A wild plant with sharp points along its leaves, and a soft round purple or white flower on top. It grows by itself in fields, on waste ground, by the side of roads — nobody plants it. Farmers treat it as a weed and pull it out. The word is a countable noun: 'a thistle', 'a field full of thistles'. What makes this word worth learning is not the plant but what it stands for. The thistle is the national flower of Scotland — you will see it on shirts, on coins, on the badges of Scottish teams. There is an old story that an invading army crept up at night, one soldier stepped on a thistle, shouted with pain, and woke the Scots, who won. Nobody knows if it is true, but it is why the plant means 'Scotland' in English. It also gives us a way of thinking about hard beauty: something sharp that hurts if you grab it, but with a soft flower on top. Poets like that. And it turns up in a very old English saying, from the Bible: 'do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?' — meaning you cannot get something good from something bad.