A Grammatical Dictionary of Botanical Latin

stip-; stipit-; -stipus,-a,-um (adj.A): generally in Latin compounds, ‘stem, stalk, stipe;’ see ‘stipe’ [> L. stipes, gen. sg. stipitis (s.m.III), stipe, stalk, stem].

These prefixes and suffixes seem to derive mostly from the Latin word ‘stipes, gen. sg. stipitis’, a stock or trunk, a stem. In compounds, the compounding element is often ‘stip-,’ not, more correctly ‘stipit-’ which is the stem of the noun ‘stipes.’ Jackson, for example, gives ‘stipiferus’ and ‘stipiform,’ (stipe- or stem-bearing; stipe-shaped) not ‘stipitiferus’ and ‘stipitiform,’ both of which orthography preserve the Latin stem.

In Hepatics, however, epithets have been constructed from compounds in -stipus,-a,-um (adj.A), and use both Greek and Latin prefixes. ‘stipus’ is associated with the word ‘stipule’ or ‘stipel’ or ‘stipella,’ all diminutives of ‘stipes,-itis.’ An obsolete term ‘stipule’ is used for the underleaves or amphigastria of Liverworts (Magill 1990). The following epithets are all for Hepatic genera and refer to the character of the amphigastria, which originally may have appeared as stipules attending the stem leaves (comm. Anders Hagborg and John Engel (F); Marshall Crosby MO):