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Plantaginaceae, the plantain family or veronica family, is a large, diverse family of flowering plants in the order Lamiales that includes common flowers such as Antirrhinum and Digitalis. It is unrelated to the true plantains also called "plantain". In older classifications, Plantaginaceae was the only family of the order Plantaginales, but numerous phylogenetic studies, summarized by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, have demonstrated that this taxon should be included within Lamiales.
A group of genera including Lindernia has now been segregated as the family Linderniaceae, which is recognized by Haston et al. 2007 (also known as LAPG II) as "Post-APG II family."
Plantaginaceae sensu lato (in the broad sense) are a diverse, cosmopolitan family, occurring mostly in temperate zones. The group consists of , and also a few with (such as the genus Callitriche). As the family is so diverse, its circumscription is difficult to establish.
The Leaf are spiral to opposite and simple to compound. Unusual in Lamiales is the absence of vertical partitions in the heads of the hairs.
The structure and form of the is variable. Some genera are merosity (i.e., with 4 and 4 ), such as Aragoa (but this one has 5 sepals); others are 5- to 8-merous, such as Sibthorpia. The flowers of most genera are polysymmetric. The corolla is often two-lipped. In some taxa, the androecium is formed before the corolla.
The fruit is a loculicidal capsule, dehiscing through the partitions between the cells.
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Although GRIN includes Lafuentea Lag. in the tribe Antirrhineae, in the phylogenetic analysis of Fernández-Mazuecos et al. (2013) it was a sister to the Antirrhineae, as also noted by Albach (2005). For the time being it should be considered an outgroup.
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