Modern Latin, named in honour of Leonhard Fuchs (1501–66), German botanist.

• pink from mid 16th century:

  A pink (Dianthus) is a plant with sweet-smelling flowers which are usually various shades of pink, purple, or white. The use of pink for the colour beloved by little girls actually comes from the flower, rather than the other way round. Similarly, several other languages use the rose as their source for the colour, and since the early 20th century fuchsia (named after the 16th-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs) has been used for a distinctive shade of deep pink. Shakespeare uses the pink flower to signify the supreme example of something in Romeo and Juliet: ‘I am the very pink of courtesy.’ Here he was probably making a pun on the expression the flower of, meaning ‘the finest part or example’. This Shakespearean phrase led to the development of the expression in the pink of condition, which by the early 18th century was shortened to simply in the pink ‘in very good health and spirits’. The plant name appeared in the mid 16th century, but its origin is not known for certain. It may be short for pink eye ‘small or half-shut eye’, which would make the name like its French equivalent oeillet, which means ‘little eye’. Pink in the sense of the sort of sound an engine makes when cooling dates only from the early 20th century and imitates the sound.