How to get all term descriptions from a specific taxonomy vocabulary? I have a block that displays an imagemap, and each map area represents a taxonomy term. All terms are in the same vocabulary.

For each map area, I know the term name and want to pull the term description using a Drupal function. I know I can do something like this:

&lt;?php $myTerm = taxonomy_get_term_by_name('1'); ?&gt;
&lt;area shape="poly" title="&lt;?php echo $myTerm[0]-&gt;description; ?&gt;" coords="1,2,3" href="link2" /&gt;


But it's quite clunky and means making a function call for every map area.

Is there an API function that gets every term in a vocabulary (like taxonomy_node_get_terms_by_vocabulary() but without referencing a node?)...

Or should I make a module for this..?
I think you could use taxonomy_get_tree or just write your own query_function with the following query: db_query('SELECT description FROM {term_data} where vid = %s',$vid).