How many of us know how the apple got its name, or the onion? We take these words for granted because they slip right off the tongue, but most of us don’t know where they come from.
Even the words ‘fruit’ and ‘vegetable’ are thrown around like they sprang up out of nowhere. In fact, the word ‘fruit’ comes from the Latin word fructus, meaning an ‘enjoyment’ or ‘delight’ as well as ‘produce’ or ‘crop’. ‘Vegetable’, on the other hand, comes from the proto-Indo-European root weg-, meaning ‘strength’ or ‘liveliness’; hence we also find weg- in ‘awake’, ‘vigor’, and other related words.
In order of unexpectedness, here are ten etymologies of fruit and veg we see every day.
10. Raspberry
It’s not exactly known where the raspberry got its name. But an earlier (1540s) form, raspis berry, may be a clue—pointing toward raspise (from Anglo-Latin vinum raspeys), a kind of sweet, rose-colored wine.
Alternatively, as with many words in English, it may be Germanic in origin. One theory suggests it comes from Old Walloon, a Belgian/French language in which ‘thicket’ (a habitat associated with the berry) is raspoie. Or it may be related to the English word rasp, meaning rough, referring to the berry’s appearance. (By the way, besides ‘apple’, ‘berry’ is the only word for fruit native to English.)
In any case, ‘to blow a raspberry’ (a fart noise through closed lips) is only tangentially related, as a shortening of “raspberry tart,” which rhymes with ‘fart’.
9. Cabbage
In the late 14th century, the English referred to cabbage by the Old North French word caboche, meaning ‘head’ (from Latin/Proto-Indo-European caput/kaput). This makes sense given we still refer to a single cabbage as a “head of cabbage”. But this association with heads is not borne out by other European languages. In Italian, cabbage is cavolo, while in Spanish it’s col, as in Old French chol and French chou—all from the Latin for cabbage, caulis. Even Germanic tongues share this Latin root. In German it’s Kohl, in Swedish kål, and in Dutch kool. (Hence ‘kale’ and ‘coleslaw’.)
So maybe ‘cabbage’ in English comes from the Latin boce, meaning ‘hump’ or ‘bump’, with the expressive prefix ca-. Still, holding a cabbage, it does kind of feel like a head.
8. Potato
‘Potato’ comes from the Taíno batata, with no mention prior to that. This is because it wasn’t until the mid-16th century that Europe had even heard of this root crop—despite its importance today. However, batata wasn’t the common white potato; it referred specifically to the sweet potato. The batata or potato, meaning ‘sweet potato’, was the first type to reach European plates, lauded by diners as “just like fine marzipan” and superior to “our passeneps or carets.”
When Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the white potato to the British Isles, a new name was obviously needed. Instead of using papa from the Andean Quechua language, as the Spanish had, the English named it “Virginia potato” after Raleigh’s New World colony. In any case, it wasn’t a hit like its sweet orange cousin. Hence it also became known as the “bastard potato,” reflecting its perceived inferiority. For a while it was grown as an ornamental plant, or fed as a cheap food to sailors.
Elsewhere in Europe, the potato was the “earth-apple”: pomme de terre in French and erdapfel in German. Other German words for the potato include kartoffel (from the Italian tartufolo, meaning ‘truffle’) and grundbirne, meaning ‘basic pear’.
7. Kiwi
Kiwifruit was unknown in the West until 1904—at least as an agricultural crop. This is when the US Department of Agriculture imported seeds and domesticated the fruit, which was known back then as yang tao. Around the same time, a New Zealander returning home from China gave seeds to some neighbors with orchards and they flourished—doing far better than any in the US. New Zealand, and the Bay of Plenty in particular, had the best conditions for growing yang tao.
Rebranding the fruit the “Chinese gooseberry,” New Zealand exporters shipped their first 100 cases to San Francisco. However, the name was problematic for two reasons. First, in the American imagination, ‘Chinese’ was synonymous with ‘communist’ and ‘communist’ was synonymous with ‘evil’. Second, gooseberries are prone to anthracnose fungus and, while kiwis have nothing to do with real gooseberries, the name worried US importers. Its replacement, “melonette,” didn’t work either because melons were subject to heavy tariffs. The name “kiwi” was born when a US importer asked NZ exporters to find a short Maori term that immediately calls New Zealand to mind. Kiwi was already a slang term for a New Zealander, from the Maori for the native flightless bird.
Once the name was settled, kiwis became the “fruit of the future,” an essential garnish in nouvelle cuisine and patisseries around the world—despite the French calling it souris vegetales, meaning ‘vegetable mice’.
6. Squash
A Native American staple, the squash gets its name from askutasquash—a Narragansett (Algonquian) word meaning ‘may be eaten raw or uncooked’. (Askut means ‘green’, ‘raw’, or ‘uncooked’, while ‘asquash’ means ‘eaten’.) Given how few of us have even thought about eating squash raw, this may seem like a mistake. But don’t knock it til you’ve tried it; raw squash is surprisingly palatable.
