The Etymology of Cedar
Cedar entered English around 1290 from Old French cedre, descending through Latin cedrus from Greek kedros. The deeper origin of the Greek word is disputed: it does not have a clear Indo-European pedigree, and many linguists treat it as a Mediterranean substrate word — borrowed by Greek from a now-vanished pre-Indo-European tongue of the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps Phoenician or another Semitic-adjacent source. The tree it named, Cedrus libani, the Cedar of Lebanon, was already legendary in the ancient world: the cedars of Lebanon are mentioned more than seventy times in the Hebrew Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh sets a key scene in the cedar forest, and Phoenician shipbuilders made their seafaring vessels from cedar wood. The wood resists rot and insects and is intensely aromatic — qualities that gave it sacred and architectural importance for millennia. English cedar later expanded to cover several unrelated trees with similar fragrant wood (Western red cedar, eastern white cedar, Atlas cedar, deodar cedar). The Lebanese national flag still bears the cedar at its centre.