Humans have been utilizing plants (and fungi) for food and medical purposes for a long time (Rahman et al., 2019). Some organisms have changed their habitat areas due to introduction by humans, and combining genetic analysis with archaeological and linguistic evidence allows us to reconstruct their histories (Zerega et al., 2004; Roullier et al., 2013; Chiba et al., 2022). When species are transmitted across regions by cultural contacts between human groups, they may be called with similar names in different languages (Haspelmath, 2009). To examine evidence of human-mediated plant transmission left in languages, we analyzed similarities of plant names between languages using publicly available databases in this study. We collected 510 vegetable and herb names covering 239 languages with geographic information. Name similarities between languages for each species were calculated based on edit distances of character strings according to the previous study (Obayashi et al., 2019). We grouped similar names and investigated patterns specific to each species by hierarchical clustering and tensor decomposition. Our results suggested that some species originating from the Americas form larger clusters of names across language families and continents, while species originating from Eurasia tend to exhibit multiple smaller clusters of names by language families and regions. Then, we hypothesize that these large clusters in American species reflect their histories of spreading rapidly worldwide via Europe after the 15th century due to the long-range voyages. We tested the effect of geography on the cluster formation of the name similarities by simulations. The results showed that patterns of cluster formation depended on the ability to cross the Atlantic Ocean, suggesting that the 15th century voyages may have strongly influenced both plant transmission and cultural evolution of vocabulary related to living organisms. It is necessary to develop additional models with cultural parameters, like the number of speakers, which is an important factor in language diffusion, for further understanding of cultural evolution in the vocabulary. Our study demonstrates that analyzing cultural resources like vocabulary may contribute to exploring the relationships between humans and biodiversity. Furthermore, matching name similarities with genetics may reveal unknown human influences on habitat changes of less documented organisms as well as major crops.