Other forms: apricots
An apricot is a small, soft, orange fruit with one hard stone in the middle. Half the size of a peach and less juicy — most people meet it dried, in sticky wrinkled halves, or boiled down into jam.
It gives its name to a colour: apricot is a pale golden orange, used for paint, dresses and lipstick. The tree is an apricot tree, the hard middle is the stone (Americans say pit), and the seed inside that is the kernel. Fresh apricots have a short season and bruise if you look at them, which is why the dried and tinned versions are everywhere. Don't file it as a small peach — an apricot is firmer, sharper-tasting and nearly smooth-skinned, with none of the fuzz. Both AY-pri-cot and A-pri-cot are said, and the stress sits on the first syllable either way.
1nounapricotA small soft orange fruit with a stone in the middle.
“She stewed the apricots with a little sugar and a strip of lemon peel.”
2nountreeThe tree that this fruit grows on.
“There was an old apricot at the bottom of the garden.”
3adjectivecolourOf a pale golden-orange colour.
“The bedroom walls were painted a soft apricot.”
The apricot took the long way round the Mediterranean. Latin called it praecocia, "the early-ripening ones", because it comes before the peach; that passed into Greek, then into Arabic as barquq, then into Catalan as abrecoc, and English made it apricock before French abricot pulled the spelling to apricot. Precocious is the very same Latin word, and still means ripening early.
Latin
(persica) praecocia
Ancient Greek
πραικόκιον
Medieval Greek
βερικοκκία — apricot tree
Arabic
بَرْقُوق — plums
Catalan
abrecoc
English, today
apricot
From abricot. Alteration of apricock (with influence from French abricot), itself an alteration of abrecock (with influence from Latin apricum (“sunny place”)), from dialectal Catalan abrecoc, abricoc, variants of standard albercoc, from Arabic بَرْقُوق (“plums”), from Medieval Greek βερικοκκία (“apricot tree”), from Ancient Greek πραικόκιον, from Latin (persica) praecocia literally “(peaches) which ripen early”, (mālum) praecoquum literally “(apple) which ripens early”. a doublet of precocious.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Food & Drink