apple (English)

Where does "apple" come from?

The English word 'apple' traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂ébōl, a term that likely emerged as a 'wanderwort', a word borrowed across different cultures, and was adopted by the ancestors of Germanic speakers. It traveled through Proto-West Germanic as *applu and Old English as æppel, originally referring broadly to any fruit or round, spherical object before narrowing to the specific fruit we know today. Its connection to the 'forbidden fruit' of Eden is a later cultural association, likely bolstered in antiquity by the linguistic similarity between the Latin words for 'apple' (mālum) and 'evil' (malum).

Full etymology tree

apple (English), 'A common, firm, round fruit produced by a tree of the genus Malus.'
- inherited appel (Middle English), 'fruit, nut'
  - inherited æppel (Old English), 'apple'
    - inherited *applu (Proto-West Germanic), 'fruit'
      - inherited *aplaz (Proto-Germanic), 'apple, fruit'
        inherited *h₂ébōl (Proto-Indo-European), 'apple'
        influence 𒊭𒈠𒇻 (šam(a)lu-) (Hittite), 'apple, apricot?'
- influence mālum (Latin), 'inflection of malus:'
- influence malum (Latin), 'inflection of malus:'

Direct ancestors

Updated July 2026

Etymology data from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · About Miraris