harina

Forms

harina f (plural harinas)^[1] Old Spanish wrote farina;^[2] Autoridades notes that this was the old form.^[3][2] Judeo-Spanish has arina.^[1] Aragonese, Leonese and western Asturian keep farina; in Oviedo and Villaviciosa the Galician fariña has spread, and Llanes and Ribadesella say jariña.^[4][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish farina, inherited from Latin farīna (“flour”).^[3][5][6][1] The word has been used at every period and in every register of the language, and it survives in every Romance language: Portuguese farinha, Galician fariña, Asturian fariña, Catalan farina, Occitan farina, French farine, Italian farina and Romanian făină.^[3][7][4]

The Latin noun stands for *farrīna, a derivative of far (“emmer wheat; grain, flour”).^[8][1] That noun goes back to Proto-Italic *fars (“flour”) and is cognate with Celtic words for bread, Slavic words for flour or food and Germanic words for barley, such as Old English bere (“barley”).^[8][9] Wiktionary traces it, with doubt, to Proto-Indo-European *bʰers- (“spike, prickle”).^[1]

The initial /f/ of the Latin word went the Castilian way: aspirated as /h/ and then lost before a vowel, as in this word.^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

The earliest Spanish texts in the CDH are the Fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200, in a 13th-century copy), where Abraham has Sarah knead iij medias de farina “three measures of flour”, and the Fuero de Madrid, with the heading De farina pesar “on weighing flour”.^[11] Corominas's first record is Berceo, for whom pan de mala farina is bread of poor flour.^[3][11]

Semantic evolution

Alfonso X's prose uses farina for the meal of wheat and other grains and, in the General Estoria, farina oleada, an offering of flour mixed with olive oil.^[12] By Nebrija's time the spelling was harina, and Covarrubias (1611) derives it from Latin far.^[13][14] The Academy's dictionary of 1817 adds the transferred sense of the powder of other solids, such as metals, and the expressions eso es harina de otro costal “that is another matter” and donde no hay harina todo es mohína, for the quarrels that poverty brings.^[15] Its 1884 edition separates flour stripped of bran and the flour of tubers and pulses.^[16]

In the Americas the word is recorded in Puerto Rico from 1512.^[17] In Cuba harina alone is maize flour, and wheat flour is harina de Castilla; in Argentina the Portuguese loan fariña names cassava flour.^[3] In the Antilles and Central America harina is slang for money, and in Honduras, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico for cocaine or heroin.^[18][19] Richard Hawkins's Observations (1622) use the Spanish word, as Farina, for the flour his crew made into pancakes.^[20]

Timeline

• c. 1200 – farina in the Fazienda de Ultra Mar.^[11]
• 1220–1250 – farina in Berceo, Corominas's first record.^[3][5]
• 1250–1279 – Alfonso X's Lapidario compares a white substance to flour.^[12]
• 1335 – the derivative harnero “sieve”, a syncopated harinero.^[5]
• 1505 – the derivative enharinar “to flour”.^[5]
• 1512 – the first record from the Americas, in Puerto Rico.^[17]
• 1611 – Covarrubias derives it from far and records the proverb derramador de la harina y allegador de la ceniza.^[14]
• 1817 – the Academy's dictionary records eso es harina de otro costal.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. flour: the powder obtained by grinding wheat or other grain.^[6][1]
2. Such flour with the bran or husk removed.^[6]
3. The powder of some tubers and legumes: harina de garbanzo.^[6]
4. Any fine powder to which a solid is reduced.^[6]
5. (slang) cocaine;^[1][19] (Puerto Rico) heroin.^[1][19]
6. (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, colloquial) Money.^[19][21]

Word family

• harinero
• harinoso
• enharinar
• harnero
• harinado

Related words

• farina
• farináceo
• Portuguese farinha

Usage notes

Common expressions are ser harina de otro costal “to be a different matter” and meterse en harina “to get down to work”.^[22][1] Harina has been borrowed into Tagalog and Cebuano.^[1]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. s.v. harina
3. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 3, 320
4. ^ a b García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 2687
5. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. harina
6. ^ a b c d e Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. harina
7. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 3197
8. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
9. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ Prat Sabater, Marta (2003), Préstamos del catalán en el léxico español, doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, p. 175
11. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. harina
12. ^ a b Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. harina
13. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 360
14. ^ a b Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 961
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real
16. ^ Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 556
17. ^ a b Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. farina
18. ^ Malaret, Augusto (1946), Diccionario de americanismos, 3rd ed., Buenos Aires: Emecé, p. 465
19. ^ a b c d Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. harina
20. ^ Grupo IATEXT, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, AMERLEX: corpus of americanisms in early texts on the Americas (online database), p. s.v. harina
21. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. harina
22. ^ Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. harina