Pumpkins displayed for sale on wooden racks
26 October 2021
A pumpkin, as we use the word today, is a North American squash of the genus Cucurbita. The word is almost exclusively applied specifically to the species Cucurbita pepo, but in early use it could be used for any type of gourd or melon, including species not native to North America. Pumpkin is a variation on the older word pompion, which is a borrowing from the French pompon. The French word in turn is from the Latin pepo or pepon, meaning melon, which in turn comes from a Greek root meaning ripe.
The Latin pepo or pepon was transformed into pompon in French probably because pompon already existed in French meaning a top knot or tuft of hair (Cf. the English pompom used by cheerleaders), and the roundness of the vegetable resembled the roundness of the tuft of hair. And in once in English, the diminutive suffix -kin was added in the seventeenth century, giving us the pumpkin variant.
We find the older pompon in several sixteenth century works, all referring to European varieties of melon or gourd. It can be seen in The Grete Herball, a botany text from 1526:
Melons that we call pompous be of two maners. There be some longe and some rounde. But the rounde be of courser substaunce and more gleymy.
And Thomas Elyot, in his 1542 Bibliotheca, states a false belief that eating pompons and other vegetables is a cause of cholera:
That sickenes inge[n]dred with inordinate fedynge of longe tyme, speciallye of rawe fruites and mushroms, moche vse of cucumbers and pompones, and all fruytes very colde, whiche eaten after meales or the meate be digested, are corrupted in the stomake, and ingendreth a venomous iuyce, whiche nature may not susteyne, and therfore she expelleth it with violence.
The earliest known attestation of the pumpkin form is in Nathaniel Ward’s 1647 satirical The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America. It appears in a passage about the possibility of King Charles I recruiting Americans to help the Royalist side in the English Civil War:
If he fears any such thing, that he would come over to us, to helpe recruite our pumpkin-blasted braines: we promise to maintain him so long as he lives, if he will promise to live no longer then we maintain him.
The phrase pumpkin-blasted braines is a reference to pumpkins being a dietary staple of early settler-colonists in North America. Some editions of the book use the phrase bewildred braines.
There is a 1648 use referring to pumpkins grown in Maryland. It appears in court records in an interrogatory regarding damages a farmer’s hogs did to another farmer’s crops:
That he neuer heard him the s[ai]d Edw: Hall say, hee would giue him the s[ai]d G. Manners any satisfaction for his corne. But for his pumkin Vines, w[hi]ch then the hogs of the s[ai]d Edward Hall had spoyled, he would satisfy the s[ai]d Manners.
There are also several early uses of pumpkin in European or Asian contexts. One from 1653 refers to gourds or melons grown in what is now Indonesia:
We put into a small Port, called the Boohoole, which we afterwards named the Pumpkin-Bay, because of its fertility in bearing of Pumpkins, for there we bought 500 for a faddam of Blue Bafta Callico, which is Sarrat Cloth; at the same rate also we bought Hogs and brought them to our Boat; being thus victualled we forthwith set Sayle for Bantam, whither the blessing of a favourable wind not long after brought us, though with a miserable Leakey Ship.
And another is from a 1653 English translation of François Pierre de la Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François:
19. Potage of pumpkin with butter.
Take your pumpkin, cut it into peeces, and seeth it with water and salt; after it is sod, straine it, and put it into a pot with an onion sticked with cloaves, fresh butter and peper; stove your bread, and if you will, allay three or foure yolks of eggs; and powre them over it with some broath, then serve.
20. Potage of pumpkin with milke.
Cut it and seeth it as abovesaid, then pass it through a straining panne with some milk, and boile it with butter, seasoned with salt, peper, an onion sticked, and serve with yolks of eggs allayed as abovesaid.
La Varenne’s 1651 French original uses the word citrouille.
The evidence is quite clear; pumpkin is an English variation of a French word with Latin and Greek roots. It originally referred to melons or gourds generally, but over time its meaning has narrowed to refer to the orange, North American gourd that we know and love.
But if one pokes around the internet, one will come across the claim that pumpkin comes from the Wôpanâak (Wampanoag) word pôhpukun, which literally means “grows forth round” and is used to refer to the pumpkin. On its face, this claim is plausible. Many English names of North American plant and animal species come from Indigenous languages. And the Wampanoag originally lived throughout what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island, an area that was settled by Europeans at about the time pumpkin entered the English language. But an examination of the evidence shows that pôhpukun is a recently reconstructed word, and it is essentially one that is, in part, modeled after the English pumpkin. In short, it is a Wôpanâak borrowing from English rather than the other way around. This pattern of borrowing and modification to match existing roots is common in efforts to reconstruct and revitalize Native American languages. Pôhpukun is a Wôpanâak word; it’s just a recent coinage and not the source of the English pumpkin.
The last first-language speaker of Wôpanâak died in 1899, but there is fair amount of writing in that language dating back to the seventeenth century (Cf. Goddard and Bragdon, and Trumbull). This writing has been published and thoroughly pored over by linguists, and pôhpukun does not appear prior to the Wôpanâak revitalization initiatives that began in the 1990s. Nor does pôhpukun resemble any of the other Algonquian words for melons, gourds, or squashes.
European settler-colonists came in contact with the Wampanoag in 1620. And we have uses of pumpkin to refer to European and Asian squashes from the 1650s. While these come after the first appearance of pumpkin in a North American context, they come too soon for transmission of the word to European and Asian contexts to be plausible. Also, the 1648 use from Maryland, which is well outside the traditional Wampanoag territory, would not likely be from a Wôpanâak root. It is far more likely that the English settler-colonists brought the word pumpkin with them and applied to it to the North American species rather than the other way around.
Sources:
Browne, William Hand, ed. “Court and Testamentary Business, 1648.” Archives of Maryland, Judicial and Testamentary Business of the Provincial Court, 1637–1650, vol. 4. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1887, 412.
Elyot, Thomas. Bibliotheca Eliotæ. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“Fun With Words.” Wôpanâak Language Revitalization Project, 2021.
Goddard, Ives and Kathleen J. Bragdon. Native Writings in Massachusett, 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988. ACLS Humanities eBook.
The Grete Herball. London: Peter Treveris, 1526, sig. R.ii.r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
La Varenne, François Pierre de. Le Cuisinier Francois. Paris: Pierre David, 1651, 284. BnF Gallica.
———. The French Cook. London: Charles Adams, 1653, 134–35. Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins...and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 33–34.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2007, modified June 2021, s.v. pumpkin, n.; December 2006, modified September 2021, s.v. pompion, n. and adj.
Trumbull, James Hammon. Natick Dictionary. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 25. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Ward, Nathaniel (under pseudonym of Theodore de la Guard). The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America. London: J.D. and R.I. for Stephen Bowtell, 1647, 66–67. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.
Woofe, Abraham. The Tyranny of the Dutch Against the English. John Quarles, ed. London: John Crowch and Thomas Wilson, 1653, 51. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Image Credit: Martin Doege, 1997. Used under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.