What is "alectryon"

Alectryon is the Ancient Greek word for " rooster". In Greek mythology, Alectryon was a youth, charged by Ares to stand guard outside his door while the god indulged in illicit love with Aphrodite. He fell asleep, and Helios, the sun, walked in on the couple. Ares turned Alectryon into a rooster, which never forgets to announce the arrival of the sun in the morning.

Both the words Alectryon and Halcyon might have been corrupted from Halaka, one of the old Persian appellations of the sun. In the ' Vendidad' it is said that the sacred bird Parodars, called by men kahrkatak, raises its voice at the dawn; and in the "Bundehasb", the sun is spoken of as Halaka, the cock, the enemy of darkness and evil, which flee before his crowing.

Alectryon may refer to:

• Alectryon (mythology)
• Alector, father of one of the Argonauts, referred to by Homer as "Alectryon"
• Alectryon (genus), in botany

Alectryon is a genus of about 30 species of trees and shrubs known to science, constituting part of the plant family Sapindaceae. They grow naturally across Australasia, Papuasia, Melanesia, western Polynesia, east Malesia and Southeast Asia, including across mainland Australia, especially diverse in eastern Queensland and New South Wales, the Torres Strait Islands, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, Indonesia and the Philippines. They grow in a wide variety of natural habitats, from rainforests, gallery forests and coastal forests to arid savannas and heaths.

Mainland Australia, especially the eastern Qld and NSW rainforests and the monsoon tropics, harbours the global centre of Alectryon species diversity, having 15 species, 12 of them endemic to Australia. In the continent of, combined New Guinea including Papua New Guinea and West Papua, Australia and all of their continental islands, including the Torres Strait Islands, known collectively in biogeography as the Sahul continent, lives the even greater diversity and endemism of 21 and 19 species, respectively.