About this dictionary

Petal Spelling Dictionary covers the vocabulary of flower structure: the whorls a flower is built from, the shapes a cluster of flowers takes on the stem, and the parts of an ovule and a seed. These are terms rather than plants, so where an entry names a root it gives the Greek or Latin word the term was assembled from, not a species.

Every entry starts from a spelling somebody could arrive at by hearing the word and writing it down. Keyboard slips are not the subject. A transposed letter tells you nothing about the language, and the point of the site is the gap between what a word sounds like and what it looks like.

The explanations describe letters, sounds and origins. Where the origin of a term is not certain, the entry describes the letters and stops there. Pronunciations are written as plain respellings rather than in phonetic notation, and where more than one is in general use the entry says so.

The site links only to itself. There is nothing to buy here, no accounts, no analytics and no third-party scripts of any kind.