Category: A

A dentist looks after teeth; a trident is an ancient weapon with three teeth; you indent a paragraph when you take a “bite” out of the first line; and al dente means that you have cooked pasta or vegetables so that they are tender but still firm “to the tooth.” English borrowed this Italian phrase…

An agape was a frugal meal that the early Christians ate together to symbolize their ideals of charity and sharing, and to commemorate the last supper of Jesus and his disciples. Appropriately enough, agape, usually pronounced to rhyme with bag a pay, is a Greek word meaning love. It did not take long, however, for…

In Eden, the only ale that Adam had or wanted was water, so Adam’s ale became, in the seventeenth century, a humorous name for drinking-water; in Scotland the term Adam’s wine is used. Adam’s name appears also in Adam’s apple, a phrase bestowed upon both the human larynx and upon the sour fruit better known…

In the New Testament, the Gospel of John recounts how Jesus, just before he died, cried out, “I am thirsty,” causing one of the spectators, perhaps a Roman soldier, to dip a sponge into a nearby jar of vinegar-water, which he then held to Jesus’s mouth. To us, the soldier’s offer of vinegar may seem…

There are many things that you might not want to eat, but in the Old Testament there is also a list of “abominable things” you are forbidden to eat. Deuteronomy, chapter fourteen, says that you may eat animals that chew the cud and also have a cloven hoof; however, you may not eat animals that…

When Francois Mitterand, the former president of France, realized that he would soon die of prostate cancer, he engaged in a stupendous act of abligurition; that is, he squandered a small fortune on a lavish and bizarre meal for himself and thirty friends. The meal included oysters, foie gras, and caviar, but the piece-de-resistance was…

For a very brief period in the early eighteenth century, the word abesse was used as a name for any thin sheet of rolled-out pastry. The English word developed from the French name for thin pastry, abaisse, which in turn derived from the French verb abaisser, meaning to reduce. However, whereas the French term abaisse…

An abattoir is the same as a slaughterhouse, a place where livestock are killed and turned into carcasses for the butcher. Both words, abattoir and slaughterhouse, have origins that reflect the brutal but effective method by which livestock were originally made into “dead-stock”: they were beaten over the head with a club. With abattoir that…

This French term literally means hunger beater, and refers to the first dish served to guests to allay the grumblings of their stomachs. The word is now obsolete, having been supplanted by hors-d’oeuvre in French and appetizer in English. Abat-faim and appetizer possess slightly different connotations, however, in that the former suggests beating the hunger…