Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids - Jess Zafarris 2020

A Belly Full of Words
Word play

A Belly Full of Words

Cultures around the world showcase their amazing customs in different ways, and yet there’s one thing everyone has in common: We love to eat! Our word “food” comes from the Old English foda, meaning “nourishment or fuel”—basically this can be anything that gives you energy and fulfills you.

Explore this list of delicious word histories and see if you can spot your favorite foods—or a food you’ve never heard of from another country. Without looking at the definition, see if you can guess which language that word comes from.

Ambrosia: A fruit salad popular in the American South. It was named after the Greek and Latin ambrosia, the mythical food and drink enjoyed by the gods. It is from the Greek ambrotos, meaning “immortal.”

Bacon: From a Germanic word meaning “back meat.” Originally considered food for working-class people—hence, you work hard to “bring home the bacon.”

Bagel: From the Yiddish word beygl, originally from the Old German boug, meaning “ring or bracelet.” (In Old English, an Anglo-Saxon lord was called a beaggifa, or “ring-giver.”)

Baguette: A long, narrow French bread loaf, meaning “wand,” “rod,” or “stick” in French.

Banana: Adopted directly from the language Wolof, which is spoken in the African countries Senegal and Gambia.

Barbecue: From the Spanish barbacoa. The Spanish word originally came from the Arawakan word barbakoa, from Haiti. The word barbakoa is a framework of sticks for curing meat.

Beignet: A fried French pastry, from the Old French buigne, meaning “bump” or “lump.”

Biscuit: Originally from the Latin panis bis coctus, meaning “bread twice baked.”

Broccoli: Adopted from Italian from broccolo, meaning “sprout.”

Burrito: From Spanish, meaning “little donkey.” Named after the animal because it contains many different things, and a burro (donkey) can carry big packs filled with many things.

Butter: Thought to be derived from the Greek word boutyron, which literally means “cow-cheese.”

Cauliflower: Originally spelled cole florye in English, this word comes from the Italian cavoli fiori, meaning “flowered cabbage.”

Cereal: This word for the breakfast food, and for grains in general, gets its name from the goddess Ceres (known as Demeter to the Greeks), who represented agriculture, grains, fertility, and motherhood. Her name comes from a word meaning “to satiate, feed,” also the source of “create” and “increase.”

Cheese: There are more than 1,000 different types of cheese produced all over the world using different methods. Many of them involve curdling and aging milk until it becomes a solid. The word “cheese” probably comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to ferment” or “to become sour.”

Chimichurri: From the Basque tximitxurri, which is loosely translated as “a mixture of several things in no particular order.” The Basque language is spoken in certain areas of northern Spain and southwestern France.

Chocolate: Originally an unsweetened Aztec drink made with cacao beans, from the Aztecan word chocola-tl.

Chop suey: A Chinese dish popular in the United States made of stir-fried meat and veggies. This is thought to be from the Taishanese tsap seui, meaning “odds and ends” or “miscellaneous leftovers.”

Chow mein: A Chinese word for stir-fried noodles. This is adapted from chāu-mèing in the Taishanese dialect, meaning “stir-fried noodles” or “sautéed noodles.”

Coconut: A nut of the coco tree, or palm tree, from the Spanish/Portuguese coco, meaning “a grinning face” because the three holes in coconut shells were thought to look like a face.

Coffee: From the Arabic word for coffee, qahwah. This may have originally been from a word meaning “wine” or may have been from the name of the Kaffa region in Ethiopia where coffee was grown.

Cookie: From the Dutch koekje, meaning “little cake.”

Couscous: A Maghrebi (North African / Moroccan) dish made of crushed durum wheat or other grains, originally from the Arabic kaskasa, meaning “to pound.”

Croissant: Named for its shape, from Old French croisant, meaning “crescent of the moon.”

Curry: This spice blend is common in Indian, Asian, and Mediterranean cuisine. The word comes from Tamil (South Indian) kari, meaning “sauce” or “relish for rice.”

Éclair: A long, oval-shaped pastry with cream filling. Its name comes from éclair, the French word for lightning bolt. The sweet treat, like lightning, is “long in shape but short in duration”—that is, so tasty that you can’t help but eat it very quickly!

Falafel: Fried chickpea bites, from the Arabic word falafil, which means “crunchy.”

Filet mignon: A small, tender cut of steak, from the Old French filet, meaning “thread” or “strip,” and mignon, meaning “delicate,” “dainty,” or “cute.”

Fruit: This word originally comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to enjoy.”

Garlic: From Old English garlec, meaning “spear leek,” named after the shape of the stalk that grows out of the bulb.

