ancona

Ancona, the city on the Adriatic coast of central Italy, takes its name from the Ancient Greek ankon, meaning elbow or bend — a reference to the promontory that curves like an elbow into the sea. The city was founded by Greek colonists from Syracuse in the fourth century BCE, and its name was simply Ankōn, the elbow. The Romans Latinized it as Ancona, and the form has not changed in twenty-three centuries.

In art history, an ancona is a type of altarpiece — specifically one that combines a painted panel with an architectural frame, usually displaying a central image of the Virgin or a saint in a carved or gilded surround. The word entered Italian art vocabulary by the fourteenth century. The connection to the city is contested: some historians link the term to the distinctive altarpiece-making workshops of the Marche region; others treat it as a coincidental homonym that simply meant a niche or framed devotional image.

The Ancona chicken, a black-and-white mottled breed, was developed in the Marche region of Italy — the same territory where the city sits — and reached Britain and the United States by the 1880s. The breed became popular with small farmers because of its hardiness and high egg production. The American Poultry Association admitted Ancona chickens to its Standard of Perfection in 1898.

The three uses of the word — the city, the altarpiece type, and the chicken breed — share only geographic origin and the Greek root ankon. The elbow-shaped promontory that gave the city its name gave the altarpiece its vocabulary and the chicken its breed designation. It is a rare word that names an architectural form, a livestock variety, and an ancient city without any of the three uses interfering with the others.