1:30 pm / May 30, 2013
The Etymology of the Word 'Lobster' photo

The Etymology of the Word 'Lobster'

(Credit: Wikimedia)

Lobsters, more than most other things we eat, straddle a weird line between familiar and alien, comforting and terrifying. Crack into a one-and-a-half-pounder, and within minutes (depending on your tiny fork skills), you’ve spelunked down the crustacean’s every nook and cranny, seen the creature inside and out, watched it go from animal to meal to a bunch of empty shells. The average Mainer knows more about lobster than even the best butcher knows about cows, as far as total edible comprehension goes.

But still, they look like giant sea bugs. Little kids, if you shove a live lobster in their face (or even, in the case of this writer, a cooked one), cry. Scientists don’t even know if lobsters have finite lifespans, or if predation (boiling pot of water included) is the only way they die. And this sense of the uncanny, of a delicious thing that looks like a nightmare, is pretty much how the lobster got its name.

Food writers have taken to calling the 17-year cicadas popping up this summer “shrimp of the dirt” (and have come up with cicada recipes to match), but the Ancient Romans went for concision: their word for lobster, locusta, was the same as their word for locusts. Even though “locust” is the more obvious descendent of the Latin word, the OED posits that the word applied to lobsters first, and then, by extension, to the “lobsters of the land.” That Latin confusion has persisted into modern Spanish, where both lobsters and locusts se llama langosta, and for a while in the Middle Ages, the French called both langouste (whence langoustine).

In situations like this, the most sensible thing for an English speaker to do would be to cherry-pick Germanic and Latinate words to tell the two animals apart. But, for once, the French beat us to it, taking the Old Norse humarr and turning it into their word for lobsters, homard. We could have easily done the same. But, ever the rebel, English went down a weirder path.

“Lobster” does, still, come from the Latin locusta, but its first appearance in English was as a “lopystre” or “loppestre,” with the Latin C changed to a P. The best guess as to how the sound change happened is that locusta half-merged with the Old English word for a spider, loppe (which is pretty much the same word as the modern “lobe,” like earlobe: think dangly), thanks to the lobster’s creepy legginess. The R at the end, along similar lines, worked its way in there for the simple reason that no normal English words end in “sta,” while a lot end in “ster.” There never was, unfortunately, a lobster who lobsted. Then the P in “loppester,” jammed between two vowels, gave into peer pressure and became the voiced B by the late 1500s.

So, yes, the lobster ended up a “lobster” (and not a locust) because Medieval Brits thought it looked kind of like a spider. Not particularly appetizing. But if we keep eating something for centuries, calling it a giant mutant bug all the while, you know it’s got to taste good.

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