jaggery

Etymology

It is borrowed from Portuguese jágara, also jagra, jagre and xagara, in the Portuguese of India.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} The Portuguese word is usually traced to Malayalam ചക്കര (cakkarā, “jaggery”),^[3][4][5][7] probably so in the American Heritage Dictionary,^[6] while the OED, Skeat and Weekley derive it from a Kannada word for unrefined sugar,^[2][8][9] and Collins, Klein and Merriam-Webster derive the English word from Hindi.^[10][11][12] All go back to Sanskrit शर्करा (śarkarā, “sugar; grit, gravel”),^{[6][2][3][7][11][1]} the source of sugar, so that jaggery is a doublet of that word.^[11][7][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

A coarse dark brown sugar made in India from the sap of palms: 1598, in W. Phillip's translation of Linschoten's Discours of Voyages.^[2] The Shorter Oxford dates it to the late 16th century,^[3] and Merriam-Webster gives 1631.^[12]

Semantic evolution

Hobson-Jobson describes jaggery as coarse brown or almost black sugar from the sap of several palms: the wild date tree, the palmyra, the caryota and the coconut palm.^[7] It was usually made in small round cakes, which in Tinnevelly once passed as a kind of currency, and in Bombay the name covered all rough unrefined sugar.^[7] The OED also records the word for any crude sugar.^[2] From 1859 it was used for a palm that yields it, especially Caryota urens, the jaggery palm.^[2][3] The word is also spelled jaggary and jagghery.^[10][12]

Timeline

• 1598 – coarse dark brown sugar made from palm sap.^[2]
• 1859 – a palm yielding jaggery, especially Caryota urens.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. A coarse, dark brown unrefined sugar made in India from the sap of palms; also, any crude sugar: The cook stirred a lump of jaggery into the lentils.^[12][10][2]
2. A palm that yields this sugar, especially Caryota urens.^[2][3]

Related words

• sugar
• saccharine

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
6. ^ a b c The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
7. ^ a b c d e Yule, Henry; Burnell, A. C. (1903), Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, new ed. by William Crooke, London: John Murray
8. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
10. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
11. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
12. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster