My mother-in-law brought over a pomegranate a while ago.

My kids like pomegranates it never seemed to occur to them to eat it until I steered it to the table one day.

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There the pomegranate sat, looking as red as an apple.

In fact its name pomegranate comes from the fact that it looks like an apple. French for “apple” is pomme, a word that came from Latin.

Inside though a pomegranate is not at all like an apple.  The darn thing is jammed full of seeds.

In French seeds are called grain from the Latin granate.

Thus pomegranate literally means “apple full of seeds.”

Mark Morton points out in his book Cupboard Love that the rock granite is named because its crystals form a grainy texture.

Another stone the semiprecious garnet isn’t grainy but it too has a name related to our word of the day. In this case a garnet is named because of its red color thought to be just like that of a pomegranate seed.

As I implied, French got the word pomegranate from Latin. According to The Oxford English Dictionary English adopted the word in 1320.

But then the French stopped calling the thing a pomegranate around the same time the English started.

Instead in French this fruit got an abbreviated name instead; grenade. 

Grenade as a name for the fruit flitted briefly into English as well and the syrup called grenadine is a vestige of that use.

When the English and the French weren’t eating they were quite often fighting.

By 1520 a new kind of weapon had appeared in battles. It was about the size of a pomegranate and to do damage to the enemy it exploded and split into many pieces; kind of like the seeds of a pomegranate.

Logically the French named this deadly device after a pomegranate and as I’ve just explained their word for “pomegranate” was grenade.

70years later the word had made it into English as grenade.

The soldiers who specialized in tossing these things were called grenadiers and the name has stuck to those guys with the tall bearskin hats that stand guard outside the Queen’s house in England.