A plant with medicinal or herbal properties associated with elder trees, or possibly another name for the plant known as ground elder.
Compound of 'elder' and '-wort' (an Old English suffix meaning 'plant' or 'herb'). Many plants were named by combining a reference plant with '-wort' in medieval herbalism and folk medicine.
The '-wort' suffix is a window into how medieval people organized knowledge—'mugwort,' 'lungwort,' 'figwort'—they named plants after what they looked like or what they treated, creating a sort of herbal taxonomy centuries before science.
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