gorp

Gorp is the American hiker's name for a handful of dried fruit, nuts, seeds, and chocolate eaten on the trail. The mixture itself is ancient: dried provisions for travel are as old as travel itself. The word emerged in the American outdoor community of the 1960s alongside the Sierra Club's expansion and the backpacking boom that followed. By the early 1970s, gorp appeared in outdoor gear catalogs and trail guides as the standard term for portable high-energy food.

The most repeated explanation is the acronym Good Old Raisins and Peanuts, but acronym-first naming is almost never how slang actually works. The more plausible root is the British dialectal verb to gorp, meaning to eat greedily or to bolt food, recorded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dialect dictionaries from Yorkshire and Lancashire. The verb shares a root family with gorge, gulp, and possibly the obsolete gorb (glutton), all tracing back to Old French gober (to swallow) and Proto-Germanic sources meaning to devour.

American English absorbed a great deal of British dialect vocabulary through nineteenth-century immigration, and the outdoor recreation community was not immune. The verb to gorp may have entered American regional speech and then attached itself to the food: the stuff you gorp on the trail. This kind of metonymy, where an action lends its name to its object, is extremely common in food naming. Grub, chow, and gorp all follow the same pattern.

The acronym story gained traction in the 1970s because it was memorable and because the hiking community liked to think of itself as practical and plain-spoken. Good Old Raisins and Peanuts sounded right. It also helped that the basic recipe actually is raisins and peanuts, supplemented with M&Ms or seeds or whatever the hiker had on hand. The backronym colonized the word's history so thoroughly that the dialect origin is now rarely remembered.