Arranged by ear

Leaf terminology reaches most people through the ear. A guide on a walk says a leaf is glaucous, a botany lecture describes a margin as laciniate, a plant identification video calls a tip acuminate. The word goes in cleanly and comes out of the fingers as glawcous, lasiniate, acyoominate. A normal dictionary is no help at that moment, because looking a word up already requires spelling it.

So the arrangement here is backwards. Each word has a page listing the spellings people actually produce for it, and each of those spellings has a page of its own. Type what you heard, land on that page, and the real word is the second line.

Every entry names the specific letters at fault. Sometimes it is a soft c doing the work of an s, as in laciniate. Sometimes it is a whole syllable that survives only in writing, like the o in lanceolate, which is the last trace of the Latin diminutive lanceola. Sometimes the ending is simply a fossil: the -ceous of coriaceous says shus and has said so since the word came out of Latin coriaceus, leather.

The seventy heard spellings were not invented one by one. A generator derives them from the sound of each word, and everything it offered was read and either kept or thrown out. Roughly a hundred and eighty candidates went in the bin, mostly because no ear would ever produce them. What is left are spellings a person could plausibly type.

Nothing here is a pronunciation guide in the technical sense. The respellings are plain English syllables, not phonetic notation, and they show where the stress falls and nothing more. The Latin given for each word is its actual root, not a translation of the English.