Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.
No one really knows how the word “raspberry” originated.
Ok, cool. But we can still make some guesses and learn some weird things. Join me as I stumble through research that I barely have the resources and qualifications to do.
Tarts and Himbeere
I asked Twitter what to blog about next, and “raspberries” won. So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, where all great word-type adventures ought to begin. The results for raspberry‘s etymology were few, though I did learn that “raspberry tart” is Cockney rhyming slang for “fart”, which is why we call fart noises raspberries. The world is beautiful.
“Raspberry tart” is Cockney rhyming slang for “fart”.
A bit disappointed, I went to Google Translate and looked at what raspberry translated to in Spanish and French, wondering if their origins might shed some light. It was a silly mistake, though, because raspberry doesn’t have Latin roots, but Germanic roots (which doesn’t mean it’s German, but sort of like a cousin of German).
The German word for berry is beere (sidenote: the German word for beer is bier), and the German word raspberry is himbeere. But him in German does not translate to rasp in English, so even though we get the word berry from the same place as the Germans, our word for raspberry has a different origin than theirs.
I did some looking around, and the origins of himbeere in German also seem uncertain, so the Germans don’t help us too much with our raspberry quest.
Raspis
The earliest recorded form of raspberry in English comes from the early 1500’s, but it wasn’t even called raspberry at that point. The word was raspis. Somewhere around the mid-1500’s, raspis started getting shortened to simply rasp. So our beloved raspberry has this whole secret past life we knew nothing about.
However, it wasn’t a complete stranger. There are instances recorded in the 1530’s of raspys berys (spelling was a lot more flexible back then). Even though the proper name was raspis, the people still classified it as a berry, just as we do today.
It seems somewhere around the year 1600, people started to treat the raspis just like they treated strawberry and blackberry (which had already been compound words for hundreds of years or more). Thus, the word raspberry was born and became the norm, leaving raspis and rasp to the cold, unforgiving past.
The Latin Rasp
One last note. The word rasp—as in, “The chalk rasped loudly against the chalkboard”—finds its roots in Latin, not Germanic. Some have speculated that the rasp in raspberry comes from this Latin root, but there’s not much evidence. If this is the case, though, it would be one of those cool (or frustrating, depending on who you ask) scenarios where the English language combines words from different origins (the Germanic berry and the Latin rasp) to make a new word.
Hooray for English!
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