Other forms: limes
A lime is the small, hard, deep-green citrus fruit, sharper and more bitter than a lemon. A wedge pushed into the neck of a bottle, a squeeze over fish tacos, the dried-out half rolling around the bottom of the fridge drawer.
Lime green is the colour taken from the skin: a loud yellow-green that turns up on hi-vis jackets and tennis balls. Lime cordial is the sweet green squash you pour into water or lager. A completely different lime is the white powder made from limestone, spread on sour soil by farmers and mixed into mortar and plaster by builders — quicklime and limescale belong to that family, not to the fruit. And in Britain a lime is also a broad park tree with heart-shaped leaves, better known elsewhere as a linden.
1nounlimeA small green citrus fruit with sharp sour juice.
“She cut a lime into wedges for the tacos.”
2adjectivecolourOf a bright yellow-green colour.
“He turned up in lime green shorts you could see from the car park.”
3nounwhiteA white substance made by burning limestone, spread on soil and used in building.
“The farmer spread lime on the sour ground each spring.”
4nounlargeA large tree with heart-shaped leaves, also called a linden (British English).
“An avenue of limes led up to the house.”
The etymology on record here belongs to the other lime, the white one: Old English līm meant glue or sticky stuff, from Proto-Germanic *līmaz and a Proto-Indo-European root *h₂leyH-, "to smear". Its cousins across the sea still mean glue — Dutch lijm, German Leim — and Latin limus meant mud. That is the lime of limestone and mortar, spread and smeared; the green fruit reached English by another road entirely.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂leyH- — to smear
Proto-Germanic
*līmaz
Proto-West Germanic
*līm
Old English
līm
Middle English
lyme
English, today
lime
From Middle English lyme, lym, lime, from Old English līm, from Proto-West Germanic līm, from Proto-Germanic līmaz, from Proto-Indo-European h₂leyH- (“to smear”). Cognate with stq Liem (“glue”), Dutch lijm (“glue”), German Leim (“glue”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish lim (“glue”), Faroese and Icelandic lím (“glue”), Latin limus (“mud”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA