appio

Forms

appio m (plural appi)^[1] Old Italian forms include apio, apiu and lappio, and the southern achi and acchi.^[2] Old Roman had acio (about 1440) and Old Neapolitan accio (about 1512), and the word is Corsican appiu in Corsica.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin apium (“celery, parsley”), which in Latin named celery, both wild and cultivated, parsley and other aromatic umbellifers.^[3][4][2][1] The word lives on in all the Romance languages except Romanian: French ache, Occitan api, Catalan api, Spanish apio and Portuguese aipo.^[5][3][6] In Latin times it also passed into the Germanic languages, as Old High German ephi and modern Eppich.^[3][6] From Germanic it reached the Slavic languages.^[3]

In Italy the inherited word is popular only from Tuscany southwards to Sicily, where Latin /pj/ became /ppj/; the central and northern Marche and Umbria lack it, but Corsica has it.^[3][7] In northern France it gave way in the 17th century to céleri, a name of the cultivated plant that came from Lombardy, and in northern Italy, and now also in Tuscany, Rome and the written language, sedano prevails.^[3]

The Latin word is usually taken as derived from apis (“bee”), because bees were thought to like the plant.^[8][1] Zingarelli and Sabatini–Coletti note that the Romans understood it as the “bees' herb”.^[9][7] Battisti and Alessio compared it instead with a plant name in Theophrastus and traced it to a root ⟨*ap-⟩ “water”, which they saw as both Indo-European and Mediterranean.^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in Restoro d'Arezzo, 1282, in the Arezzo dialect.^[2][4] The word names plants of the genus Apium, generally celery, whose seeds and roots went into medicinal preparations.^[2]

Semantic evolution

Old Italian already had a set of names built on the word: appio comune and appio domestico for celery, appio d'acqua for watercress, and appio selvatico, a wild plant that is not clearly identified.^[2] An old Italian treatise on farming quoted by Tommaseo advises that l'appio del mese di febbrajo si può seminare “celery may be sown in the month of February”.^[10]

The word spread in texts across Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, from Venice and Mantua to Rome, Naples, Taranto and Sicily, where the local forms acio, accio and achi show the southern outcome of the Latin consonant group.^[3] Tuscan appio still meant “celery” in 1809.^[3]

Modern dictionaries treat appio as a botanical name: appio dolce and appio grande are celery and appio montano is lovage.^[11][12][4] Battisti and Alessio record appio dei sassi for a Macedonian umbellifer, a learned calque on Latin petrapium, which itself renders Greek petrosélinon “parsley”.^[6]

Timeline

• 1282 – Restoro d'Arezzo writes appio.^[2][3]
• Late 14th century – Old Venetian appio is recorded.^[3]
• About 1440 – Roman acio appears in a recipe book.^[3]
• 1476 – Old Mantuan appio is recorded.^[3]
• 1499 – The Florentine Ricettario uses appio.^[3]
• About 1512 – Neapolitan accio is recorded.^[3]
• 1809 – Targioni Tozzetti records Tuscan appio “celery”.^[3]

Meanings

Noun

1. (botany) The common name of several umbelliferous garden plants of the genus Apium, such as celery, prezzemolo and pimpinella.^{[4][11][7][12]}
2. (botany) Celery, the same as sedano: appio dolce and appio grande are names of celery, appio montano of lovage.^{[4][11][12][9]}

Related words

• Latin apium
• Spanish apio

Usage notes

The variant apio is less common.^[7][12]

A separate adjective appio (before 1639) names a kind of apple, the same as appiolo: mele appie, melo appio.^[4][12][10] Most dictionaries derive it from Latin melapium, from Ancient Greek μηλάπιον (mēlápion), a compound of mêlon “apple” and ápion “pear”.^{[4][11][9][8][1]} The GDLI instead derives it from Latin apiana “camomile”, on the model of appiola.^[13] Wiktionary also lists an adjective appio “Appian”, of Appius Claudius Caecus, from Latin Appius, and the TLIO an Old Roman appio “of the Via Appia” from the middle of the 13th century.^[1][2]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Pfister, Max; Schweickard, Wolfgang; Prifti, Elton (eds.) (1979–), Lessico Etimologico Italiano, Wiesbaden: Reichert; online at lei-digitale.it, p. 3, 74
4. ^ a b c d e f g De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
5. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
6. ^ a b c d Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 255
7. ^ a b c d Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
8. ^ a b Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ a b c Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
10. ^ a b Tommaseo, Niccolò; Bellini, Bernardo (1861–1879), Dizionario della lingua italiana, 4 vols., Torino: UTET
11. ^ a b c d Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
12. ^ a b c d e Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)
13. ^ Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca, p. 1, 572