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Here is the origin of cucumber The story of the cucumber’s name is simple. In Latin, the crunchy vegetable was known as the cucumerem, which then either passed up through Old French as cocombre, and then to English, or was just pulled straight from the Roman root in Wycliffe’s first English-language translation of the Bible (which does mention the veggie by name a few times). Before the Latin, the best guess anyone’s got for the word’s origin is a “pre-Italic Mediterranean language,” which is a fancy way of saying “we have no idea.”
But the story of the cucumber’s reputation—it was, for a time in 17th-century England, despised—is a little more complex. Originally from somewhere in the lower Himalayas, the cucumber has been grown throughout the Old World for millennia—the Romans liked them so much, they went to the trouble of designing greenhouses just to grow them (though it’s likely that they ate them small, more like what we’d call gherkins nowadays). By the early Middle Ages, prickly vines were a-blooming in France, and they were reported to be growing in England (always a little late to the game) by the 1320s. Interestingly, there was an Old English word for the cucumber, eorthappel (literally “earth apple”), which would imply that at least someone in England had heard of them before 1066 (the year that most English scribes, now conquered by French kings, gave up the old language). But since most mentions of eorthappels come from translations of the Bible, there’s a chance that old-timey Brits just picked up the idea that cucumbers were some kind of ground-fruit, and made up a word that seemed to make sense.
After enjoying centuries of being enjoyed by the English, though, the cucumbers suddenly picked up a reputation as being poisonous in the 18th century. As Dr. Johnson so eloquently demonstrated in his dictionary entry for the plant, they were seen as little better than trash, and picked up the alternate name of “cowcumber” around the same time, since they were only fit for animal fodder. Samuel Pepys, writing on August 22, 1663 (350 years ago yesterday!), reported the alarming news that a guy named Tom Newburne was “dead of eating cowcumbers,” and that he’d heard of another person dying of similar causes just the other day.