bean

Long before anyone put beans in a tin, people were already naming them with a sound that may have echoed the bean itself: *bʰabʰ-, a possible prehistoric reduplication meaning “broad bean.” The trail then runs through Proto-Germanic *baunō and Old English bēan before Middle English bene shortened and brightened into bean. But the family tree is hazy: Latin faba, Russian bob, and Germanic bean may be cousins—or independent borrowings from an ancient European word for “bean.” By about 1300, English speakers were already using bean for something trivial; centuries later, American baseball turned a bean into a head, producing beanball and the verb to bean. Beans were cultivated in Thailand as early as the seventh millennium BCE, so this tiny syllable has been traveling with human diets for roughly nine thousand years—small package, enormous history.