pan

Forms

pan m (plural panes)^[1]

Etymology

It continues inherited from Latin pānis (“bread”).^[2][3][4][1] Old Spanish had the same form pan.^[2][1] The word is common to all the Romance languages: Portuguese pão, Galician pan, Catalan pa, French pain, Italian pane and Romanian pâine.^[2][5][1] García de Diego lists the Castilian, Portuguese and Catalan words under the same Latin article.^[6]

The Latin noun is probably from an older Proto-Italic *pāstnis, as the diminutive pāstillus (“small cake, pastille”) suggests.^[7][1] This is usually connected with Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to graze, feed”), but de Vaan finds the step from “graze” to “bread” hard to explain and leaves the origin open.^[7][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas dates the word from a charter of 1090 in Oelschläger's list of first records.^[2][3] In the Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140, in a 14th-century copy) Martín Antolínez supplies the Cid's men de pan e de vino “with bread and wine”.^[8] The Cid already uses pan also for the cereal crop from which bread is made.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The transfer of pan or panes from the bread to the wheat and other cereals it is made from is old and shared with Portuguese: it is in the Cid and in the 14th-century chronicle of Peter I, and it gave the phrase tierra de pan llevar “land fit for grain”.^[2] Alfonso X's prose uses the word for bread, for land under grain, for the daily living and for wheat.^[9] Nebrija in 1495 glosses pan as “wheat, barley, rye”, Latin annona.^[10]

Covarrubias in 1611 calls bread the common food of mankind, made mainly from wheat, and records the shapes named after it, pan de higos, de açucar, de xabon and panes de oro, as well as proverbs such as A falta de pan buenas son tortas and Con su pan se lo coma.^[11] Autoridades adds the rich dough with butter or oil used for pies and empanadas, a sense the DLE now marks as obsolete.^[12][4]

In the Americas it is recorded from 1513 in Puerto Rico, in pan cazabe, the cassava bread of the islands.^[13] In several Central American countries, Colombia and Bolivia it is a euphemism for the vulva.^[4][14] Colloquially it can also mean money or a job.^[1]

Timeline

• 1090 – first record, in a charter.^[2][3]
• c. 1140 – the Cantar de mio Cid has pan e vino and uses pan for the grain crop (in a 14th-century copy).^[8][2]
• 1202 – the Cortes de Benavente have pan e vino in a text without a later copy.^[8]
• 1250–1279 – Alfonso X's Lapidario has labrar por pan “to work for a living”.^[9]
• 1335 – first record of the derivative panadero.^[3]
• 1417 – a Segovian charter speaks of land de pan e vino coger.^[2]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija glosses pan as wheat, barley and rye.^[10]
• 1513 – pan cazabe in Puerto Rico.^[13]
• 1611 – Covarrubias records the proverb A falta de pan buenas son tortas.^[11]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary gives the Latin etymology.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. bread: a food made of a dough of flour, usually wheat flour, with yeast and water, baked in an oven.^[4][1]
2. A loaf of bread, especially a large round one; a bun: Compré dos panes en la esquina.^[4][1]
3. A mass of something else shaped like a loaf: pan de higos, pan de jabón.^[4][11]
4. Food, one's daily sustenance: ganarse el pan.^[4][1]
5. A thin sheet of baked flour from which hosts and wafers are cut.^[4]
6. A very thin leaf of gold, silver or another metal used for gilding: pan de oro.^[4]
7. Cereal crops while growing, until they are reaped.^[4][2]
8. (euphemistic, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama) The vulva.^[4][14]
9. (obsolete) A fine dough with butter or oil for pies and empanadas.^[4][12]

Word family

• panadero
• panal
• panecillo
• panera
• empanada
• paniaguado
• apanar
• empanar
• empanizar
• panadería

Related words

• apaniguar
• panero
• Latin pānis
• Portuguese pão

Usage notes

Fixed expressions include pan de cada día, pan comido and the proverb A falta de pan, buenas son tortas.^[1][11]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 4, 364
3. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. pan
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l 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. pan
5. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 6198
6. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. s.v. panis
7. ^ 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
8. ^ 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. pan
9. ^ 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. pan
10. ^ a b Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 393
11. ^ a b c d Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 1188
12. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 5, 102
13. ^ 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. pan
14. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. pan
15. ^ Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 782