What is the phrase’s origin and historical past? : NPR

[ad_1] <img src="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4724x3149+0+0/resize/1100/quality/50/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff2%2Fb6%2F121a15814c70a9dac92aad805b94%2Fgettyimages-2238905584.jpg" data-template="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4724x3149+0+0/resize/{width}/quality/{quality}/format/{format}/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff2%2Fb6%2F121a15814c70a9dac92aad805b94%2Fgettyimages-2238905584.jpg" class="img" alt="Pumpkins and other cucurbits (plants of the gourd family) sit on a wooden garden cart in Nevers, France, on October 4, 2025. Most of the gourds are orange, and a few are green. The cart rests in a green field edged with trees." fetchpriority="high"/> Signal of the season: Pumpkins and different cucurbits sit on a backyard cart at a pageant in Nevers, France, on Oct. 4. Frédéric Moreau/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Pictures conceal caption

toggle caption

Frédéric Moreau/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Pictures Pumpkins are the bookends of autumn. Headlines concerning the arrival of pumpkin spice lattes sign summer time's finish. And shortly after the final bites of pumpkin pie on the Thanksgiving desk, we flip to plans for winter holidays. In between, jack-o'-lanterns are the celebs of Halloween.

The seasonal gourds additionally evoke a romanticized supreme of less complicated instances, based on Cindy Ott, creator of Pumpkin: The Curious Historical past of an American Icon.

"Pumpkins are extra standard than ever," Ott, an affiliate professor of historical past on the College of Delaware, tells NPR. "Individuals are shopping for this stuff, even pumpkin spice lattes, due to these attachments, these very old school concepts about reverence of the small household farm."

As her remark suggests, it wasn't at all times like this. Like a gourd rising on a rambling vine, "pumpkin" took fairly a circuitous path earlier than it achieved PSL ubiquity. For this installment of Phrase of the Week, we comply with the trail.

The place did the phrase "pumpkin" come from? The phrase "pumpkin" has lengthy referred extra to an concept than to a particular plant.

"Pumpkin itself is not precisely a botanical group," says Logan Kistler, curator of archaeobotany and archaeogenomics on the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past in Washington, D.C. "It is extra describing the form of any form of squash that individuals have bred to seem like what we consider as pumpkins."

The phrase "pumpkin" itself started with the Greek phrase pepon and advanced into the French pompon, based on Fiona McPherson, an government editor with the Oxford English Dictionary. Pumpkin, she says, is a variant of "pompion," an English phrase relationship to the 1500s.

Whereas the phrase's roots are sometimes linked to Europe, the plant's roots are firmly within the Americas, with 1000's of years of historical past.

"The primary instance that we've of 'pumpkin' is from 1647," McPherson says, "apparently on the subject of the poor weight loss program of early settlers" within the New World.

When European settlers reached the present-day Americas, they encountered Indigenous individuals rising pumpkins — a helpful supply of meals that is straightforward to develop and will be saved in chilly climate.

"Pumpkin was usually used as a normal time period, just like how the phrase "corn" as soon as referred to any grain reasonably than to a particular foodstuff, says Ott.

"Pumpkins are a part of this genus Cucurbita," based on Kistler, who says the vegetation had been farmed all through North, Central and South America. "In precolonial instances, Indigenous individuals within the Americas domesticated several types of these type of pumpkin precursors no less than six totally different instances. So, there's what we acknowledge as pumpkins originating all all through the Americas, going again so far as about 10,000 years in Mexico."

<img src="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/8192x5464+0+0/resize/1100/quality/50/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2a%2F03%2F496547ea48d1a19a6209b4320dff%2Fgettyimages-1738295241.jpg" data-template="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/8192x5464+0+0/resize/{width}/quality/{quality}/format/{format}/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2a%2F03%2F496547ea48d1a19a6209b4320dff%2Fgettyimages-1738295241.jpg" class="img" alt="A woman holding a paddle and wearing a life vest sits in a giant hollowed-out pumpkin as she paddles through water in an annual race in Kasterlee, Belgium, on October 22, 2023." loading="lazy"/> A Pumpkin Regatta racer paddles an enormous pumpkin by means of the water in Kasterlee, Belgium, on Oct. 22, 2023. Individuals cowl a distance of 100 meters in hollowed-out pumpkins within the annual occasion. Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP/Getty Pictures conceal caption

toggle caption

Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP/Getty Pictures A number of of these species are simply discovered right now, whether or not they're being weighed at a state honest (Cucurbita maxima) or canned for baking (Cucurbita moschata).

Whereas different plant names have persevered since then, McPherson says, "'pumpkin' is the phrase clearly that has taken over."

Who're you calling a pumpkin? Shortly after the phrase was first utilized in English, "pumpkin" turned a technique to throw shade.

"Essentially the most attention-grabbing a part of calling individuals pumpkins is it has been so constant," Ott says, citing work and tales relationship again centuries. "For ladies, it is usually related to their physique."

Pumpkin imagery was used to recommend {that a} girl is pushed by her pure urges, "as a substitute of being cerebral and mannerly," Ott provides. "And for the person, it is at all times been related along with his head — like an empty-headed particular person. [It's] used for politicians for tons of of years."

For McPherson, the velocity with which the phrase "pumpkin" turned an insult is hanging.

"It actually didn't take lengthy for it to develop this figurative use," she says, including that by 1680, pumpkin was "utilized contemptuously to an individual who's a bit immodest or self-important or silly."

A gourd turns into an emblem for a romanticized previous By the late nineteenth century, Ott says, the rehabilitation of the phrase "pumpkin" in language was underway. For one factor, it turned a time period of endearment to name youngsters pumpkins, she says. And across the similar time, the pumpkin turned an emblem of old school methods of residing — a touchstone in poems and style work as urbanization took maintain in america.

"So People transfer overseas, into the town, however they wish to think about themselves farmers at coronary heart, a lot of them," Ott says. "And a pumpkin has been a technique to preserve these connections. In order that's when the pumpkin turned the pumpkin. It is a cultural historical past, and never a botanical one."

Right now, that historical past features a twist. Descendants of the identical pumpkins that after sustained Indigenous civilizations and early settlers at the moment are supporting trendy small-scale farmers, Ott says. Tapping into nostalgia for our agrarian previous, farmers are placing pumpkins entrance and middle as they flip their farms into what Ott calls "agrarian wonderlands" to attract guests.

"The cool factor about the entire story," she says, is that "these very romantic concepts and myths that a whole lot of People inform themselves about their origin tales are literally serving to to rejuvenate the very factor it represents: a small household farm."