Compound words.

I did a search on Crapemyrtle and only come up with one hit.
I broke the compound word up and came up with 187. Did a little research and found that it is named crapemyrtle for a reason. It is from the genus Lageerstroemia, and is not from the genus Myrtus in the myrtle family. Breaking it up implies it belongs to the second genus. The same applies to horsechestnut, mayapple. Other compound words are horseapple, hackberry, dogwood, firethorn, soapberry and barberry.
Did a spell check and all of the above are spelled wrong.

What am I implying. Beats me, just thought I would crow. LOL

Unfortunately common names don't always follow common sense--someone somewhere must have thought that Lagerstroemia looked like a myrtle in some way so it got that name, the trick with searching PF is to know the correct spelling of the common name regardless of whether it really makes sense or not (you might also note that the Crape part of the name isn't even spelled right--I think they got their name because the flowers looked like bits of crepe paper, but the common name got spelled with an "a" instead, go figure!)

Do you think Dave;s should list them correctly spelled being every one out there looks to us for the right way. Or should we split up the word.

Floridata has a slightly different twist on how it *should* be spelled, and why:

http://www.floridata.com/ref/l/lager_i.cfm

I would heartily agree with the tag end of their comment, in that it's a common name, and there is no recognized authority for how they should be spelled or whether they should even be used. There's no way to effectively enforce taxonomic rules on common names.

I don't mind making corrections where they are needed. We did something similar with Nymphaea (aka waterlilies) a while back - we had them all as two words, and went through all 800-some entries to add the compound word. There are a mere 191 entries for Lagerstroemia, which makes it a slightly less daunting task, but at the moment, we're swamped with other error reports and processes that are consuming our available resources.

Barberry/Berberis, Dogwood/Cornus, Firethorn/Pyracantha, Hackberry/Celtis, Horsechestnut/Aesculus, Mayapple/Podophyllum, Soapberry/Sapindus are already listed with the compound word among the common names.

I've never seen crape myrtle spelled as one word ever, anywhere so I'd be somewhat opposed to putting it in Plant Files that way--I know common names aren't governed or anything but in my mind it's not common unless it's commonly spelled that way (but I hate common names anyway and try to avoid using them, so when it really comes down to it I don't care!). But if we're correcting things, you might as well put in Crepe myrtle as an option too because I see it mis-spelled that way when people are talking about it on forums more often than I see it spelled correctly.

We spell Lagerstroemia's common name as both Crape and Crepe ;o)