Mistletoe
Shakespeare calls it “the baleful mistletoe” (Titus
Andronicus, ii. 3), in allusion to the Scandinavian story that it
was with an arrow made of mistletoe that Balder was slain. (See Kissing Under The Mistletoe.)
The word mistletoe is a corruption of mistel-ta, where mist is the German for “dung,” or rather the
“droppings of a bird,” from the notion that the plant was so
propagated, especially by the missel-thrush. Ta is for tan, Old Norse tein, meaning “a plant” or “shoot.”
Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894 More on Mistletoe from Fact Monster:
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