I had the random thought that if I have a daughter I should name her after the stapeliad genus Desmidorchis lol
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I think a lot of them fall into a sort of neutral area, but i do agree most veer towards sounding more feminine. I think this is because in English at least, a lot of girl names end with a vowel, and so do biological names. A few genera come to mind, Amanita, Aquila, Thuja, Zenaida etc. Same with the suffixes ‘ae’, ‘ia’, ‘io’, ‘oa’, you get the point.
The only ‘non-feminine’ (stay with me here) suffixes left are things like ‘on’, ‘ius’, ‘ium’, etc. Don’t get me wrong, if it was more acceptable to name a boy Sarcodon, I think that would be awesome. Erigeron, Acer (thats a cool one), Arion, Phlebopus. Maybe not that last one (or maybe?) but you get the point. A lot of the names with non-vowel endings aren’t as smooth, sometimes less ‘pretty’ or ‘cute’
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Jūra (sea) is s somewhat common name in Lithuania.
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Well, for masculine names, I’ve known guys named Drake, Ash, Alder, Stone, Jasper, and Flint. Oh, and a Thorn. Seems like that there have to be more along those lines, particularly if one were to digging back into Anglo-Saxon: Wulf, Arthur (from artos: bear), Merlin…
Gymnthorax? Chaetodon? Gymnomuraena?
I wouldn’t name a boy Phlebopus; I’d be afraid he’d get varicose veins in the legs.
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I heard of a gal named Castilleja (pronounces Cast-ill-ay-uh) and I just loved her name. Love the sound and the genus.
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Looking through my plant-obs at genus or lower, there are cool sounding linguistically masculine names too, the problem is that they are oddly pompous. “Galanthus”, “Euonymus”, “Helianthus”, “Narcissus” (though I would advise against that one).
I would not mind being called “Helianthus”, I kinda like it. Like @apusaffinis I think it would be cool to have a wider palette of names.
Also, I guess, though it may be cheating, that you could always use a masculine form of the genera names, whether it “formally” exists or not.
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I know someone who changed their surname to Helianthus.
With the genus being named after the Spaniard Domingo Castillejo it is interesting that the English pronunciation chooses to pronounce the “j” in the spanish way with an h, but not the “ll” as a y.
The same is true of the California city of Vallejo.
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