Names
The plant is known by a number of different names in English, including Chinese plum and Japanese apricot. An alternative name is ume, from Japanese, or mume, from the scientific name. Another alternative name is mei, from the Chinese name.
The flower is known as the meihua (梅花), which came to be translated as "plum blossom" or sometimes as "flowering plum". The term "winter plum" may be used too, specifically with regard to the depiction of the flower with its early blooming in Chinese painting.
In Chinese it is called méi (梅) and the fruit is called méizi (梅子). The Japanese name is ume (kanji: 梅; hiragana: うめ), while the Korean name is maesil (hangul: 매실; hanja: 梅實). The Japanese and Korean terms derive from Middle Chinese, in which the pronunciation is thought to have been muəi. The Vietnamese name is mai or mơ (although mai may also refer to a different plant, Ochna integerrima, in the south of Vietnam).
Read more about this topic: Ume
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“If marriages were made by putting all the men’s names into one sack and the women’s names into another, and having them taken out by a blindfolded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have here in England.... If you can tell me of any trustworthy method of selecting a wife, I shall be happy to make use of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)