The Etymology of Hummus
Hummus is one of the rare English words borrowed almost intact from Arabic in the second half of the 20th century. In Arabic, ḥummuṣ (حُمُّص) simply means chickpea — the seed of Cicer arietinum, a domesticated legume cultivated across the Middle East for at least seven thousand years. The full Arabic name of the spread is ḥummuṣ bi-ṭaḥīna — literally chickpeas with tahini — but English-speakers shortened it to just hummus, applying the chickpea-name to the dish made from chickpeas. The earliest written recipes recognisable as modern hummus appear in 13th-century Cairo cookbooks, and variations have been part of Levantine, Egyptian, and Turkish cuisine ever since. The dish entered British and American kitchens slowly through the 1960s and 70s, and explosively from the 1990s onward — by 2010 hummus was a supermarket staple in most of the English-speaking world. The Semitic root ḥ-m-ṣ for chickpea is shared across Arabic, Hebrew (חומוס), and other Semitic languages, while Spanish garbanzo and Italian ceci come from quite different roots.