ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews of the taxonomic classification of the genus Lens Mill., listing its 10 accepted taxa and their synonyms. It also gives vernacular names in about 180 languages of nearly all ethnolinguistic families of the world. The second section is a set of etymological analyses attempting to explain the origin of the popular names and their mutual relatedness, as well as interactions between individual language families. This chapter includes one table and one painting representing a possible evolution of one of the Altaic proto-words associated with this taxon.
