Pumpkin

How to spell pumpkin

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pumpkin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pumpkin mean?

1. nounA large, round, orange-skinned gourd grown for food and for autumn decoration.

Pumpkin in a sentence

• She roasted the pumpkin to make a thick autumn soup.

• The children carved a face into a hollowed pumpkin for the party.

Where does pumpkin come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word pumpkin traces back to the Greek pepon, which literally meant 'ripe' and was used of a large melon eaten only when fully matured in the sun. Greek passed this to Latin as pepo, a kind of large melon, which travelled into Old French as pompon and then into early English as 'pompion' or 'pumpion' during the 1500s. English speakers in the American colonies later reshaped that ending, swapping the old -ion for the homely diminutive -kin (the same little ending seen in 'napkin' and 'lambkin'), giving the modern pumpkin by the 1600s. The slightly surprising spelling trap is the buried letter 'p' inside 'pump', which is genuinely there because of the Greek pepon and is not just a phonetic accident, even though many people pronounce it as 'punkin'. The same pepon root quietly survives in the modern word 'melon'.

How the word is built

• pump- (from Greek pepon: ripe, cooked by the sun)
• -kin (diminutive suffix)