The shiny-capped, almost supernatural looking mushroom known as Ganoderma Lucidum is at the heart of Organo Gold’s many delicious products. As anyone in the OG Family knows, this miraculous mushroom is revered here in the halls of OG, and we aren’t the only ones aware of its precious qualities. Ganoderma has been used for thousands of years in Chinese medicine, and is known by many different names.
Here are a few fun facts about the many monikers of our favorite fungus:
- Ganoderma is known in Chinese as lingzhi, and the names for this fungus have a two thousand year history. The Chinese term lingzhi was first recorded in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 CE). Petter Adolf Karsten named the genus Ganoderma in 1881.
- The generic name Ganoderma derives from the Greek word ganos which translates as “brightness; sheen.”
- The specific epithet lucidum is Latin for “shining.”
- In the Chinese language, lingzhi compounds ling, which means “spirit, spiritual; soul; miraculous; sacred; divine; mysterious; efficacious; effective” and zhi, which translates as “plant of longevity; fungus; seed; branch; mushroom; excrescence.”
- In Vietnamese, lingzhi or Ganoderma is known as linh chi, which literally means “supernatural mushroom.”
- In addition to the transliterated loanword borrowed or derived from the Chinese, other English names for the mushroom include “glossy ganoderma” and “shiny polyporus.”
- In China, the Ganoderma lucidum mushroom has also been called “God’s Herb.”