{"id":1107,"date":"2016-11-30T17:25:43","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T17:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2017-02-13T15:15:36","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T15:15:36","slug":"the-meaning-of-cruciferous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/2016\/11\/30\/the-meaning-of-cruciferous\/","title":{"rendered":"The meaning of cruciferous"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cruciferousflowers4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To modern ears, \u201ccruciferous\u201d is all about vegetables. But the word\u2019s rich history shows that it was formerly used in a much broader sense.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

By Eric Rumsey, Janna Lawrence and Xiaomei Gu<\/p>\n

In a Google search for the word \u201c<\/span>cruciferous<\/span><\/a>,\u201c 9 out of the top 10 retrievals contain the phrase \u201ccruciferous vegetables.\u201d This certainly does fit the predominant modern usage of the word. As a game show host might say, \u201cwhat do you think of when I say \u2018cruciferous\u2019?\u201d Well, of course, \u201cvegetables\u201d! But it hasn\u2019t always been this way. As the Google Ngram chart below shows, the phrase \u201ccruciferous vegetables\u201d only came into prominent use about 1980. Before that, the word \u201ccruciferous\u201d was widely used in other contexts.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"ngramcruciferousveg1110\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To understand the real meaning of the word, it\u2019s important to understand what these other contexts are. This is important for more than simply historic reasons; it\u2019s also important to understand the meaning of the word to understand its connections to nutrition, and because it helps to search for the subject in databases such as PubMed (as we’ve discussed in a companion article<\/a>). Additionally, it\u2019s a surprisingly interesting story.<\/span><\/p>\n

The key to understanding \u201ccruciferous\u201d is a knowledge of its rich botanical history. The chart below gives a hint of this. The chart is a comparison of the use of the words Cruciferae and Brassicaceae. These are names that have been assigned to the plant family that contains \u201ccruciferous vegetables\u201d and many other plants as well. As the chart indicates, Cruciferae was the name of the family until the early 20th century, when it was officially changed to Brassicaceae. Since then, botanists have gradually been switching the word they use, with continuing widespread use of the older name Cruciferae.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"ngramcruciferaebrassicaceae1111\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This seemingly arcane naming distinction is important because when the family name was Cruciferae, the word cruciferous was used to include all plants in the family, not just the edible species that we call \u201ccruciferous vegetables,\u201d which helps explain the common use of the word in the chart above. (Examples from Google Books of the broad botanical use of the word \u201ccruciferous\u201d in the 19th century are <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.) The significance of this is magnified by the fact that the family is very large, containing 372 genera and 4060 species, making it one of the largest flowering plant families. This and other details of the family are well-covered by a <\/span>Wikipedia<\/span><\/a> article on it. Another detail that gives an idea of the size and variety of the family and helps explain the widespread use of \u201ccruciferous\u201d is that, in addition to cruciferous vegetables, it also includes decorative flowers, weeds, and <\/span>Arabidopsis thaliana<\/span><\/i> (\u201ca very important model organism in the study of the flowering plants\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

Relating to the image of three flowers<\/strong> at the top of the article, another help in understanding\u00a0“cruciferous” is the etymology of the word itself.\u00a0The word comes from the word \u201ccross,\u201d because the 4-petaled flowers have the appearance of a cross. The flowers in the image above are (from left) Raphanus sativus (Wild radish weed), Brassica oleracea (Broccoli) and Arabidopsis thaliana. (Images are from Wikipedia).<\/p>\n

In conclusion, the word \u201ccruciferous\u201d is confusing because the word has its origins in a time when the large family Brassicaceae was called Cruciferae, which meant that all of the plants in the family (most of which are not edible) were referred to as \u201ccruciferous.\u201d In the last generation, as botanists have switched to calling the family Brassicaceae instead of Crucuferae, and as people have become more aware of nutrition, the word \u201ccruciferous\u201d has gradually come to be used most commonly in the context of \u201ccruciferous vegetables.\u201d As we\u2019ll discuss in a companion article, it\u2019s important to know about this history and the taxonomic relationships of cruciferous vegetables in order to do successful searches in research databases like PubMed.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To modern ears, \u201ccruciferous\u201d is all about vegetables. But the word\u2019s rich history shows that it was formerly used in a much broader sense. By Eric Rumsey, Janna Lawrence and Xiaomei Gu In a Google search for the word \u201ccruciferous,\u201c 9 out of the top 10 retrievals contain the phrase \u201ccruciferous vegetables.\u201d This certainly doesContinue reading “The meaning of cruciferous”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":1127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,44],"tags":[],"syndication":[],"coauthors":[38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1145,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/1145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/needtoknow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}