Apple is from Old English, which means it’s been around pretty much forever. But it didn’t always mean that specific fruit we identify as an apple today. Nope, is used to mean “any kind of fruit.” (Excluding berries, but including nuts, interestingly.) And English isn’t the only language that can claim that. The same was true of the similar words in French, German, Dutch, Norse, Irish, and even Slavonic. That would be why we then get words like pomme de terre in French–“apple of the earth” for potato.
It also explains why the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden has come to be thought of as an apple. Because it was called an apple for hundreds of years–not because people meant that specific rosy-skinned, white-fleshed fruit, but because it simply meant FRUIT!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.