Parsnip: The Root of a Fork

The name of the parsnip reaches back to Roman fields. English took it from French and Latin words that once meant both ‘parsnip’ and ‘carrot’, ultimately tied to a two-pronged digging fork called a ‘pastinum’. Most European languages still use forms of the same root, though Spanish stands apart with ‘chirivía’, an Arabic borrowing that once meant ‘caraway’. In English, the ending ‘-nip’ came by analogy with ‘turnip’, and the stray ‘r’ probably crept in from ‘parsley’. A vegetable named for the fork that unearthed it.