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Honey is a very old word but it is a bit of an unusual word in that most words that represent something very common to our human experience have a pretty wide usage across many languages.

This is only partly true of honey.

In most Indo-European languages the word for honey is not related to our word honey, but instead to an actual Indo-European root meaning “honey.”

This root does make its way into English in words like mellifluous and molasses.  But only Germanic based languages use the word honey or its relatives.

As logic would have it that means that honey shows up as an English word back in Old English.

As a basic word that so many people would have experience with it turned up early too; the Oxford English Dictionary first citation is from the year 875.

But Germanic languages are Indo-European languages too, so why did we end up with a different word for honey?

It seems that like many words the parent of honey spread in meaning and got applied to numerous things.

Etymologists think that perhaps the word root behind honey might originally not have meant this sweet sticky substance, but a yellow honey-like color instead.

So honey was an important enough article that in Germanic it overtook other meanings of the word, which in Sanskrit and Greek were retained as color words.

Honey from bees is certainly the oldest meaning of the word honey, but the word gets applied to lots of other things we like, especially our loved-ones.

The first citation someone calling their sweetheart honey is found in 1350 in a translation of a French story known as William of Palerne or Guillaume de Palerme.

This story has an unexpected etymological circularity.

I’m sure the honey as “sweetheart” reference was merely incidental in the translation but the main love interest in the story is daughter to the Roman Emperor, a girl named Melior.

Clearly Melior is a name chosen for its sweetness and etymological connection to mel the Latin word for “honey.”