The word broccoli entered English in the late 17th century, with the first recorded use in 1699, borrowed directly from Italian. In Italian, broccoli is the plural of broccolo, meaning "small sprout" or "flowering crest of a cabbage." Broccolo is a diminutive of brocco, which means "shoot, sprout, skewer, or peg." The Italian brocco descends from Latin broccus, an adjective meaning "projecting" or "pointed," originally used to describe protruding teeth.
The semantic chain from "projecting teeth" to "vegetable" is less surprising than it might appear. Latin broccus described anything that stuck out or projected forward. In post-classical Italian, brocco came to designate any protruding shoot or sprout -- the growing points of a plant that push outward from the stem. The tightly clustered flower buds that form the head of a broccoli plant are, botanically, precisely such shoots, bunched together before they open into flowers. The diminutive suffix -olo (plural -oli)
Broccoli belongs to the species Brassica oleracea, the same species that includes cabbage, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. Italian gardeners developed broccoli through selective breeding from wild cabbage, probably in southern Italy, between the 6th and 1st centuries BCE. The Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder mentioned a vegetable that may be broccoli in his Naturalis Historia (77 CE), and Italian cultivation intensified during the late Roman Republic and early Imperial period.
The vegetable was introduced to France by Catherine de' Medici in the 16th century, and from France it spread slowly to northern Europe and eventually to North America. Thomas Jefferson recorded planting broccoli at Monticello in 1767, though the vegetable did not become widely popular in the United States until Italian immigrants brought it in large quantities in the early 20th century.
The Latin root broccus connects broccoli to several other English words through French intermediaries. Broach (a pointed instrument for making holes, or a spit for roasting) comes from Old French broche, from the same Latin broccus. Brochure (literally, a stitched pamphlet) derives from French brocher (to stitch), also from broche. The connection is the concept of piercing or projecting -- a pointed tool, a projected sprout, and
A notable linguistic feature of broccoli in English is that it is already a plural form in Italian. A single stem would technically be a broccolo, but English treats broccoli as a mass noun (like rice or pasta), using it for both singular and plural reference. No English speaker asks for "a broccolo" or refers to "several broccolis," though the latter occasionally appears in informal usage.
In modern English, broccoli refers to the green cruciferous vegetable eaten worldwide. The word has not acquired figurative meanings, though it has become culturally symbolic: in American popular culture, broccoli frequently represents the archetypal vegetable that children refuse to eat, a status cemented when President George H. W. Bush publicly declared his dislike of it in 1990. The word is pronounced /BROK-uh-lee/, preserving the Italian stress pattern on the first syllable.