List of plant family names with etymologies

Since the first edition of Carl Linnaeus's Species Plantarum in 1753, plants have been assigned one epithet or name for their species and one name for their genus, a grouping of related species. Related genera are in turn grouped into families. Each family's formal name ends in the Latin suffix -aceae and is derived from the name of a genus that is or once was part of the family.

The table below contains seed-bearing families from Plants of the World by Maarten J. M. Christenhusz (lead author), Michael F. Fay and Mark W. Chase, with two updated families from Plants of the World Online. The second column gives the family's original type genus, unless that name is no longer accepted in taxonomic databases. The fourth column gives an associated meaning, derivation or person.

Key

 * LG: derived from a Greek word (G), a Latin word (L), another language (–), or a personal name (P)
 * Ba: listed in Ross Bayton's The Gardener's Botanical
 * Bu: listed in Lotte Burkhardt's Index of Eponymic Plant Names
 * CS: listed in both Allen Coombes's The A to Z of Plant Names and William T. Stearn's Stearn's Dictionary of Plant Names for Gardeners
 * Gl: listed in David Gledhill's The Names of Plants
 * Qu: listed in Umberto Quattrocchi's four-volume CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names
 * St: listed in Stearn's Dictionary of Plant Names for Gardeners
 * Linked numerical citations in the last column refer to Plants of the World.

Except for Plants of the World, these books list genera alphabetically. "Latin plant name" or "Greek plant name" in the fourth column means that the name appears in Classical Latin or Greek or both for some plant, not necessarily the plant listed here.

Families