The word was recorded in English by 1390, from Latin, in a poem called Pistel of Swete Susan. Its Latin root named a two-pronged tool, used for digging and preparing ground for planting.
Latin gave the word to Old French by around 1180, and Old French gave it to English by the late fourteenth century. The Old French form also carried a second, ruder meaning, since dropped entirely.
That gardening tool gave its name to a Latin verb meaning 'to dig up the ground'. Its own name may trace to a Proto-Indo-European root, *pag-, meaning 'to fasten', though the connection remains disputed.
PASTINE and PAGAN share the same root. PASTINE, now rare, entered English around 1440, once meaning ground freshly dug for planting, taken straight from the Latin word for the digging fork. PAGAN entered English around 1400, originally meaning a country-dweller, from a Latin word for a fixed district, although the connection remains disputed.
Though the word names a plant from the Apiaceae family, its ending was reshaped in the Middle Ages by confusion with an unrelated word for a different vegetable, from the separate Brassicaceae family. That mix-up has never been corrected. By the nineteenth century the word had also become part of a common English phrase for asking someone's forgiveness, as heard in a line from James Joyce's Ulysses.
