grocers

I called in at a local fruit shop today to get some oranges for a favourite pumpkin soup recipe.

As I was squeezing the juice out of the oranges and zesting one of them, I thought about the fact that I call the proprietor of this type of shop a greengrocer, and I began to wonder what the connection is between a grocer and a greengrocer.

Once the soup was made, I looked at the Online Etymology Dictionary and discovered read  about the noun:

early 15c. (mid-13c. as a surname), "wholesale dealer, one who buys and sells in gross," corrupted spelling of Anglo-French grosser, Old French grossier, fromMedieval Latin grossarius "wholesaler," literally "dealer in quantity" (source also of Spanish grosero, Italian grosseiro), from Late Latin grossus "coarse (of food), great, gross"...(adj.)). Sense of "a merchant selling individual items of food" is 16c.: in Middle English this was a spicer.

I haven't ever met anyone with the surname 'Grocer'. I wonder what the variants might be.

The Word Detective has a post about the connection of this word with the word gross.
The article says the Americans invented the word grocery. In Australia when I was growing up, my family referred to such a shop as the grocer's.

The Cambridge Dictionary has the usage as grocer's in the UK.

At the forum of wordreference.com, calvindebeverley has written about the American usage:

Ok here is the deal. I have no idea what the word grocer means in any part of the world than the US so take that to heart in what follows. The word grocery and grocer in the US refers to an old type of store. It was usually owned and operated by a family, father being the grocer, and it sold many different items in "Gross" or large quantities because most people lived so far out on their ranches and farms that they needed to buy in quanity sometimes even to get them through a winter. In the southwest it meant at times also a bar or saloon but that was just because people in the Southwest are just that way! LOL. J/K. As time passed small stores that sold food retained the name grocery. Today there are very few real grocery stores in the old sense probably only found in small towns. Now the food department of say Walmart is todays grocery. And the very hard to find "helper" would be what is left of the "grocer". Ok now I am hungry, er....maybe I need a drink after all this typing!

I haven't been able to find any other reference to the use of the word grocery to mean a bar or saloon.

I think this article at CulinaryLore.com is the most comprehensive one I  found.
And I enjoyed the word plays at Sesquiotica. com.

BTW, here's the recipe for the delicious pumpkin soup.

origin of the word orange

Sheridan Rogers' book, The Cook's Garden is a great read, especially for the Australian gardener. As the blurb says, 'Where would the cook be without the garden?' I would also say, 'Where would the gardener be without some guidance about what to do with the harvest?'



It's such a well-written book that I actually read it from page one to page 297, instead of browsing it as I originally intended.

I don't grow oranges, but I was interested to read Rogers' etymology of this name.

She writes:

According to Jane Grigson, in her Fruit Book, the word itself goes back to Dravidian India, narayam meaning 'perfume within'. The Arabs took it from the Persians as narandj, Italians softened it to arancia and in medieval France arancia slipped into 'orange' because the town of Orange was a great centre for the fruit.

I find the evolution of words fascinating, so I had a look around the internet to see what others are saying.

The Online Etymology Dictionary has a similar early history for the word, but says:

Loss of initial n- probably due to confusion with definite article (e.g. une narange, una narancia), but perhaps influenced by Fr. or "gold."

It seems people don't agree where the modern word came from, though I would lean towards the migration of the letter 'n' because this happens so frequently, as in the loss of the 'n' in napron to become apron.

However, in the interest of fairness, I investigated the origin of the name of the town of Orange. Whew! That was tricky. There are so many towns with this name. One of them, here in Australia, was named after the Prince of Orange, so that explains why all sorts of fruit other than oranges are grown there. The town in France acquired its name from the old Roman word Arausio. which Wikipedia says came from the name of a Celtic water god.

Somewhere in all this to-ing and fro-ing around the internet I read that in Old English there was simply a word 'red-yellow' , until the word for the fruit arrived in Britain. All references I came across, such as this one, quote the Old English word as geoluhread, but I couldn't find an actual reference for this. However, the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins says,* ' The name of the orange, first recorded in English in medieval times, goes back through Arabic to Persian, although the native home of the fruit may have been southeast Asia' so this seems to fit with what the other sites say.

And at last I came across a really interesting post about the history of many color words and it agreed with the idea that the town's name influenced the fruit's name.

The colour orange derives originally from the Sanskrit word narangah for the fruit, whose name moved westwards through Persian narang and Arabic naranj to Spanish (the Arabs imported it into Europe via Moorish Spain in medieval times); in French it became corrupted to orange, in part by the process called metanalysis but also through being strongly influenced by the name of the town of Orange in south-eastern France which used to be a centre of the orange trade.

All very interesting - to me, at least, lol.

*"orange" Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. by Julia Cresswell. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Melbourne Library Service. 16 February 2012