The Etymology of Chickpea
Chickpea entered English around 1400 as ciche pease, a direct loan of Middle French pois chiche, where chiche descended from Latin cicer, the classical Roman name for the legume. By 1712 English speakers had reanalysed the unfamiliar chiche as chick, producing the modern compound — a textbook folk etymology, since the word has nothing to do with young birds. The Latin cicer is famous for giving the orator Cicero his family name; tradition holds that an ancestor had a chickpea-sized wart on the nose. Italian still calls the legume cece, French chiche; Spanish, by contrast, uses garbanzo, a separate borrowing from Basque. The chickpea itself is one of the oldest cultivated crops, domesticated in the Levant some 9,500 years ago, long before the word that names it took shape in any modern European language.