The most common way of naming is referring to a plant feature, often reproductive characters. Eponyms, chiefly commemorating men, have always been common and even became dominant in the last two decades.

Almost half of the names appeared in the 19th century, but the proportion of accepted names increased over time. The average number of new generic names is 5.05 per year.

Europeans authored the vast majority of names and, within Europe, it is concentrated in France, the UK, and Germany.

A mere 1.80% of the generic names were published by female authors only.

Every letter of the alphabet has been used but P is the most popular letter to start a genus with, while Q has only been used once. These are also other most and least used first letters in the English language.

Generic names are between 3 and 20 letters long and the distribution is a displaced Poisson distribution. The median length is 10 letters. This is the same for words in European languages.

Rubiaceae has 1386 generic names, of which 615 are accepted and contain 14,266 species. This makes it the fifth-largest angiosperm family.

Read the full story in my latest paper: doi.org/10.3897/phyt...

However, the Latin caelum can also mean "vault of heaven", referring to the celestial vault in ancient cosmology. So, the original spelling does refer to the arched seeds and is therefore correct.

The name is derived from Latin caelum (=heaven) and sperma (=seed) but this does not make much sense. So, taxonomists changed the spelling and etymology: from Greek koilos (=hollow), referring to the concave seeds.

The genus name is Greek, from "gala" meaning "milk" and "anthos" meaning "flower", while the epithet is Latin for "snow-covered". So, a snow-covered white-flowering plant. A very obvious name. 😀

I have a paper in review about all generic names ever published in Rubiaceae. There are currently 615 accepted names with 14,266 species; 31% are monospecific genera and the median number of species is 4. Rubiaceae has lots of small genera.

For Rubiaceae, the number of new generic names shows an almost linear increase and there is no indication that fewer generic names will be described in the future. The average increase of new genera is 5.05 genera per year.

These works have now been added to the literature list on the #Rubiaceae website. If you ever find an online version of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin... let me know.

Hi, #Rubiaceae systematics here and editor in chief of @plecevo.bsky.social, a journal about ecology, phylogenetics, and systematics of all plant groups.

This needs verification but some sources say the national flower of Yemen is Coffea arabica, which is not native there.