Pumpkin

Pumpkin means the large orange fruit of the American autumn, and a pumpkin pie is the pie made from it. Q: Why is the fruit called a pumpkin? A: Because it inherited a Greek name meaning "ripened by the sun." The word leads not to America but to the melon beds of the Mediterranean. The verb first. Greek πέπτειν peptein means "to cook, to ripen, to digest," and from it comes πέπων pepōn, an adjective, "sun-ripened, soft," and a noun for a large melon. The verb descends from Proto-Indo-European *pekw-, "to cook." Latin coquere shares the root, and so do English cook and kitchen, biscuit ("twice cooked"), and precocious ("ripened early"), as Etymonline notes. The pumpkin is a cousin of the kitchen and the biscuit. The place where "ripe" slid into "soft" is in Homer. In the Iliad, book 2, line 235, Thersites rails at the Achaeans: ὦ πέπονες, κάκ' ἐλέγχε', Ἀχαιΐδες οὐκέτ' Ἀχαιοί, "you soft ones, you sorry things, women of Achaea, no longer men." Overripe fruit, carried over to people, becomes cowardice. Latin took it as pepo, the name for cucumbers and melons grown past their size: "cum magnitudine excessere, pepones vocantur," when they exceed in size they are called pepones (Pliny, Natural History 19.65). French made it pompon, and English received it in the 1540s as pompion or pumpion. The word still knew nothing of America; when Cucurbita pepo crossed the ocean in the sixteenth century, the nearest name was hung on the strange fruit. By the 1640s the diminutive suffix -kin had been added and pumpkin was born. It is the -kin of napkin and lambkin. When Linnaeus wrote Cucurbita pepo in the Species Plantarum of 1753, the Greek melon became a species name and survives inside the scientific one. The pumpkin of story comes from France. In Perrault's Cendrillon of 1697 the godmother sends the girl to fetch a pumpkin (citrouille) from the garden, scoops it out, and with a touch of her wand turns it into a gilded coach: "la citrouille fut aussitôt changée en un beau carrosse tout doré." The pumpkin of the table settled in America. Pumpkin pie is recorded from the 1650s (Etymonline), and Amelia Simmons's American Cookery of 1796 gives two pie recipes under "Pompkin": "One quart stewed and strained, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger." The American Thanksgiving falls on Thursday 26 November 2026; if the turkey is the centre of that table, this pie is its last course. The lantern of Halloween belongs to the halloween page, so one line will do: the Irish turnip lantern is said to have become a pumpkin in America around the 1830s. In American speech pumpkin is also a pet name, so that "Good night, pumpkin" means "good night, sweetheart." Now the chain of names, paired with the turkey page. English says "ripened by the sun." Korean 호박 is commonly explained as 胡 "foreign, of the northern frontier" plus 박 "gourd," though the Standard Korean Dictionary gives no etymology; the fruit is said to have arrived after the Imjin War, and Heo Gyun (1569–1618) is reported to describe its cultivation in his Hanjeongnok. Japanese カボチャ names Cambodia, by way of the Portuguese ships that brought it, the fruit being taken for a native of Cambodia (Digital Daijisen); Chinese 南瓜 is "the southern gourd." Only English squash, from Narragansett askutasquash, "eaten raw" (Etymonline), keeps a word of the fruit's home. Back to Korean. "호박이 넝쿨째 굴러떨어졌다," a pumpkin rolling in vine and all, is an unlooked-for windfall; "호박씨 까다," shelling pumpkin seeds, is acting demure while doing something else behind one's back. The old pumpkin becomes 호박죽, pumpkin porridge, and in some homes 호박범벅 sits beside the red-bean porridge of the solstice in the eleventh lunar month. If the English pumpkin closes the year as a pie, the Korean one closes it as a mash.