Other forms: figs
A fig is a soft purple fruit full of tiny seeds. Fresh figs, dried figs, a fig tree.
It is not really a fruit but an inverted flower cluster, and it is pollinated by a tiny wasp that crawls inside — commercial varieties mostly do without. Fig leaves are the traditional covering in art, and not worth a fig means worthless.
1nounfigA soft purple fruit full of tiny seeds.
“She ate a ripe fig straight from the tree.”
fig is a fruit.
Old French figue comes from Latin ficus, the name of the tree and its fruit.
phn
𐤐𐤂
Latin
fīcus — fig tree
Vulgar Latin
*fīca — fig
Old Occitan
figa
Old French
figue
Anglo-Norman
figue
Middle English
fige
English, today
fig
From Middle English fige, fygge (also fyke, from Old English fīc, see fike), borrowed from Anglo-Norman figue, borrowed from Old French figue, from Old Occitan figa, from Vulgar Latin fīca (“fig”), from Latin fīcus (“fig tree”), from a pre-Indo European language, perhaps phn 𐤐𐤂 literally “ripe fig” (compare hbo פַּגָּה (“early fallen fig”), syc ܦܓܐ, dialectal Arabic فَجّ, فِجّ). (Another sem root (compare akk 𒈠 literally “fig”) was borrowed into Ancient Greek - as σῦκον (whence English sycophant; Boeotian τῦκον) and Armenian - as թուզ.) The soap-making sense derives from the resemblance of the granulations in and texture of the soap to those of a fig. a doublet of fico.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA