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Origin and history of spinach

spinach(n.)

garden vegetable with thick, succulent leaves, late 14c., spinache, spinage, etc. (late 13c. as a surname), from Anglo-French spinache, Old French espinache (14c., Modern French épinard, from a form with a different suffix), from Old Provençal espinarc, which perhaps is via Catalan espinac, from Andalusian Arabic isbinakh, from Arabic isbanakh, from Persian aspanakh "spinach."

But OED is not convinced the Middle Eastern words are native, and based on the plethora of Romanic forms pronounces the Romanic words "of doubtful origin." Compare Medieval Latin spinagium. Old folk etymology connected the word with Latin spina (see spine), supposedly for the prickly fruit, or with Medieval Latin Hispanicum olus.

For pronunciation, see cabbage. In 1930s colloquial American English, it had a sense of "nonsense, rubbish," based on a famous New Yorker cartoon of Dec. 8, 1928. Related: Spinachy; spinaceous. Popeye, the spinach-eating superman, debuted in 1929.

also from late 14c.

Entries linking to spinach

cabbage(n.)

type of cultivated culinary vegetable that grows a rounded head of thick leaves, mid-15c., caboge, from Old North French caboche "head" (in dialect, "cabbage"), from Old French caboce "head," a diminutive from Latin caput "head" (from PIE root *kaput- "head"). Earlier in Middle English as caboche (late 14c.).

The decline of "ch" to "j" in the unaccented final syllable parallels the common pronunciation of spinach, sandwich, Greenwich, etc. The comparison of a head of cabbage to the head of a person (disparagingly of the latter) is at least as old as Old French cabus "(head of) cabbage; nitwit, blockhead," from Italian capocchia, diminutive of capo.

The plant was introduced to Canada 1541 by Jacques Cartier on his third voyage. The earliest record of it in the modern U.S. is 1660s. The cabbage-butterfly (1816) is so called because its caterpillars feed on cabbages and other cruciferous plants.

spine(n.)

c. 1400, "backbone, spinal column," from Old French espine "thorn, prickle; backbone, spine" (12c., Modern French épine), from Latin spina "backbone," originally "thorn, prickle" (figuratively, in plural, "difficulties, perplexities"), from PIE *spein-, for which de Vaan compares Latvian spina "rod," Russian spina "back, spine," Old High German spinela "hairpin," Middle High German spenel "needle," and perhaps Latin spica "ear of grain" (see spike (n.2)). The "thorn-like part" sense is attested in English from early 15c. The meaning "back of a book" is by 1920, in advertisements for book-cover protectors.

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