2893: Spice and Species Nov 22, 2024

Spices are not a specific botanical distinction, but come from an earlier sense of “special determining quality”. In fact, ‘spices’, ‘specific/special’, and ‘species’ all come from this root, but none of the same meaning. Rather, the Latin ‘speciēs’ meant “kind; sort”, but in the sense of ‘wares; goods’. Developing into “defining quality” of anything, the word branched off into particular words for quintessential elements of something or other, so the Old French ‘espice’ meant “the quality of food” i.e. flavor, and eventually led to ‘spice’, but also ‘species’ being the essential quality of a type of animal, and so on.