Etymology: < Old French carnation, -acion = incarnation (perhaps aphetic form).

Etymology: < Latin carnātiōn-em (in Cælius Aurelianus c420 in sense ‘fleshiness, corpulence’), < carn-em flesh; compare French carnation, and Italian carnagione ‘the hew or colour of ones skin and flesh’ (Florio).

Etymology: Some 16th cent. authors give one form of the name as coronation , apparently from its 16th cent. specific name, Betonica coronaria , in allusion to its use in chaplets (compare campion n.²), or from ‘the floures..dented or toothed aboue..like to a littell crownet’ (Lyte). On the other hand, Turner calls the plant an incarnacyon, Lyte has carnation as well as coronation, and Gerarde expressly identifies it with the colour ‘carnation’. Prior takes coronation as the original form, and Britten and Holland think his opinion ‘probably correct’.One or other name must have been due to popular mistake; carnation is alone found after 1600, and has apparently even modified the later application of ‘carnation’ as a colour-name: the flower, however, is not always of this colour: as Lyte says, ‘some be of colour white, some carnation or of a liuely flesshe colour, some be of a cleare or bright redde, some of a darke or deepe redde, and some speckled’.