صندل

The English word 'sandal' in the sense of sandalwood (and the compound 'sandalwood' itself) comes from Persian sandal, which in turn comes from Sanskrit candana — the name of the Santalum album tree, the white sandalwood native to southern India and Sri Lanka whose heartwood produces one of the world's most prized aromatic substances. Sanskrit candana is possibly of Dravidian origin or from an unknown pre-Sanskrit source. The sandalwood trade is ancient: Santalum album heartwood was a major export commodity from southern India to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean from at least the 5th century BCE. Persian merchants, who controlled much of this trade, gave the Sanskrit word the Persian phonetic form sandal.

From Persian sandal, the word entered Arabic as ṣandal (صندل), then Greek as santalon, and Latin as santalum — the Latin term that gives sandalwood its modern botanical genus name. Old French produced sandale or sandre, from which English gets 'sandal' (the wood). The shoe called a 'sandal' is an entirely separate word — it comes from Greek sandalon, possibly from a pre-Greek Anatolian source — and the two 'sandals' (shoe and wood) are homophonic false friends: they sound alike in English but have unrelated etymological histories. This coincidence has occasionally confused etymologists and is worth noting explicitly.

Sandalwood's uses span religious, medical, and aesthetic domains. In Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, sandalwood paste is used in ritual anointing and temple offerings; sandalwood incense is burned in worship across all three religions and in Shinto as well. Sandalwood oil is among the most expensive natural perfume ingredients — the base note that holds a fragrance together and provides the warm, creamy, woody foundation of countless classical perfumes. The Mysore sandalwood of Karnataka, India, has been under state protection since the 18th century, when the Kingdom of Mysore recognized the tree's extraordinary economic value. The word sandalwood preserves in everyday English the Persian merchant's transmission of a Sanskrit tree-name across one of the world's oldest luxury trade routes.