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

Question

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.

In: Other

Answer 1

I like how you chose this sub instead of r/NoStupidQuestions because you would otherwise have to brace yourself against a flurry of highly technical information or something.

Answer 2

Weirdly, the dehydrated names are both the french names for the fresh fruits.

There is probably something there…

Answer 3

We have same thing in Ukrainian. For example dried apricot is kuraga, dried grapes are rodzynky, plums (specific ones) chornoslyv, but there are no dedicated words to dried cherries, pears and other fruits and berries.

Answer 4

Prunes are dehydrated plums?!? It took me 40 years on this planet to find that out? WTF!?!

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I love it when this happens. My mind has been blown.

Answer 5

Yeah, I get momentarily confused when I see fresh grapes at the store and in small print it says raisins on them, so I assumed raisin is French for grape.