Category: B

The painful swelling that makes big toes bigger is called a bunion, a word that may derive from the same source as the word bun. In the fifteenth century, this shared source—the Old French bugne, meaning bump on the head—was adopted by the East Anglian dialect of English as bunny, meaning lump or swelling (no…

The Turkish name for cracked wheat is bulgur, a word English adopted directly from Turkish in the 1930s. Many centuries before this, however, Arabic had adopted the same Turkish word as burgul, a term that English then borrowed in the mid eighteenth century, spelling it burgoo and using it to refer to a porridge made…

Brussels sprouts are small cabbages that actually belong to the mustard family. They take their name from Brussels, Belgium; where horticulruralists first developed them in the fourteenth century. The vegetable itself was not imported to England until the mid nineteenth century, but fifty years earlier it had been referred to by name in English gardening…

Why do we eat carrots but not broccolies? The reason is that English acquired the word broccoli in the late seventeenth century from Italian, and in Italian broccoli is already plural: the singular form is broccolo, which in turn is a diminutive of the word brocco, meaning stalk or shoot. The word broccoli therefore means…

Brioche, a cake made from yeast dough enriched with eggs, acquired its name in French in the fifteenth century, a name adopted by English in the early nineteenth century. The source of brioche is the Old Norman French word brier, meaning to pound, so named because brioche dough requires repeated kneading; brier is also the…

The French agricultural region of Brie, located east of Paris, is where the soft, creamy cheese known as Brie acquired its name. Brie is now made in Brie, but the cheese actually originated in the lie de France and was named Brie only because Charlemagne, the king of the Franks in the eighth century, was…

Most nutritionists say that breakfast should be the largest meal of the day, partly because you have not eaten for the previous eight or even fourteen hours. These food-less hours are a fast, as are the longer periods of not eating undertaken by hunger-strikers or religious devotees. Accordingly, when you finally do sit down to…