A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
gall
A gall is a growth a plant produces at the direction of something living inside it. A wasp, fly, mite, or fungus lays or infects, and the plant responds by building a structure around the intruder with a specific shape, color, and internal architecture that the plant would never build on its own. Oak alone hosts several hundred kinds. The shape belongs to the inducer, not the tree, so a gall identifies the animal rather than the plant.
Etymology
The word came into English from Latin by way of French and originally meant an oak apple specifically, because that was the gall that mattered commercially. It is unrelated to the gall that means bile or bitterness, which is Old English, or to the gall that means a sore rubbed on a horse, though all three have been sitting on the same spelling long enough that dictionaries list them as separate entries side by side.
Notes
Oak galls made ink. Crushed with iron salts and gum arabic, they produce iron gall ink, which is dark, permanent, and bites into the paper, and which was the standard writing ink of Europe for well over a thousand years. Magna Carta, Leonardo’s notebooks, Bach’s manuscripts, and the United States Constitution are all written in the juice of a wasp’s nursery.