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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

ginkgo.

Any trees native to China with small, fan-shaped leaves and edible seeds.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈɡɪŋ.kəʊ/UK
  1. Any trees native to China with small, fan-shaped leaves and edible seeds.

  2. The seed of a ginkgo tree.

Where this word comes from

From Japanese 銀杏 (ginkyō), from Chinese 銀杏/银杏 (yínxìng, “silver apricot”). Ginkgo is the name that is printed in Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum Fasciculi V … (1712) authored by Engelbert Kaempfer, the first Westerner to see the species. In his way of transcription ginkyo would have been Ginkjo or Ginkio but was printed as Ginkgo. This was read by Carl Linnaeus, and the misspelling stuck.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.