2:30 pm / May 9, 2013
On the Etymology of the Word Apricot photo

On the Etymology of the Word Apricot

(Credit: Wikimedia)

Most fruit and vegetables have names that give no clues as to when they’re in season. If someone showed you the words “tomato,” “cabbage,” and “grapefruit,” your odds of guessing when to pick them would be about even with throwing a dart at a calendar. Others, like summer squash, spring onions, and winter wheat, practically scream their season from the rooftops. But some split the difference with a subtler approach: the useful data is encoded in the name, but you have to dig a little to find it.

Such is the case with the apricot. At the most basic level, the name comes from the same root as the word “precocious,” and essentially means the same thing. The apricot, compared to its cousin the peach, ripens earlier in the year (and the botanical sense of “precocious” precedes the figurative one in English, but only by about fifteen years–good luck keeping a poet away from a gardening metaphor), so Pliny called it a praecocia (literally, “early-ripen”).

From that early beginning, though, “apricot” took a strange path to our tongues. Typically, Latin words follow a pretty direct path from Latin, to French, to English, but “apricot” took a little jaunt south. First, the Greeks picked it up as berikokkia, which Arabic, then, turned to al-burquq (whence the “a” in the “apricot”). Then, it worked its way through the Arabic presence in Spain to the Spanish albaricoque, then over the Pyrenees into the French abricot (since, as any French speakers know, the French love just dropping letters wholesale). The form that first came to English, “abrecock,” was closer to the Spanish version, but eventually we got the message from our friends across the Channel and changed that hard final K (not least, one imagines, because “abrecock” sounded a little dirty) to the final T we have today.

Interestingly, even though our “apricot” passed through Arabic to get here, there’s another Arabic word for the fruit–mishmish–that’s just as tied up with its season. If someone’s making plans you know they won’t keep, or talking about their pie-in-the-sky dreams, Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers might roll their eyes and say bukra fil mishmish (or just fil mishmish for short), which translates roughly to “tomorrow, when apricots are in season.” It’s the equivalent of our “when pigs fly,” and comes from the fact that some apricots are only really delicious on the day that they’re picked, and go all mealy and lame the day after–so if you’re holding out for another day of prime apricot season, you’re probably going to be waiting for a very long time.

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