squash

Ever since I was a kid, I wondered why squash could refer to the sport, the fruit or the act of squishing — and even then, why should we have both squish and squash and what is the difference between the two? It turns out only two of the three are related: the verb sense, “to crush or to squeeze,” goes back to the Latin verb exquassare, the prefix ex- plus quassare, “to shatter,” which also gives English the word quash. The verb sense of squash eventually generated a noun sense, “the act of squashing,” but I feel like it doesn’t get used all that much except in the name of the sport, although that itself isn’t spelled out all that explicitly. The Wikipedia page notes, without citation, that the name comes from the fact that people playing the game eventually noticed that puncturing the ball caused it to squash upon impact, thereby offering “more variety to the game.” Also, at one point, the ball itself was the squash. And the blog Grammar Phobia says that in some contexts, the game is still called its old name, squash rackets. The fruit — and yeah, apparently gourds are fruits and not vegetables — gets is name from the Algonquian word askutasquash, which literally means “the things that may be eaten raw,” and therefore has no relation to the other squash, though notably you can still squash a squash. Squish, by the way, is probably just a variant of squash, though I haven’t seen any guesses as to why it should exist.