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This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient.  The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.

Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:

From Middle English spinach, from Anglo-Norman spinache, from Old French espinoche, from Old Occitan espinarc, from Arabic إِسْفَانَاخ (ʔisfānāḵ), from Classical Persian اسپناخ (ispanāx, ispināx).

Wiktionary

Greek σπανάκι • (spanáki)

From Byzantine Greek σπινάκιον (spinákion), σπανάκιν (spanákin), σπινάκι (spináki), ultimately from Persian اسپناخ

Wiktionary

The English word "spinach" dates to the late 14th century from the Old French word espinache.^[2] The name entered European languages from medieval Latin spinagium, which borrowed it from Andalusian Arabic, isbinakh. That in turn derives from Persian aspānāḵ.

Wikipedia

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.

etymonline

Then I remembered that four years ago I had written a very long, detailed post on the subject of the origins of English "spinach":  "Spinach: the Persian vegetable" (1/19/21).  After I finished writing that post, I thought I'd never have to investigate the origins of the English word "spinach" again.  Now, however, I began to be troubled by problems about the derivation of "spinach" that I hadn't considered before.  So I asked Don Ringe about them:

According to my research here, when English borrowed the word for "spinach", ostensibly it came from Old French espinache (14c.), which apparently got it from Arabic isbanakh, which got it from Persian aspanakh "spinach."  As you can see, however, Old French, Arabic, and Middle Persian had it in a form with prosthesis, whereas Old Persian did not have prosthesis, just beginning with initial "sp-).  

This is very confusing to me.  How could English borrow the word from a language that already had prosthesis and then get rid of the initial vowel that had already been added and go back to an earlier form of the Persian word?

Reassuringly, Don replied:

This one is easy:  English routinely drops French prothetic vowels, because in OF they were maximally unstressed.  Adding or subtracting a fully unstressed vowel at the margin of a word is an easy change, in both directions.  Take a look at the history of Italian:  Latin sp- and st- acquired a prothetic vowel i- in Old Italian, and then more recently it was dropped again.  So the fact that the English word apparently resembles the Persian word more closely is literally a historical accident. 

But you should also take a look at the etymology recorded in the OED online, which is the gold standard for English etymologies:  it's not certain that the Persian and Arabic words are the source of the Romance words rather than the other way around.

Following Don's advice, I turned to the OED:

OED seems more concerned about finals whereas I'm more concerned about initials.

To quote an American icon:  "I'm strong to the finich 'cause I eats me spinach."

It looks like I'm not done with "spinach" yet, so I'd best keep up my spinachy quest to determine where the word (and the plant) actually came from.

Though the Chinese were already eating spinach by the middle of the 7th c. and definitively calling it the "Persian vegetable" (bōcài 菠菜), the name they gave it just refers to the country it came from, not what the people of that country called it:

From earlier 波斯菜 (bōsīcài), from 波斯 (Bōsī, “Persia”) + 菜 (cài, “greens, vegetable”).

where bōsī 波斯 is obviously a transcription of "Persia":

Borrowed from Old Persian (Pārsa).

Middle Sinitic: /puɑ  siᴇ/

(source)

The botanical homeland of spinach does indeed seem to be the Persian realm, so it is not surprising that many of the words for this vegetable in the world's languages ultimately come from Persian or allude to Persia.  So I thought that maybe, by tracing the origin of the Persian word for "spinach", I could get closer to the IE root.  None of my usual go-to sources for PIE roots (e.g., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots) were hazarding a guess for what the ultimate IE root for "spinach" might be.

There was, however, an old folk etymology that connected "spinach" with Latin spina ("spine; backbone", originally "thorn, prickle").  Usually I'm wary of folk etymologies, but this one was convincing.  It made sound and sense!  Moreover, it fit well with the early Iranian words for spinach.

(…forms with پ (p) are directly from Middle Iranian). The Old Iranian form would be *spināka-, *spinaka- (compare Northern Kurdish sping), from the root *spin- (Northwestern Iranian), *sin- (Southwestern Iranian), ultimately from the Proto-Iranian *spai- (*spi-), from Proto-Indo-European *spey- (“thorn-like”) (*spi-), which are also reflected in Latin spina, Persian سنجد (senjed), Ossetian сындз (synʒ), синдзӕ (sinʒæ, “thorn”), Baluchi [script needed] (šinž), Central Iranian šeng, Kermani šank (“thorn”). Also akin to Semnani esbenāγa.

(Wiktionary)

There you have it:  "spinach", the plant with spiny, spiky, prickly seeds.

Selected readings

• "Spinach: the Persian vegetable" (1/19/21)
• "Keeping Things Green With Spinach Varieties", by Lawrence Davis-Hollander, Grit (November 29, 2011)   

[Thanks to Nick Tursi]

July 9, 2025 @ 3:44 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Uncategorized

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