Coquo

#etymology Published: 2022-01-09

When I learned the word concoct, I looked up its etymology and found that it comes from the Latin word coquō, which means “I cook” or “I ripen” (or coctus, past participle of coquō, meaning “cooked”). It is totally understandable since concoct today means “to make up by mixing a variety of ingredients”, with the prefix con- meaning “together”. This word has many English descendants especially related to cooking, including cook, cuisine, kitchen, and so on. In this post, let’s see some more words.

biscuit

Biscuit is composed of the prefix bis- (variant of bi-) meaning “twice” and coctus. Thus, biscuit literally means “twice baked”, and according to Wikipedia, this is because:

biscuits were originally cooked in a twofold process: first baked, and then dried out in a slow oven.¹

terracotta

The Latin word terra means “the dry land” or “soil” (cf. terrain). So terracotta originally meant “cooked earth”. (If you don’t know what it is, take a look at the Wikipedia.)

precocious

As you may know, the word precocious² means “prematurely developed”. This word is the combination of the prefix pre- (in advance) and coquō as the sense “I ripen”. This corresponds to the Japanese translation 早熟の (早 can be regarded as “pre-“ and 熟 means “ripe”).

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