Does the word "kitchen" seem odd to you?

This is crazy—my four year old asked me just this morning why the kitchen is called the kitchen. Wierd. And I’m not trying to imply that you have the mind of a four year old!

Yeah I’ve always wondered the same thing but bathrooms don’t always have a bathtub…

Well, I suppose some people call it “the shitter”.

Well it has seven letters – that’s odd.

add a t and you get “kittchen” a german slang term for jail

@applesaucemanny Because that’s a “powder room”

No, but I see its relationship to the German kuchen (“to cook”) and Küche (kitchen) and the French cuisine, “cooking; culinary art; kitchen”; ultimately from Latin coquere, “to cook.” They’re all part of the same family.

Words that follow different evolutionary paths from different sources rarely end up exactly parallel. There is also the fact that in many or most cultures a separate place for a smoky cooking fire was set aside long before there were separate places for sleeping, dining, bathing, and “living” (aren’t you living in all those other rooms?).

According to this article, “kitchen” has a much earlier origin than the names of our other rooms. The first occurrences of a similar word (cycene and kycenan) in Old English date from around 1000 A.D. By contrast, the earliest citation of “bedroom” was from Shakespeare in 1590, of “dining room” in 1601, of “bathroom” in 1780, and of “living room” in 1825.

So when “kitchen” was coined, English was far closer to its Germanic and Latin roots.

The word kitchen would seem odd to me even if it had the recognizable English meaning that words like ‘dining room’ and ‘bathroom’ have. It’s an all-around weird word.

Pick any word and say it a bunch of times, or type it and make it repeat dozens of times, and it looks and sounds weird. The very idea of words is pretty funny when you start to think about it. But don’t, or your tongue will get all tangled up and then they really will sound weird.

jeruba jeruba jeruba jeruba jeruba jeruba jeruba hee hee jeruba jeruba jeruba je.. hee hee.. jerbuba jebuba jerubrajerubajeruhhhhhaaaaahahahahahaha! you’re right! ha ha ha ha
jerubububujerruuu oh I can’t stand it any more hahahhee hee hee

It’s also interesting in its form, since it starts with a K and ends in -en like “children” and “oxen”, except that those are plurals and “kitchen” is singular, ie we don’t say “one kitch-two kitchen”. It is of course possible that it could have derived from something like that, in the same sense that nobody here except Jeruba knows the singular of “dice”. Just a wild guess though.

And of course, even though ragingloli was joking, it is possible that it comes from some german word originally meaning “small kit” where “kit” could have meant anything from “cook room” to “larder”. Or even “cell(ar)”.

So, Jeruba and I are the the only two entities on Fluther who realize that if you lose one of your pair of dice, you then only have one die??

There may be some folk from the other side of the pond who may dispute that, however as dice is used for both singular and plural in the British Isles.

But, we have a sticky situation, in comparing it to words of similar form, which gives rise to the little couplet:

———————————————————————————————————————

A piece of cheese the size of a die

Can bait the trap for a nibbling mie…..
—————————————————————————-

or something to that effect.

I also assume that there are plenty of folks around here who are aware of the phrase “the die is cast”......?

:)........:)

“mie” could have actually been right, since the word derives from Greek “mys” which incidentally is the root word for “muscle”. The plural for both was “myes”

@Jack79 “mouse” is not derived from Greek. It’s from Old English “mus”, plural “mys”.

I think one can safely assume that if a word appears in English in 1230 AD and Greek in 2300 BC, that it probably came from Greek originally, like most modern words (usually either directly, through Latin or through German). Not only obvious words such as “butter” but even typical Germanic words such as “butcher” and “stand” come from Greek. Which in turn probably took them from Sanskrit.

Where are you getting this information? You need more evidence than “the Greek word is attested earlier”. English “mouse/mice” is derived from Old English “mus/mys”, which is not borrowed from Greek because it exhibits the i-mutation in the plural characteristic of some Germanic nouns (also found in “foot/feet”, “man/men”, “louse/lice”, etc.) Greek does not have this. Also, the OED tells us that “mouse” is cognate with, but not borrowed from, Greek “mus”, and they tend to know what they’re talking about.

“butter” was borrowed from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek. “butcher” goes back to Old French “boc” (goat). “stand” is of Germanic origin.

oh I’m just making it all up

I just don’t think that it’s a mere coincidence that it’s “mus/mys” and “mys/myes” in Greek, rather than, say “arotron”. Or that “stand” comes from “stehen” which in turn comes from “istamai”. Yes, some of the connections are vague, but they are thousands of years old, and often just 1–2 original letters remain.

alrighty then.

You’re right, it’s not a coincidence. “mouse” looks similar to Greek “mus” and “stand” look similar to Greek “istamai” not because the English words are borrowed or derived from the Greek (they aren’t) but because English and Greek are both Indo-European languages.

Hi, i am sorry to disappoint you but the origin of word kitchen is from the old Albanian language and Albanian language gives this word the true meaning => “kitchen” = “the place where you boil”, (kuzhinë = ku-zien), Albanian language is an Indo-European language. Greetings from Albania!!

@ultimo_m Of course that is not true.

Everyone knows the kitchen is derived from “kittchen”, german for “prison”. And of course, the kitchen is the place where you imprison the wives.