why dehydrated grapes and plums are called raisins and prunes, respectively, but we don’t name other dehydrated fruits different from their original names?

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Where did the naming convention come from for these two fruits and why isn’t it applied to others?

Edit: this simple question has garnered far more attention than I thought it would. The bottom line is some English royals and French peasants used their own words for the same thing but used their respective versions for the crop vs the product. Very interesting. Also, I learned other languages have similar occurrences that don’t translate into English. Very cool.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Grapes and plums could not be imported fresh to England, because they needed to be transported by boats over long durations.

So French exporters would dry their fruit before sending them over, and label them “raisin” and “prunes”, which are just the French words for grapes and plums.

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