mushroom

Way back in grade school, when we were first learning about compound nouns, I remember an assignment that had us take one of them and make a sentence using both of the component words individually. I’m not sure what the point of this exercise was, exactly, other than to reaffirm that sometimes some words are two words and we children should not be scared of that fact, but I clearly remember one kid picking the word mushroom, with the resulting sentence being something like “I threw up and then there was mush in the room.” Our teacher said this did not actually qualify for the assignment, not as a result of featuring vomit as a central plot point but because mushroom was not actually a compound noun, even if it looked like it was. This kid was not a good student but was a fairly competent arguer, and he challenged our teacher to explain where the word mushroom came from if not from putting mush and room together. The teacher could not explain the etymology, and this ended with her basically saying “I don’t know what is correct but I am certain you are just wrong.” And that’s how it ended. That is actually a fairly good snapshot of how my lower-school education went, really.

More than thirty years later, this incident popped into my head and I suddenly realized that I did not know where the word mushroom comes from, so here it is: no one is completely sure.

To start with, Etymonline traces it to the 1400s with muscheron and musseroun coming into English from French, and the French coming perhaps from the Late Latin mussirionem, though it is noted that this Latin word might have actually come from French and not the other way around.

The OED theorizes that it could have a connection to the French mousse, “moss,” but other sources disagree, saying there is no proven connection between mousse and any lineage leading to English’s mushroom. 

The Wiktionary etymology connects the French mousse to Frankish mosa (“moss”), Old High German mos (“moss, bog”), Old High German mios (“moss, mire”), Old English mēos (“moss”), Old English mōs (“bog, marsh”), Old Norse mosi (“moss”), Old Norse myrr (“bog, mire”) and the Proto-Indo-European *mews- (“mosses, mold, mildew”). It also claims that mushroom displaced the Old English word for these things, swamm, which is related to both the words swamp and sponge. But at the end suggests that it may go back to a mysterious, pre-Roman word altogether.

The French mousse meaning “moss” made me wonder how that word came to be associated with both desserts and hair products. Again, according to Etymonline, it’s been used in English to refer to frothy dishes since 1892, but this entry defines that French word mousse ass “froth, scum,” from the Late Latin mulsa, “mead,” which in turn comes from the Latin mulsum, “honey wine, mead,” which is in turn the neuter form of  the adjective mulsus, meaning “mixed with honey, which is related to mel, “honey.” The Proto Indo-European root meilt- is as far back as we can apparently take it, and that root is present also in the English words caramel, marmalade, melissa, mellifluous, mildew and molasses.

Which is to say that it does not offer a clear connection between mousse as moss and mousse as sweet frothy substance. So then we go to the Etymonline entry for moss, which apparently can mean both the organism itself — the “moss plant,” even if moss is not a plant — and “bog, peat-bog,” which is a use of the word I am not familiar with. “The Germanic languages have the word in both senses, which is natural because moss is the characteristic plant of boggy places. It is impossible to say which sense is original.”

So I suppose the French words mousse and mousse might be homonyms? But given how both refer to soft, wet things, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t have some connection. I just couldn’t find it.

So what of mush? I am certain you are dying to know. Etymonline has it being a variant of mash, which in this context just means “a soft mixture.” Mash, in turn, comes from the Old English masc — as in masc-wyrt, “mash-wort,” an infused malt — and connects that to the Swedish mäsk “grains for pigs,” the German Maisch, “crushed grapes” and another infused malt, and the Old English meox “dung, filth.” And that word goes back to the Proto Indo-European root meik-, which also gives us everything from medley to melee to mustang to promiscuous.

Thirty years later, I still do not know where this word mushroom comes from, but as is often the case, the journey to this anticlimactic destination taught me a lot of other things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.