Lemon & Lime Are The Same Word ―

Both Derived from Arabic or Persian

Arabic līmūn ليمون

Persian limou لیمو “lemon”

But the earliest reflex of this root may be Indo-European, so that the words lemon and lime are not, as many dictionaries assert of “Middle Eastern” origin, but of South Asian provenance.

Sanskrit nimbu निंबू or nimbuka निंबूक “lime”

In ancient India, there was a Sanskrit word for the Indian lime, nimbū, still used in Hindi. The Indian lime is a sort of cross between a lemon and a lime. Nimbu pani is a refreshing limeade drunk on a very hot Indian day. Nimbu may have been borrowed, as many Sanskrit terms were, into Persian as limu, and hence into Arabic as līmūn. Arabic has also lima, possible ancestor of lime, and a general collective plural form, līm ‘citrus fruits.’

The path into English appears to have been: French limon < Spanish limón <Portuguese limão < Italian limone < Provençal limo < medieval Latin limonem < Arabic līmūn < Persian limu< Sanskrit nimbū.

In other Persian borrowings of Sanskrit words, initial Sanskrit /n/, unpalatable to the Persians, became an /l/ sound. And the Sanskrit /b/ is merely infixed and euphonic and dispensable (earlier Vedic Sanskrit form nim'u), since it was not needed in any Persian attempt at euphonious utterance. In Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, a plosive like /b/ sometimes replaces a glottal stop, represented here in nim'u by the superscript apostrophe. Putting the /b/ sound into the word makes the word easier to say, quicker to enunciate.

When some languages borrowed the word limun or lime, the forms were altered. For example, the Japanese word for lemon is remon, because /l/ is difficult.

Japanese remon   れもん , レモン  “lemon”

and compare Japanese raimu    ライム  “lime”

One Chinese word for lemon is an attempt at pronouncing a form of the word lemon borrowed from some language west of China.

Chinese ning-meng   檸檬   “lemon”

Mandarin Chinese gets a bit closer to “lime” with 萊檬 lái méng.

 

Persian Pun

The familiar English proverb is: One man's meat is another man's poison. Quite unrelated to this discussion but one of the best puns ever made in English is American humorist S. J. Perelman’s proverb: “One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian.”

Note that English borrowed from French limon (14 th century) and lime (16 th century) and they became the yellow lemon and the green lime. Then in 17 th century French, another word that had been hanging around in French since the 13 th century, originally borrowed from Latin, replaced both limon and lime first as the French scientific word and then as the popular French word too, and that word was citron. In modern French, lemon = le citron and lime = le citron vert.

Lemon and lime then are related. Lemon made its way to English through Old French as lymon in the 15th century. Lime first entered English later, in the 17th century. Lime was borrowed from a Spanish form, lima.

Oranges & Lemons

Lemony reference abounds in English. My favourite is the British nursery rhyme and game. Here’s one version of the old rhyme:

Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St Clements
You owe me five farthings
Say the bells of St Martins
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich
Say the bells of Shoreditch
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney
I'm sure I don't know
Says the great bell at Bow
Here comes a candle to light you to bed
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head

Chop chop chop chop the last man's head!

 

from The Book of Games by Kate Greenaway (1846- 1901)

 

There are many other verses. To discover the precise rules of the children’s game and pinpoint the exact location of the London church bells (some of which the visitor may still see), check out the BBC site that explains all.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A696125

 

More fruit-word origins shall bloom here as this new year burgeons. Look for them and pluck them with certitude from their pendant boughs.