Hoary

White or gray, usually from age.

My father is fond of a kind of cough­drop-like can­dy called hore­hounds. I knew from his descrip­tion that the can­dy got its dis­tinct fla­vor from a plant of the same name, but what I did not know is the rela­tion to the word hoary. When I opened my Cham­bers Dic­tio­nary today look­ing for flib­ber­ti­gib­bet, the book opened into the Hs and the entry for hore­hound caught my eye. Accord­ing to Cham­bers, it is «a hoary labi­ate plant.» Hore is also list­ed as an alter­nate spelling of hoar, and hoarhound as an alter­nate spelling of hore­hound, so it stands to rea­son that the plant is so named for its char­ac­ter­is­tic hoariness.

I don’t have any ety­mo­log­i­cal cita­tion for this rela­tion, so don’t quote me on it. In fact, there are vari­eties of hore­hound called both white hore­hound and black hore­hound (which are part of the same fam­i­ly but not the same genus) so there may well be some oth­er ori­gin to the name.

Hoary itself is a word that I’ve encoun­tered for decades with­out ever both­er­ing to find out what it meant.