World Wide Words logo

PASTINACEOUS/ˈpæstiːneɪʃəs/Help with IPA

Something pastinaceous is like a parsnip.

It’s a very rare word in English: the OED has just the one citation for it, from Richard Tomlinson’s 1657 translation of a Latin medical work by Jean de Renou, who is better known by the Latin version of his name, Renodaeus. I tried to find an example of pastinaceous using Google Books and the only one that appeared was from one of my own works. How more self-referential can research get?

The word derives from the Latin pastinaca, which could be the parsnip but often also referred to the carrot. Related words in that language are pastinare, to dig, pastinator, someone who prepares the ground for planting, and pastinum, a two-pronged digging fork or dibble, which probably lent its name to the vegetables because they so often formed forked roots in the ground (it would appear that difficulty in growing well-shaped parsnips is not solely a modern problem).

The Latin survives in the systematic name for the genus of the parsnip, Pastinaca, and in the archaic English pastinate, to dig or cultivate land. Parsnip itself came to us through French and at first was spelt passenep, as though it were a kind of nep, Middle English for the turnip.

World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2009. All rights reserved. Contact me if you want to reproduce this piece, but first see my advice page, which also has notes about linking. Your comments and corrections are welcome.

Page created 7 Mar. 1998
Last updated 25 Apr. 2009
Bookmark and Share
E-Magazine
Try the weekly World Wide Words e-magazine — it features words in the news, weird words, new(ish) words, old words, words people ask questions about, and even the occasional grovelling correction.
Subscribe to the e-magazine using RSS Subscribe to the site updates RSS feed
Notes and comments
Try a page at random