Eggcorn Forum

Mandrake, a European plant in the nightshade family, has been employed for many centuries as a herbal, especially as an anaesthetic, a sleep-inducer, and as an ingredient in magical potions. Though the plants are little used today, even by committed herbalists, many of us will know about them through John Donne’s famous poem, the one that begins

Goe, and catche a falling starre,
Get with child a mandrake roote,
Tell me, where all past yeares are,
Or who cleft the Divels foot.

The belief that mandrakes can promote fertility, a tradition that is also the basis for the Biblical story in Genesis 30 about a sex-for-favor compact between two of Jacob’s wives, turns on the curious shape of mandrake roots. The roots resemble, some say, the lower half of the trunk of a man. But the identification requires some imagination. In Chapter VI of the second book of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne writes: “Many…false conceptions there are of mandrakes. The first, from great antiquity, conceiveth the root thereof resembleth the shape of man; which is a conceit not to be made out by ordinary inspection, or any other eyes, than such as, regarding the clouds, behold them in shapes conformable to pre-apprehensions….” Browne goes on to point out that “as fair a resemblance is often found in carrots, parsnips….”

In the centuries when the mandrake was a familiar plant, many supposed that the name “mandrake” was compounded from “man” and “drake.” The “man” part of “mandrake” may have been inferred from the shape of the plant, its associations with human fertility, and its human-like behavior (One common superstition was that the root of the plant screamed when it was pulled from the ground.). The perception of the word “drake” in the second half of “mandrake” may even have guided the evolving English spelling of the word (“Drake” is an old word for a flying dragon. An early variant of “mandrake” was “mandragon.”). But the “man” and “drake” associations, however clever, are ultimately a sort of double-yolked eggcorn. The word “mandrake” actually derives from the Latin name for the plant, “mandragora,” which is based in turn on a similar Greek word.