A common garden flower, grown for tall spikes crowded with small flowers in white, yellow, pink, red, or deep purple. Gardeners like it because it flowers for a long time in summer and comes in almost every colour. The English name comes from a game children play with it: squeeze the sides of one flower and the two lips open and shut like a little mouth, so the flower looks like a dragon snapping. Once you have seen a child do that, the name never leaves you. Count it like an ordinary noun — one snapdragon, a packet of snapdragon seeds, a bed of snapdragons. Its scientific name, Antirrhinum, is what you will see on seed packets and in garden books, so the two names sit side by side in shops. Bees are heavy enough to push the mouth open and get inside, which is how the flower is pollinated — lighter insects cannot manage it. The flower means little in English idiom; it is simply a well-loved garden plant, often the first flower a child learns to play with.