Used plant part

Fruits, which are often termed “seeds”, though this is not botanically correct.

Plant family
Apiaceae (parsley family).

Sensoric quality

Anise flower

Sweet and very aromatic. See cicely for other spices with a similar fragrance.
For an overview on sweet spices, see licorice.

Main constituents
The aroma of the essential oil (up to 3% in the fruits) is dominated by trans-anethole (max. 90%). Additional aroma components are estragol (iso-anethole, 2%), anise aldehyd (less than 1%), anise alcohol, p-methoxy-acetophenone, pinene, limonene, ?-himachalene (2%). An unusual compound is the phenol ester 4-methoxy-2-(1-propene-yl)-phenol-2-methyl-butyrate, which is characteristic for anise (5%).
Older books (e.g., Melchior and Kastner) mention that anise, especially of Italian origin, may contain small amounts of highly toxic hemlock fruits. This warning seems now to be obsolete; you'll probably not share Sokrates' fate just after enjoying one anise bisquit.

Origin

Anise (flowering plants)

Eastern Mediterranean (Egypt?) or West Asia. Turkey is still an important producer in our days, but still better qualities come from Spain.

In Far Eastern cuisines (India, Iran, Indonesia), no distinction is made between anise and fennel (see below). Therefore, the same name is usually given to both of them. On the Philippines, star anise, there a popular spice, is referred to as “anise”, too.

Etymology
The spice got its classically-Latin name anisum by confusion with dill, which in Greek is known as aneson or aneton

Names of anise in virtually all European languages are derived from Latin anisum, with very little variation: The form anis is valid in a large number of languages, including Norwegian, Croatian, Finnish, Russian,

Dried anise fruits (also termed anis seeds)

Ukrainian and Hebrew. Examples for names in other languages are Icelandic anís, Latvian aniss, Hungarian ánizs Czech anýz, Polish anyz, Estonian aniis, Italian anice, Romanian anason, Arabic yanason , Urdu anisuan and Farsi anisun.

Sanskrit shatapushpa, literally means “a hundred flowers” and probably refers to the flower cluster (umbel). The Sanskrit name was also applied to related plants, and some modern languages have loaned the term from Sanskrit in non-compatible meanings. For example, thian-sattapusyat is the name of anise fruits in Thai herbal medicine, but in the South Indian language Telugu, shatapushpamu means “dill”.

The Hindi name saunf properly denotes fennel, which anise is thought to be a foreign variety of and which is often used interchangeably with anise. To distinguish anise clearly from fennel, the specialized terms patli saunf “thin fennel” or vilayati saunf “foreign fennel” may be used.

Some languages name anise as a “sweet” variant of other, related spices; for example, Indonesian jinten manis and Arabic kamun halu both mean “sweet cumin”, a name which is also sometimes heard in English. Arabic has another, similar name habbu al-hulwa “sweet grains”. Portuguese erva doce “sweet herb” may denote anise, fennel or occasionally other sweet plants like sweetleaf (Stevia rebaudiana).