Other forms: peaches
A peach is a round fruit with fuzzy orange-pink skin, sweet yellow flesh and a hard wrinkled stone in the middle. Juice running down your wrist when you bite one, tinned peach halves in syrup, a bowl of them going soft on the windowsill.
Peach is also the colour taken off the skin — a soft warm pinkish orange, on nursery walls, nail varnish and bridesmaids' dresses. The fine hair on the skin is the fuzz; the hard middle is a stone in Britain and a pit in America; and the nectarine is the same fruit with smooth skin. Informally a peach is anything lovely: she is a peach, that was a peach of a pass. Peachy means fine and healthy — everything's peachy — and depending on the voice it can mean the exact opposite. Peaches and cream describes a pale pink complexion.
1nounpeachA round fruit with soft fuzzy orange-pink skin, sweet flesh and a large stone.
“The peaches were so ripe the juice ran down his chin.”
2adjectivecolourOf a soft warm pinkish-orange colour.
“They painted the nursery a pale peach.”
3nounexcellentSomeone or something excellent.
“That new assistant of yours is a peach.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
The Greeks called it the Persian apple, μᾶλον περσικόν, because that was the direction it arrived from. Latin cut the phrase down to persica, which wore away through Vulgar Latin *pessica into Old French pesche and English peche. The name still points at Persia, which was only a stop along the road.
Middle English
peche
English, today
peach
From Middle English peche. From Middle English peche, borrowed from Old French pesche (French pêche), Vulgar Latin pessica (cf. Medieval Latin pesca) from Latin persica, from Classical Latin mālum persicum, from Ancient Greek μᾶλον περσικόν (“Persian apple”). Displaced Middle English persogȝe, from Old English persoc, ultimately from the same Latin root above.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA