Our English name “horse chestnut” is nothing more than a translation of the sixteenth-century Latin botanical name, Castanea equina.
The name, according to a late-sixteenth-century writer, was “for that the people of the East countries do with the fruit thereof cure their horses of the cough.”
It is much more probable, however, that horse merely indicated “large,” as is the case with a number of other materials, the horse bean, horse mackerel, horse-radish, for example.
