farro

Forms

farro m (plural farri)^[1] Old Italian had farre, the form of the first record, beside farro and faro.^[2][3][4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Vulgar Latin *farrum, from Latin far (“emmer, spelt; grain”), genitive farris.^[1][5][6] The Latin neuter changed its declension: Old Italian farre continues the accusative farrem, and the modern form a Medieval Latin farrum found in Medieval Latin.^[7][2][8] The word survives in southern Italian dialects, in Sardinian farre, Catalan farro and Portuguese farro.^[7][9][10] The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana instead classes it as a learned word.^[11]

The Latin word goes back to Proto-Italic *fars (“flour, grain”), with Oscan far and Umbrian far in Oscan and Umbrian.^[12][1] De Vaan compares Old Norse barr “grain”, Old English bere “barley”, Welsh bara “bread” and Slavic words for flour and food, and suggests that a stem Proto-Indo-European *bʰars-, with its vowel /a/ and its meaning, may be a loan from a non-Indo-European language.^[12][7]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is farre in a register of the Florentine convent of the Santissima Annunziata of 1286, for the grain.^[2] The form farro appears in the 14th-century Libro della cura delle febbri.^[2][3] That text prescribes a diet of barley or spelt gruel for fever.^[11]

Semantic evolution

Old Italian used the word for several hulled wheats, Triticum dicoccum, T. spelta and T. monococcum, grown for food.^[3] The Tuscan translation of Crescenzi describes it as like spelt but coarser in blade and grain, and translators of Virgil used salso farre for the salted meal of Roman sacrifice.^[11]

Tommaseo noted that both kinds were grown in Italy far more in the past than in his day.^[4] In modern Italian it is the name of the hulled wheats grown mainly in central Italy, with farro piccolo, medio and grande for einkorn, emmer and spelt.^[13][14] English has borrowed the word as farro.^[1]

Timeline

• 1286 – Farre appears in a register of the convent of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence.^[2][7]
• 14th century – Farro appears in the Libro della cura delle febbri.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. (botany) emmer, spelt or einkorn: hulled wheats whose grains keep their husk after threshing, grown mostly in central Italy: una zuppa di farro e ceci.^[13][14][5]
2. The grain of these wheats, husked and eaten whole or ground: Abbiamo comprato due chili di farro perlato.^[14][5]

Word family

• granfarro
• farrotto

Related words

• farina
• farragine
• confarreazione
• Latin far

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
3. ^ a b c Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
4. ^ a b Tommaseo, Niccolò; Bellini, Bernardo (1861–1879), Dizionario della lingua italiana, 4 vols., Torino: UTET
5. ^ a b c De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
6. ^ Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier
7. ^ a b c d Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
8. ^ Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
9. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
10. ^ Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 1601
11. ^ a b c Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
12. ^ 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
13. ^ a b Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
14. ^ a b c Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli