of native plants.

The main focus of this site is validating the names that are put here, therefore the readers of this site are earnestly requested to point out errors in the common names listed for the species. The regional names put in native script require stricter attention in terms of incorrect spelling.

Readers are also requested to provide any names that are not found listed for the species.

Comments which help know the derivation of the common names are more than welcome.

As such, this site is not botanically inclined; comment(s) related to any error(s) are welcome from readers with scientific background. Best possible rectification / revision will be carried out; this site does not use any program / software to handle mass changes in content.

Creating this site is result of my inspiration derived from two of my inspirers: Tabish Qureshi a physicist by profession with a doctorate, associate professor at the Centre for Theoretical Physics, JMI, New Delhi. Studying the wildflowers of India is only one of his various interests. His work at Flowers of India triggered passion and liking towards the floral beauty of nature around me. Michel H. Porcher, a non-conformist, semi-academic, multilingual lexicographer, compiler of the M.M.P.N.D. His efforts towards compiling names of plants is mind boggling, and would stand unmatched forever.

There are host of personalities who are actively associated with flora of India, some of whom I am not yet aware of; would like to mention one name: J M Garg. He is the owner of a Google Group called efloraofindia. His passion for maintaining the group (and closely related website with the same name - efloraofindia) is tremendous. Me too a member of this group - and I find many friends there, who are contributing their knowledge fantastically.

Many thanks to - the resources available on internet (a long list of them that continuously evolves), to like-minded enthusiastic collaborators who help with the regional names, and to you for visiting this page.
-- Dinesh Valke

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The long list of internet resources

listed alphabetically

• ANAMEE, a facebook group of Assamese people discussing floral diversity in Assam; a fantastic help for knowing local names used by various tribes of Assam and the north-east
• बॆरकॆ अट्टिल् - changing the way in which Tuluvas consume their food
• दक्षिण कोंकणी उतरावळि - A Southern Konkani Vocabulary Collection
• Dave's Botanary - Here you can look up a plant name, discover its meaning and find a guide to pronouncing it. But take it from W.T. Stearn, an authority on the subject: "Botanical Latin is essentially a written language .... How they are pronounced really matters little, provided they sound pleasant and are understood by all concerned..."
• The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users
• efloraofindia (earlier Indiantreepix) is the largest Google Group in the world devoted to creating awareness, discussing, identifying Indian Flora. Website with the same name, efloraofindia has been created for documenting the discussions. It has the largest database on net on Indian Flora
• Ethnobotany of Northeast India - Research community as well as a database of names of useful plants of Northeast India - developed by the members of Ethnobotany of Northeast India, Google site
• FRLHT's ENVIS Centre on Medicinal Plants - Environmental Information System, Medicinal Plants, Digital Herbarium, Digital Atlas, Raw Drug description, Plant images and description, Vernacular names in 39 languages spoken in Indian subcontinent
• Flora Andhrika - Plant wealth of Andhra Pradesh, a series of blogs by DCS Raju & Lalithamba Avadhanam. Their efforts to introduce the native species and widely cultivated plants of Andhra Pradesh with Telugu vernacular names, with links to photographs in flickr, is a fantastic reference material for knowledge of Eastern Ghats flora. Lalithamba is retired lecturer in Botany, and DCS Raju is retired Joint Director of BSI.
• Flowers of India is a website aimed at having information about all the flowers found in India, with their common names, especially in Indian languages, pictures and habitat, easily available in one place. This is meant to be a place you can look at if you saw a flower and wanted to know more about it. Although the site has a team busy in hunting out new flowers, people can contribute flower pictures taken by them, if the flower is new to the site.
• Amar Shri Ratilal P. Chandaria's Gujarati Lexicon - the most comprehensive Gujarati language resource
• Learn Sanskrit - पठत संस्कृतम् - शब्दकोशः
• Mangropedia is a multilingual free-content, open-sourced and web-based encyclopedia on Mangrove Forest and Ecology. The word "Mangropedia" is portmanteau of the words Mangro (short form of mangrove) and encyclopedia.
• मराठी शब्दकोश - मराठी भाषा विभाग - महाराष्ट्र शासन
• Mehedi Voice - personal views and knowledge materials made by Hasan Mehedi to share with you all
• OSADHI - Online Structural and Analytics based Database for Herbs of India. A database of all the medicinal plants having PAN India presence.
• Rangjung Yeshe Wiki - Dharma Dictionary
• A Santali-English dictionary by A. Campbell, of the Santal mission
• The Shodhganga@INFLIBNET - A reservoir of Indian Theses, provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs submitted by the researchers.
• Tamil names of Botanical names by Yercaud Ilango
• Tulu-English Dictionary (1886) by Rev. A. Männer
• ॥ विकिशब्दकोशः॥ स्वतन्त्रः संस्कृतशब्दकोशः
• Hassler, Michael (2004 - 2023): World Plants - A complete, synonymic checklist of the Higher Plants of the World. With complete, detailed distribution data (countries and regions).
• XOBDO - A descriptive multilingual dictionary by the people, for the people and of the people of north-east India. An organization formed with a group of volunteers located in various parts of the globe with the common interest of promoting the languages of the North-East India in the cyberworld.
• 84000 : Translating the words of the Buddha

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Collaborators, language-wise

listed alphabetically; many thanks to these people for sharing my passion with great enthusiasm by way of providing / coining names in regional languages of India

• English: Dr Tabish Qureshi • Assamese: Ashim Gogoi, Brahmananda Patiri, Dilwar Hussain, Dipankar Debaghareeya, Farmer Tridip Gogoi, Monoj Nath, Pankaj Chetia, Ranjan Hazarika, Ratneswar Kachari • Bengali: Bubai Bera, Pavel Ghosh, Soumya Das Chakraborti, Dr Tapas Chakrabarty, Dr Tapas Kumar Paul • Dogri: OM Prakash Vidyarthi • Hindi (Himachal Pradesh): Dr Anil K. Thakur • Gujarati: Bhavin K. Desai, Kiratsinh Zala, Mukeshkumar Mali, Viplav Gangar • Kannada: Dr Mahadeswara Swamy • Malayalam: Ajayan Sadanandan, Haneesh Km, Sam Kuzhalanattu, VC Balakrishnan, Vinaya Raj V R • Malvani: Nitin Kawthankar, Raj Gurav • Manipuri: Dr Tabish Qureshi • Marathi: Milind Wadmare, Nitin Kawthankar, Shrikant Ingalhalikar • Mizo: M Sawmliana • Nepali: Saroj Kumar Kasaju • Odia: Bubai Bera, Kumar Joshabant (aka Kumar Prabhat Das), Jayanta Jena, Ranjan Moharana • Pahari: Dr Anil K. Thakur • Santali: Prasanta Hembram • Tamil: Dr Vijayasankar Raman • Telugu: Lalithamba Avadhanam, Mandru Ramesh Chowdary

~~~~~ Last updated: 10-04-2024 ~~~~~