The word “lettuce” is made of “milk”

A little bug is causing a whole lot of diarrhea:

Now at nearly 7,000 cases, the outbreak of cyclosporiasis affecting stomachs—and toilet bowls—has spread to 45 states. Caused by a parasite known Cyclospora cayatenensis, cyclosporiasis is a gastrointestinal illness marked by explosive, watery diarrhea.

The parasite is transmitted when infected feces contaminates food or water. While investigations are ongoing, the source of the outbreak is linked to fresh produce, particularly iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms in central Mexico. Despite the notable instance of a false positive sample, the US Food and Drug Administration still sees overwhelming evidence connecting that lettuce to the outbreak. 

Cyclosporiasis, of course, concerns me from a public health perspective. But what is more interesting to me, from an etymological perspective, is the word lettuce. 

Because the word lettuce is literally made of “milk.”

Yes, all of this is quite the (unappetizing) setup for a blog post on lettuce. And even the origin of the word lettuce has a milky way back to the word cyclosporiasis.

Lettuce etymology

Lettuce ultimately derives from the Latin name for the plant, lactūca, in turn based on lac, Latin for “milk.” Lac could also refer to the sap of plants—and so lettuce takes its name for its milky juice. The stem of the Latin lac is lact-, yielding such other lacteal derivatives as lactate, lactic, and lactose. 

The milky juice of plants, by the way, is technically called latex, from the Latin for “liquid” or “fluid.” The latex of the rubber tree yields, well, rubber; the term was later applied to synthetic products like it.

French eventually chopped the Latin lactūca into letue, among other forms. The plural of letue was letues, which, in the salad spinner of the English language, became the singular letuse around 1300. The spelling lettuce crisped up by the 1500s.

The deeper roots of lettuce

The Ancient Egyptians first cultivated lettuce. They even elevated it as a sacred symbol of Min, a fertility god, depictions of whom still stand upright, if you know what I mean. The Egyptians believed a certain, um, prickly variety of lettuce was an aphrodisiac.

From Egypt, the plant passed to the Greeks and Romans, who introduced lettuce—as a word and food—into Britain. English already adopted the Latin lactūca in the forms of the Old English leahtric and lactuca, but the later French borrowing supplanted them.

Cultivated is a key word for lettuce, a member of the daisy family. Its scientific name is Lactuca sativa, whose epithet, sativa, means just that: “cultivated,” as opposed to wild. Sativa, a word you may know in connection to very a different kind of green leaf, derives from a form of the Latin serere, “to sow, plant.”

A brief history of iceberg lettuce

There are several major cultivars (cultivated plant varieties) of lettuce, including leaf, romaine, butterhead, and iceberg. Iceberg lettuce was developed in the 1890s by the Pennsylvania-based W. Atlee Burpee & Company, now known as Burpee. Its founder, Washington Atlee Burpee, first had a talent for breeding chickens, but his mail-order livestock business soon expanded to seeds.

It’s in Burpee’s 1893 catalog, Burpee’s Farm Annual, that the Oxford English Dictionary first cites iceberg lettuce: “As long as our supply lasts we will send a sample packet of the iceberg lettuce free for trial.” Iceberg lettuce was popular in the US from the start—or at least was marketed as such.

Iceberg was cultivated to stay crispier than other lettuce varieties, hence its alternative appellation of crisphead lettuce. So, the moniker iceberg appears to have begun as a trade name. According to one story, the heads of this lettuce, shipped on beds of crushed ice, were thought to resemble tips of icebergs. A likelier origin for the name is its color and texture—icy and crunchy. Iceberg, for its part, is from the Dutch ijsberg, literally “ice mountain.”

“Milking” some more etymology

The English word milk is poured straight from the Old English meolc, drawn from *melg-, “to rub off,” that action likened to milking an animal.

The ancient etymological tap of the Latin lac, meanwhile, is obscure. Confoundingly, there is no common Proto-Indo-European root for something as fundamental as milk. 

The Ancient Greek for milk, for example, is gála (stem galakt-), source of galaxy. Via Latin, galaxy is ultimately shortened from the Greek galaxias kuklos, “milky circle”—that is, the Milky Way, our galaxy. Some scholars do suspect an ultimate connection between the Latin lac and the Greek galakt- stem.

Thirsty for more? Check out my older post on the etymology of galaxy and the words orbiting it, including milk and Milky Way.

A milky way back to cyclosporiasis

Now, that same kuklos (”circle, ring,” source of cycle) forms the first element of cyclospora, the parasite that causes cyclosporiasis—and its attendant explosive diarrhea, as designated by the disease-denoting, Greek-derived suffix of –iasis. 

The second element, related to spore, is from spora, the Greek for “seed, sowing.” Under the microscope, cyclospora indeed resembles a small, circular seed. 

For the curious, in Ancient Greek:

• gála is written as γάλα
• the stem galakt– is γαλακτ-
• galaxias is γαλαξίας 
• kuklos is κύκλος
• spora is σπορά