Word of the Week – Pumpkin

Can you believe I’ve never featured pumpkin as a Word of the Week before? Gasp! And here it’s one of my favorite things about autumn in America!

The fruit native to North America has obviously been here well before English colonists named it, but our word for it dates from around 1640. It’s an alteration of the French word for melon, pompone or pumpion. The French, in turn, comes from the Latin peponem, which was used for melons and comes itself from the Greek pepon. What are the roots of the Greek word? “Ripe.” The notion was that the sun ripened or cooked the melons to give them their color. The -kin ending is a diminutive that comes from Dutch and often added to the ends of words to make them cutesy. (That’s the Roseanna interpretation of a diminutive, LOL.)

So what about one of my favorite treats, pumpkin pie? That combination of words dates from 1650! By 1781, pumpkin head was used of those with a person with hair cut short all around their head, and pumpkin was applied to “a stupid, self-important person” from the 1800s onward.

Are you a pumpkin fan? As a decoration? A food? A flavor? Do you like to carve them? (My answer to all of these is a resounding YES!)

Word Nerds Merch!