Thursday word: acajou

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

acajou (AK-uh-zhoo) - n., the cashew tree, its fruits, or its resin; the wood of any of several species of mahogany.


Given that the cashew tree is not related to the mahoganies, interesting that this word came to be applied to the wood -- and it's not at all clear from the traces online how this happened. Nor is it clear which way the application went: the word is from French acajou, cashew, from which the English cashew also derives, from Portuguese, acaju, from Old Tupi acaju or agapú or acajuba or aka'iu -- the dictionaries have a range of romanizations, if those aren't actually different words, and disagree on what it/they meant, either cashew or mahogany. If anyone can provide clarity on the matter, I'd appreciate it.

Across the clearing were the spreading branches of a fine old acajou.

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

FWIW, OED3 hasn't reached "cashew" yet; for "mahogany" it doesn't cite forms that have direct bearing, so this is only to rule something out--

Etymology: Origin uncertain and disputed; earliest attested in 17th-cent. English writings about Jamaica (see below).
Perhaps ultimately a borrowing of Arawak maga mahogany (1528 in a Spanish text from Puerto Rico), or perhaps of a cognate or by-form of that word (see especially G. Friederici Amerikanistisches Wörterbuch (1947) 366–67). A derivation < Yoruba oganwo , in Nigeria applied to the genus Khaya (see sense A. 1a), has also been suggested (for summary see F. B. Lamb in Amer. Speech (1967) 42 219–26); however, this theory has not met with widespread acceptance (see especially K. Malone in Econ. Bot. (1965) 19 286–92).

The English word was adopted into scientific Latin as a specific epithet by Linnaeus ( Systema Naturæ (ed. 10, 1759) II. 940) as mahagoni, and is probably the source also of the continental forms: French mahogani, mahagoni, mahogon, etc., Italian mogano, mahogano (mogogano, magogano, etc.), Portuguese mógono, mogno, German mahagoni, Dutch mahonie, Swedish mahogny, Danish mahogni. Compare Spanish caoba < Taino kaóban.

(Of course it'd be K. Malone dissenting--sometimes brilliant, sometimes apparently utterly deluded.)