Did You Know?

Editors who compile florilegia (to use the plural form) can be thought of as gathering a bouquet of sweet literary blossoms. English speakers picked up florilegium from a New Latin word that derives from Latin florilegus, which can be translated as "culling flowers." In fact, florilegium initially applied to a collection of flowers, and later to books about flowers, but it wasn't long before the word began to be used for (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) "a collection of the flowers of literature." And florilegium isn't the only English collecting term with a floral heritage; its synonym anthology comes from the Greek word for "flower gathering."