Gumbo: A thick soup containing meat, rice, and okra (a small, green, pod-shaped vegetable). The word is a Louisiana French term but probably comes from a Bantu (Central African) word meaning “okra.”

Honey: Possibly from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “golden.”

Ketchup: Perhaps from the Chinese word kôe-chiap, meaning “brine of fish,” or from the name of the Malaysian sauce called kichap, which was made with pickled fish and mushrooms.

Kielbasa: A Polish sausage. It is either from the Turkish word kulbasti, meaning “grilled cutlet” or literally “pressed on the ashes,” or from the Hebrew word kolbasar, meaning “all kinds of meat.”

Kitchen: From the Latin coquere, meaning “to cook.”

Macaroni: From the Italian word maccaroni, a word for a pasty food made of flour, cheese, and butter. In English in the 1700s, it was also a word for a fashionable, fancy young man (also called a “fop” or “dandy”) because macaroni was a rare and fancy dish. (This is why Yankee Doodle “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.”)

Marinate: Originally meaning to pickle in ocean saltwater. It’s from the Latin marinus, meaning “of the sea.”

Marshmallow: From the Old English mersc-mealwe, a plant that grows near marshes and whose roots were used to make early versions of these sweet treats.

Mayonnaise: From French, but its exact origin isn’t clear. It may have been named for a battle at the city of Mahón, Spain, or from moyeu, an older French word for “egg yolk.” It could also be from the name of Charles de Lorraine, duke of Mayenne, who, according to legend, took the time to finish a dish of saucy chicken before a battle.

Mocha: From the name of a seaport in southern Yemen where a type of coffee was exported. Now it’s the name for coffee with chocolate syrup.

Nachos: This dish of cheesy chips was supposedly invented in the Mexican town of Piedras Negras in the 1940s by a chef named Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, after whom it was named.

Onion: From the Old French oignon, originally from the Latin unionem, which means “one” or “unity.” In Latin, it referred to the visible layers of an onion that form one unified whole.

Pizza: Adopted from Italian for any kind of cake, tart, or pie. Origin is uncertain, but it may be from the Greek pitta, meaning “cake” or “pie,” or from a Germanic word meaning a “bite” or “morsel.”

Pomegranate: A fruit whose insides are made up of juicy edible seeds, from the Medieval Latin pomum granatum, meaning “apple with many seeds.”

Quiche: An egg-based pie you might eat for breakfast, adopted from French. It originally comes from the German Küche, or “cake.”

Sausage: Before refrigerators and big grocery stores, people needed to preserve, or save, foods to eat during long winters. One way to save meat was to salt it and make it into sausage. This word originally comes from the Latin salsus, meaning “salted.”

Sauté: To cook something quickly in oil. From the French sauté, which literally means “jumped” or “bounced.” The word was originally from the Latin saltare, meaning “to hop” or “to dance.”

Shish kebab: From the Turkish word siskebap, meaning “skewer of roast meat.”

Shrimp: Likely from the Old Norse word skreppa, meaning a thin person, due to their size and slim shape.

Spaghetti: Literally means “strings” or pieces of twine, adopted from Italian.

Squash: Borrowed from the Narragansett (Native American) word askutasquash, meaning “the things that may be eaten raw.”

Stroganoff: A Russian beef dish named after Count Pavel Stroganoff, a Russian diplomat and general who lived in France and enjoyed blended cuisines.

Sushi: A Japanese sticky rice prepared with vinegar, usually served with fresh fish or veggies. The dish was preceded by narezushi, meaning “salted fish” that was stored in fermented rice.

Syrup: Comes in part from the Old French sirop, meaning “sugared drink.” But it is originally from the Arabic word sharab, “to drink.”

Tofu: A protein-rich food made of solid soy milk. The word is adopted from Japanese, originally from Chinese doufu, meaning “rotten beans” or “fermented beans.”

Tomato: From the Aztec word tomatl, literally meaning “the swelling fruit.”

Tortilla: From Spanish, literally “a little cake.”

Tuna: Also once called a “tunny,” this type of fish probably gets its name from the Greek name thynnos, which literally meant “darter” from the way they move quickly in the water.

Tutti-Frutti: The name of this ice cream and candy flavor was adopted from Italian and means “all fruits.”

Vegetable: From the Old French vegetable, meaning “living,” from the Medieval Latin vegetabilis, meaning “growing” or “flourishing.”

Vinegar: From the Old French vinaigre, literally meaning “sour wine.”

Wonton: A square wrapper made of dough and filled with meat and/or veggies. Originally from the Mandarin hun tun, meaning “stuffed dumpling.”

Yogurt: Originally a Turkish word whose source, yog, means “to condense.”

Zucchini: From the Italian zucca, meaning “gourd” or “squash.”