Stewart Robert Hinsley writes
In message
,
Des Higgins writes

My personal gripe is a relatively minor one but I only recently
realised that more or less half of the plant families that I used to
know have been done away with. Some genius decided that you cannot
have a plant family that is purely descriptive such as Leguminosae or
Compositae; you have to name the family after one of its genera. In
most cases it is not so hard seeing as the family names are easy to
guess if the chosen genus is a familiar one and most are. I used to
be a taxonomist a long time ago; glad I gave it up; it's a young man's
game now :-).


That's not completely true - several descriptive family names were
grandfathered in as legitimate alternatives to names based on genera.
Leguminosae and Compositae are among them. (The use of these
descriptive family names is less frequent than it used to be, but it's
still legitimate.)

There's are also a few family names based on genus names that are not
currently recognised, e.g. Caryophyllaceae, Fabaceae, and Theaceae,
and, if I recall correctly, Cactaceae.

I thought part of the reasoning was that it would be helpful if all the
family names had the same end, so that you knew that ...aceae was a
family (and if it wasn't ..aceae then it wasn't a family)? It was that
that did for Compositae and Umbelliferae.
--
Kay