apple

The Old English word æppel appears in Beowulf around 700 CE, but it carried no special connection to the round red fruit we know. In Old English, æppel meant any fruit or fruit-like round object: an eye was an æppel of the eye, an acorn was an eorn-æppel. The word's indiscriminate range tells us something about how English speakers categorized the botanical world before taxonomy.

The word reaches back through Proto-Germanic aplaz to a Proto-Indo-European root h₂ébōl, reconstructed from cognates scattered across half the globe. Welsh has afall, Old Irish has ubull, Lithuanian has obuolys, and Russian has yabloko. This distribution suggests speakers of the ancestral language cultivated or gathered apples on the Pontic steppe around 4000 BCE.

The fruit itself has its own separate history. Wild Malus sieversii grew in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan, and Alexander the Great's army encountered cultivated varieties in Persia around 329 BCE. Roman horticulturalists bred dozens of named cultivars by Pliny's time in the first century CE. The word and the improved fruit met in Roman Britain and survived the Anglo-Saxon migration together.

The King James Bible in 1611 sealed apple's symbolic weight in English. Comfort me with apples in the Song of Solomon gave the fruit a devotional warmth it never entirely loses. Newton's apple may be apocryphal, but it lodged in the culture with the same permanence as the biblical one.