The ancestral carnation grew in the Pyrenees along the modern-day border of France and Spain. It evolved into the modern flower around the Mediterranean, particularly in ancient Greek and Roman merchant ports, including the Bay of Kotor.

Greek botanist Theophrastus created the word dianthus to reference Dios (God/Zeus) and anthos (flower), bestowing the binomial Dianthus caryophyllus, which directly translates to Flower of the Gods. Its common English name may derive from the Latin word for a crown (corona) because of its use in ceremonial crowns. And while the linguistic line between Greek and Latin fluctuated between modern-day Montenegro and Greece, the Serbo-Croatian word for carnation (karanfil) is derived from Ottoman Turkish.



Greek and Roman mythology's origin of the flower is from the goddess Artemis/ Diana. After an unsuccessful hunt, she blamed a flute-playing shepherd for scaring off her prey. She gouged his eyes and threw them between stones. As her rage curtailed into regret, the eyes transformed into carnations.