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#sugar
2025
it's sugar2025 Oct 5wisdomlib.org
Sugar is a beautiful thing. It makes our food delicious, is an amazingly compact source of precious calories, and gives us the beetus. But sugar isn't just yummy to eat. It's also one of those English words with a weird spelling/pronunciation – shouldn't it be "shugar"? Even more interesting, "sugar" is a delightfully multi-lingual word. In Spanish, it's azúcar, German zucker, Russian сахар ("sakhar"), and Hebrew סוּכָּר ("suchar"), for a few of its many transliterated translations. So how did this happen?
Etymonline gives us a delightfully efficient history lesson:
Its Old World home was India (Alexander the Great's companions marveled at "honey without bees") and it remained exotic in Europe until the Arabs began to cultivate it in Sicily and Spain; not until after the Crusades did it begin to rival honey as the West's sweetener. The Spaniards in the West Indies began raising sugar cane by 1506.
The delightfully rich Etymonline entry also explains that in English, the switch from -k- to -g- is "obscure" but might be related to the same shift that struck flagon/flask, and that "the pronunciation shift from s- to sh- is probably from the initial long vowel sound syu- (as in sure)". The word's initial entry into our language is
from Old French sucre "sugar" (12c.), from Medieval Latin succarum, from Arabic sukkar, from Persian shakar, from Sanskrit sharkara "ground or candied sugar," originally "grit, gravel" (cognate with Greek kroke "pebble").
Even more, they also toss in the freebie that the leading a- in the Spanish word azucar is a lingering Arabic indefinite article. See? So many fun details!
However, one question is left unanswered: gravel. In that Sanskrit origin word sharkara, what does my sweet succulent sap have to do with gray gritty gravel? To this mystery, Etymonline yields no insight.
The answer I stumbled into is in the linked "Wisdom Library" page, which I really hope for once is some sort of generated text. It's either that or the most insanely thorough human on the planet. But deep in the well-referenced page, after excerpts about ancient elephant care and Ayurvedic medical advice, lies this key sentence:
The literal translation of Śarkarā is “pebbles” and eventually became the word for hard sugar crystals (drained from syrup).
...which is one of those explanations so obvious, at least in retrospect, that it's no wonder Etymonline didn't bother including it. The sugar look like pebbles, so its inventors called it "pebbles". Amazing.
An afterthought: there is some delicious full-circle irony with the sugary breakfast cereal called "Fruity Pebbles".
Sugar is a beautiful thing. It makes our food delicious, is an amazingly compact source of precious calories, and gives us the beetus. But sugar isn't just yummy to eat. It's also one of those English words with a weird spelling/pronunciation – shouldn't it be "shugar"? Even more interesting, "sugar" is a delightfully multi-lingual word. In Spanish, it's azúcar, German zucker, Russian сахар ("sakhar"), and Hebrew סוּכָּר ("suchar"), for a few of its many transliterated translations. So how did this happen?
Etymonline gives us a delightfully efficient history lesson: The delightfully rich Etymonline entry also explains that in English, the switch from -k- to -g- is "obscure" but might be related to the same shift that struck flagon/flask, and that "the pronunciation shift from s- to sh- is probably from the initial long vowel sound syu- (as in sure)". The word's initial entry into our language is Even more, they also toss in the freebie that the leading a- in the Spanish word azucar is a lingering Arabic indefinite article. See? So many fun details!
However, one question is left unanswered: gravel. In that Sanskrit origin word sharkara, what does my sweet succulent sap have to do with gray gritty gravel? To this mystery, Etymonline yields no insight.
The answer I stumbled into is in the linked "Wisdom Library" page, which I really hope for once is some sort of generated text. It's either that or the most insanely thorough human on the planet. But deep in the well-referenced page, after excerpts about ancient elephant care and Ayurvedic medical advice, lies this key sentence: ...which is one of those explanations so obvious, at least in retrospect, that it's no wonder Etymonline didn't bother including it. The sugar look like pebbles, so its inventors called it "pebbles". Amazing.
An afterthought: there is some delicious full-circle irony with the sugary breakfast cereal called "Fruity Pebbles".