pigment

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin pigmentum (“colouring matter, paint, dye; ingredient of an ointment”),^[2][3][4][5] formed from pig-, the stem of pingō (“to paint”), and the suffix -mentum.^[2][5][6][7] In post-classical Latin the noun also meant spices and perfumes, and later a spiced drink.^[2] The OED compares Old French pigment (“balm, spice”), recorded in Walloon at the end of the 12th century, and the Anglo-Norman variant pigment of piment (“spice, spiced wine”);^[2] Barnhart takes the late 14th-century word as a reborrowing, probably under the influence of the Old French noun.^[8] An early form pyhmentum, a plural dative, is found about 1150.^[8][9] The Latin verb is the source of paint and picture,^[10][11] and the American Heritage Dictionary refers it to Proto-Indo-European *peig-.^[4] The same Latin noun gave, through Spanish, pimento.^{[10][8][11][12]}

Earliest recorded meaning

A spice, or a remedy or concoction made with spices: before 1200, in the Peri Didaxeon, a text perhaps of Old English origin.^[2][9]

Semantic evolution

In Middle English the word meant a spice and also a red dye.^[9][3] The modern sense, a coloured substance used for colouring or painting, is first recorded before 1398 in Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus,^[2][8] and Etymonline dates the broader painters' sense "any substance used to impart colour" to the 1610s.^[3] Johnson (1755) defined it as paint, or colour to be laid on a body.^[13] From 1779 it was also used of the colouring matter found naturally in the tissues of animals and plants.^[2] The spice sense died out by about 1550,^[2] although Walter Scott revived the word in Ivanhoe (1819) for a spiced and sweetened wine.^[2] The verb, to colour with a pigment, dates from 1896 in the OED and the Merriam-Webster Unabridged;^[2][14] Etymonline and Barnhart give 1900.^[3][8] Derivatives include pigmentation (1866)^[8] and pigmentary (1835).^[3]

Timeline

• c. 1150 – the form pyhmentum, a spice.^[8][9]
• before 1200 – a spice, or a concoction of spices (obsolete by 1550).^[2]
• before 1398 – a colouring substance, paint, dye, in Trevisa.^[2][8]
• 1610s – any substance used by painters to give colour.^[3]
• 1779 – colouring matter in animal or plant tissue.^[2]
• 1819 – a spiced wine, in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.^[2]
• 1866 – pigmentation.^[8]
• 1896 – verb, to colour with a pigment.^[2][14]

Meanings

Noun

1. A substance that gives a characteristic colour to plant or animal tissue, such as chlorophyll or haemoglobin.^[15][2]
2. Any substance used to give colour to other materials, especially a powder mixed with a liquid to make paint, ink or enamel: She ground the blue pigment by hand.^[15][14][2]
3. (archaic) A spice.^[16][2]

Verb

1. To colour with, or as if with, a pigment.^[14][2]
2. To take on pigment; to become coloured.^[14]

Word family

• pigmentary
• pigmentation
• accessory pigment
• respiratory pigment

Related words

• paint
• picture
• depict
• pimento
• piment
• orpiment

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
5. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
8. ^ a b c d e f g h i Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
9. ^ a b c d Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
10. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
11. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
12. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
13. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
15. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
16. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press