Etymon #48
Ripened fruit plan
The word entered English from Latin in the sixteenth century. Sir Thomas Elyot, a scholar and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII, used it around 1534 in its earliest recorded sense. He later wrote The Castel of Helth, one of the first medical handbooks in English. That sense was digestive, describing what the stomach does to food. Behind it lay the Latin word for cooking, boiling and ripening with heat.
It came directly from Latin, without passing through French. It was built from two Latin elements. The first was a prefix meaning together or with. The second was the Latin verb for cooking. Combined, they named the act of cooking several ingredients together. Roman cooks and physicians were using the Latin form by the first century BC. By the time it reached English in the sixteenth century it had been in use for over a thousand years.
Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *pekw-, meaning to cook and to ripen. In the ancient world the two ideas were closely connected. The Roman agricultural writer Columella used the Latin verb for the ripening of fruit on the vine in De Re Rustica, his twelve-volume work on agriculture written around 60 AD. The same ancient root gave Sanskrit pacati, meaning he cooks, and Greek peptein, meaning to cook or digest.
BISCUIT and APRICOT share the same ancient root. BISCUIT came from Medieval Latin biscoctus, meaning twice cooked, from bis 'twice' and the past participle of the Latin verb for cooking. It was baked twice to remove all moisture and preserve it for long journeys. APRICOT came from Latin praecoquum, meaning early ripening, from prae 'before' and the same Latin verb for cooking, in its sense of ripening with heat. The Romans named the fruit for the fact that it ripened before other stone fruits. One names a twice-baked bread. The other names a fruit that ripens early.
