(ə-spărˈə-gəs)
noun- The tender young shoots of a Eurasian plant (Asparagus officinalis), eaten as a vegetable.
- Any of various perennial plants of the Old World genus Asparagus having leaflike stems, scalelike leaves, and small flowers.
Word History: The history of the word
asparagus is a good illustration of one of the peculiarities of English etymology—one found in few other languages. After the rebirth of classical learning during the Renaissance, Greek and Latin achieved a lofty status among the educated. As a result, etymologists and spelling reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries tried to give English a classical look by Latinizing or Hellenizing the spelling of words that had Latin or Greek ancestry (and even some that didn't). For example, Medieval Latin had a word
sparagus, from Classical Latin
asparagus, that was borrowed into Middle English and rendered as
sparage or, more commonly,
sperage. Botanists were familiar with the proper Latin version
asparagus, and their use of that term together with the efforts of the etymologists caused the Latin form to become more widespread, eventually supplanting
sperage. Thus, it is difficult to say whether the Modern English word
asparagus is a direct continuation of Middle English
sperage or a borrowing directly from Latin, a difficulty one encounters with hundreds of other words whose spellings and even pronunciations were Latinized during this time. • The Latin form
asparagus lives on in another guise as well; in the 1600s it was shortened in popular speech to
’sparagus, which became
sparagrass, sparrowgrass by folk etymology.
