The many-layered etymology of “onion”

Officials have linked a deadly outbreak of E. coli to slivered onions served on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. 

This got me thinking, again, about systems. About how so much actually works—running along invisibly in the background of our lives, as I mused in my post on longshoreman—most of the time.  About how much—like food safety—we actually get to take for granted. 

It also got me thinking about the word onion. What’s its background? In this post, we’ll see how much we know our onions, as the saying goes, about the history and origin of onion.

Peeling the etymological “onion”

The word onion took root in Middle English, first recorded in the 1350s. It was planted by Anglo-Norman, a dialect of Norman French in England. Spellings of the word recorded in both of those tongues are enough to make your eyes water. Middle English had hunyn, oyenoun, and oygnon, to cite a few; Anglo-Norman, vngeon, unniun, oynoin, and many others. 

The Anglo-Norman forms sprout from the Old French oignon, in turn an offshoot of the Latin ūniō, meaning “onion”—and more, as we will see. Its accusative case, or the form the noun takes when it is the object of a verb or some prepositions, is ūniōnem. As I explained in my post on voice, this case served as the form in which many Latin words transitioned into their Romance heirs. Here, it explains why onion ends in an n.

Onion. Ūniōnem. Union? Is this a coincidence? No. The word onion is, in etymological effect, the word union.

So, there was a Roman farmer named Columella. He wrote extensively on agriculture when he lived in the first century CE. In a passage from his major work, De Rustica (On Agriculture), he is explaining how to preserve various produce and provisions when, as an aside, he captures some local color—and the apparent provenance of onion: 

We will now give instructions about things which ought to be collected and stored during the summer about the time of the harvest or even when it is over. Choose a Pompeian or “undug” or even the plain Marsian onion which the country folk call unio. This is the kind which has not sprouted or had offshoots attached to it. (trans. E.S. Forster, Edward H. Heffner)

“Country folk” is a great translation of Columella’s original Latin, rusticī, though “peasants” or even “farmers” also work. And among the “rustics” here are the Marsi, an Italic people who inhabited a region of central Italy now known as Abruzzo. But they weren’t so simple-minded, as they cleverly observed that the common onion grew from a singular, unified bulb, whereas close relatives of onion, including garlic and chives, form cloves or develop in clusters. (Clove, from Old English clufu, is connected to cleave.) The “unifying” notion may also be, as the etymologist Ernest Weekley puts it, the onion’s “successive layers being regarded as forming a unity.”

Singular. Unified. One. Indeed, behind ūniō is ūnus, the Latin word for “one.” It is cognate to the English word for one, which comes from the Old English ān, source of the articles a and an.

Pearls before onions?

Compared to our vulgar vegetable, the Latin ūniō also referred to a far more opulent article: “a single large pearl.” Yes, the Latin ūniō meant both “onion” and “pearl.” The margaric meaning of ūniō may have developed independently from ūnus, perhaps, as the Oxford English Dictionary posits, because such a single large pearl was worn alone. 

There are other theories—including in antiquity. In his epic Natural History, also written in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder derives ūniō from each pearl’s uniqueness:  

There is no doubt that pearls wear with use, and will change their colour, if neglected. All their merit consists in their whiteness, large size, roundness, polish, and weight; qualities which are not easily to be found united in the same; so much so, indeed, that no two pearls are ever found perfectly alike; and it was from this circumstance, no doubt, that our Roman luxury first gave them the name of “unio,” or the unique gem: for a similar name is not given them by the Greeks; nor, indeed, among the barbarians by whom they are found are they called anything else but “margaritae.” (trans. John Bostock)

Some centuries later, in the early 7th century, a Roman bishop living in modern-day Spain, Isidore of Seville, published an etymological encyclopedia, Etymologiae. He offers: “A certain pearl is called a unio, an apt name because only one (unus) is found at a time, never two or more” (trans. Stephen A. Barney et al.).

The explanation, in the end, may not be so fancy: ūniō, as a name for such a pearl, may have been transferred from its use for onions. They do look alike, and they do both form in layers.

This Latin word for pearl made its way into English as union—and it’s actually documented about 20 years earlier than onion is! And recall those many forms that the word onion that ringed Middle English before its spelling was fully cooked: union was among them.   

Younger than onion and union, in its original lexical luster, is union in the meaning we use today: a joining together. This sense also developed from the Latin ūnus, but not until after its classical heyday. French joined it into its vocabulary, then English, as recorded in the early 1400s. Maybe, just maybe, union is a little oniony in taste and pearly in appearance, influenced in some metaphorical way by those older meanings of ūniō.   

But why was there so much hullabaloo about this Latin word ūniō in the first place? 

Well, perhaps because the usual Latin word for “onion” was cēpa or caepa, not a regionalism. And as we saw in Pliny, the typical word for pearl was margarīta. 

The deeper roots of cēpa are unknown, but we do know that cēpa is the ultimate source of the word chive. It also yields the species portion of the scientific name of the onion, Allium cepa. (Allium comes from variant of ālium, a Latin word for “garlic.”) 

And looking to spice up your vocab? Cepaceous is a nifty—and rare, obscure—adjective meaning “like an onion.” 

Aftermash

While we’re in the etymological garden, what about the origins of some other familiar members of that alliaceous genus, Allium? This blog is called Mashed Radish, after all …

Leek

From Old English leác, with cognates across the Germanic languages. Forms the second element of garlic. Also formed the second element of ynne-leác, another name for “onion,” with ynne from Latin ūniō. 

Garlic

From Old English gár-leác, literally a “spear-leek.” Gár, “spear,” forms the second element of such names as Edgar, Roger, and Oscar.

Scallion 

Ultimately from Latin (caepa) Ascalōnia, or Ascalonian onion. From Ascalon, an ancient Mediterranean seaport in the Levant (modern-day Ashkelon, Israel). 

Shallot

Ultimately a doublet of scallion (from Ascalōnia), from French eschalotte.

Old English also had hramsa, “wild garlic, onion,” surviving today as ramsons and ramps. Historical linguists relate hramsa to other common Indo-European words for “onion,” including the Irish crem and Greek krémuon. Speaking of Greek, it also had βολβός, meaning—and origin of—“bulb,” inventively extended to glass bulbs by the end of the 1700s and specifically to light bulbs in the 1880s. 

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So, what did Columella do with that onion, anyways?

First dry it [the onion] in the sun, then, after it has been cool in the shade, arrange it in a pot with thyme or marjoram strewn underneath it and, after pouring in a liquid consisting of three parts vinegar and one of brine, put a bunch of marjoram on the top, so that the onion may be pressed down. When it has absorbed the liquid, let the  vessel be filled up with similar liquid.

I’ll take it as implied that he cleaned everything very thoroughly first.

Can’t get enough produce? Don’t miss how gourd got its name.