Where I come from, the locals know three kinds of mushrooms. The ones you find in the grocery stores. In the early spring, there is a race to find as many morels as one can. Finally, every other mushroom is a toadstool.
It’s a simple way of understanding something that, for most people, isn’t understood at all. Where did the word “Toadstool” come from and what does a toad have to do with mushrooms?
But that word “toadstool” didn’t come from science. It came from something else entirely.
The word itself goes back many centuries, appearing in English as early as the late Middle Ages. It was commonly used to describe mushrooms that were thought to be poisonous or unsafe to eat. Early dictionaries and botanical writings often drew a loose line between “mushrooms” and “toadstools,” though the distinction wasn’t based in science
It came from perception and chatter.
But even then, the name itself was never entirely clear.
Early records show the word appearing in many forms, tadstole, todestole, paddockstool, toad-cheese, or toads-meat, stretching back to the 1300s. Even then, people weren’t quite sure what it meant, only that it had something to do with toads.
And that connection puzzled people just as much then as it does now.
Some believed the name was literal and that toads sat on mushrooms like stools. Let’s face it, it is fun to imagine that. Writers and poets even described scenes of toads resting on them, as if they belonged there.
Others thought something more strange: that mushrooms grew from toads themselves. From their presence, or even from their waste. At a time when toads were seen as poisonous, unclean, or even tied to darker forces, that association had influence.
In medieval Europe, they were often linked to disease, witchcraft, and transformation. The same could be said for mushrooms, organisms that appeared suddenly, vanished just as quickly, and seemed to rise from decay.
It didn’t take much for the two to become connected.
In some traditions, the name may have simply come from imagination, a “toad’s stool,” a small seat in the forest where something unseen might rest. In others, it may have been a warning. A way to label certain mushrooms as dangerous without needing to understand why.
Over time, the meaning blurred.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, toadstool had become a common way to describe poisonous or inedible fungi, separating them, at least in people’s minds, from the mushrooms they trusted enough to eat.
Even today, the meaning of toadstool isn’t fixed
In some places, it still refers specifically to poisonous mushrooms. In others, it’s used more loosely, sometimes for any wild mushroom at all.
Today, the term has no scientific meaning. There’s no real difference between a “mushroom” and a “toadstool”, only perception, passed down through generations.
But the word remains. It continues to shift, just as it always has.
A small piece of history from a time when mushrooms weren’t fully understood and when people gave them names, not to explain them, but to make sense of what they feared.
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