Niagara Falls' Botany - Maidenhair Tree

 
Yet another spelling of the transliteration of the Chinese word for what we call, variously, "Ginkgo" (Google lists ~4,970,000 English pages), or "Gingko" (1~,610,000 pages, and they suggest the other spelling); this spelling, "ginko" comes in a respectable third (!1,030,000 pages). I suppose it makes sense that Linnaeus' version should be the most popular!

In a warning to those of with sloppy handwriting, WikiPedia notes about the name that:
The name ginkgo means "silver apricot" (銀杏, pinyin: yínxìng) in Chinese. The same characters are used in Japanese and Korean (where the ginkgo had been introduced from China). The Japanese pronunciation is ichō while the Korean equivalent is eunhang, both of which appear to be a loan from Chinese, though this is not certain (from the entry in the dictionary Kōjien). The Japanese characters used to write ginkgo look as though they could be read ginkyō, and this was the name Engelbert Kaempfer, the first Westerner to see the species in 1690, wrote down in his Amoenitates Exoticae (1712). However, his y was misread as a g, and the misspelling stuck.

In modern Japanese, the characters are read either ichō (meaning the tree) or ginnan (meaning the seed); this latter reading appears to be based on the renjō (i.e., liaison) reading of the characters. The modern Chinese name for its shelled seeds is 白果 (Mandarin bái guǒ), meaning "white fruit".