Everyday LifeGreek → English
Pea
/piː/noun
A small round green seed eaten as a vegetable, borne in pods on a climbing legume.
The Greek roots
πίσον
píson
pea
Literally: “the pison seed”
Follow a root:πίσον1 word
The story of the word
English made this word by mistake. The old singular was pease, from Latin pisum and Greek πίσον, and to English ears it sounded like a plural, so a brand new singular was cut out of it in the seventeenth century. Pease pudding keeps the original shape. Whether Greek itself borrowed πίσον from an older Mediterranean language is unresolved.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old English → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
In a sentence
The children shelled peas into a colander on the back step.