That’s not to say pre-Columbian Americans only ate it raw. Cultivated from as early as 10,000 years ago, the squash had plenty of uses. Not only was its flesh roasted, boiled, or preserved in syrup, its shoots, leaves, flowers, and seeds could also be eaten. Even the hard outer shells—which come in various colors including orange and blue—could be scooped out and used as containers.
In spite of its charms, the colonists thought the squash was beneath them… until the harsh New England winter. Then they were greedily baked as a comforting staple with fat, maple syrup, and honey.
5. Onion
The word ‘onion’ dates back to the early 12th century, when it appeared as ungeon, oinyon, and unione or in Irish as inniun and Welsh as wynwyn. Before that was the Old English ynne. All words originally derived from the Latin unionem for a kind of onion—or pearl, based on the resemblance of a string of pearls to a string of onions. The Latin word also means ‘unity’. In this context, it refers to the way an onion grows in successive layers—unlike, say, garlic, which is split into self-contained cloves.
The more common word in Latin for onion was cepa, hence the Spanish cebolla, although in Latin it had a hard ‘c’ or ‘k’ sound. This is also the origin of ‘chive’, which in English was originally cives—pronounced with a soft ‘c’ as in French.
4. Coconut
The coconut is an ancient agricultural crop, first domesticated by Southeast Asian islanders before migrating to the Pacific 4,500 years ago. Its name in these regions tends to be a variant of niu. In Europe the coconut was originally nux indica, ‘Indian nut’, because the fruit was first encountered in India. However, Indians themselves mostly knew it as naariyal. So where did ‘coconut’ come from?
Innocent as it sounds, the name actually comes from the coconut’s ghoulish appearance—at least to Portuguese colonists. The three “holes” at the base, resembling eyes and an open mouth, apparently reminded them of an Iberian folkloric “ghost-monster”, the Coco, that kidnaps and devours naughty children. (To be fair, coconuts are kind of scary; they’re said to kill more people than sharks.)
The ‘nut’ part came later, in the 1610s, and formed part of its name in taxonomy: Cocos nucifera. This is, of course, despite it not being a nut but really a very hard fruit.
3. Apple
In Old English, æppel referred to any kind of fruit—not just apples. It came from Proto-Germanic *ap(a)laz, just like Old Norse eple, Old High German apful, and Old Irish ubull. It wasn’t until the 12th century that England got ‘fruit’ from Latin via French. But æppel remained in use, appearing in eorþæppla (“earth-apples”), meaning ‘cucumbers’, fingeræppla, meaning ‘dates’ and, in 15th century Middle English, appel of paradis, meaning ‘banana’. Even as late as the 17th century, it remained a generic term for fruits and nuts.
This explains how the Bible’s unspecified “forbidden fruit” automatically became an apple when more likely it was meant to be a pomegranate. In Islam it’s believed to be wheat, hinting at the Fall represented by agriculture.
Interestingly, given the Bible connection, one etymology suggests the Proto-Germanic root of ‘apple’ actually comes from the Semitic languages of Ethiopia. According to this theory, ‘apple’ started as ‘abal meaning ‘genitals’ or ‘testicles’.
2. Eggplant
Why is a vegetable (or fruit really) that looks nothing like an egg called an eggplant? The answer is surprisingly simple: it used to. Europeans came up with the name ‘eggplant’ in the 18th century because its fruits were the size and shape of goose eggs. Even the color was similar—off-white or yellow instead of dark purple.
This may surprise those who think ‘eggplant’ is an American word. In fact the more authentic American term is “Guinea squash,” by which the eggplant was known from the 18th century when it was first introduced from West Africa.
In Britain, it’s called an aubergine—which entered English via the Arabic al-badinjan from the Sanskrit vatimgana, meaning ‘anti-wind vegetable’. Apparently it was thought to ease flatulence.
1. Passionfruit
Although passionfruit’s beauty kind of sells itself, its name is an obvious advantage, oozing sex appeal and a tropical feel. Really, though, it couldn’t be more chaste.
‘Passion’ in this case means the Passion of Christ, that is, the suffering and execution of the prophet. Thanks to Christian missionaries, its flower came to be known in its native South America as the flor fe las cinco lagas or the ‘flower of the five wounds’ since it was used to tell the tale of crucifixion. In their telling, the five stamens represented the five wounds Christ sustained—one in each hand and foot and one in the side.
Other parts of the flower also played a role: the three styles represented the nails driven into the cross; the ovary represented either the vinegar-soaked sponge offered to Christ for relief or the hammer used to drive in the nails; and the corona represented the crown of thorns. The ten petals, meanwhile, represented the apostles (minus Peter and Judas) and their purple color (traditionally associated with Lent) was attributed to Christ’s blood falling from the sky.