Q: For a number of years now there’s been controversy over the term “milk” being used for plant-based products. However, I believe it has been used that way for centuries. Did “milk” originally refer to a process of drawing out fluid, and then to any fluid produced by that method?
A: The notion of plants producing “milk” has indeed been around for centuries, though the animal sense came somewhat earlier. Here’s the story.
If you go back far enough into prehistory, the word “milk” ultimately comes from melg-, an Indo-European root, reconstructed by linguists, that originally meant “to rub” and then became “to milk.”
Etymologists and historical linguists generally believe that the Indo-European base gave rise to meluk-ja-, the prehistoric Germanic root for “giving milk,” which led to the Old English verb melcan and noun meolc.
However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “the origin of the vowel [u] between l and k in the Germanic base [meluk-ja-] is problematic and has led some to suggest that the noun and the verb may not ultimately be cognate.”
In addition, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots points out “the unexplained fact that no common Indo-European noun for milk can be reconstructed.”
We think it’s probable that both the noun and the verb “milk” do indeed ultimately come from the Proto-Indo-European root. We haven’t seen convincing evidence that contradicts this.
As for the English etymology, the noun appeared before the verb in Old English. It originally referred to the fluid secreted by mammary glands, but that sense soon widened to include the milky liquid from plants.
The OED’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from an Old English translation (circa 900) of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), an eighth-century Latin church history by the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede:
“He symle in þæm feowertiglecan fæstenne ær Eastrum æne siða in dæge gereorde, 7 elles ne peah nemne medmicel hlafes mid þinre meolc” (“He would always observe the forty-day fast before Easter, eating only once a day, and then only a small amount of bread with thin milk”).
The first OED citation for the milky liquid from plants (in the compound wyrtemeolc, plantmilk) is in an 11th-century Old English translation of Herbarium, a 4th-century Latin herbal, or book about plants and their medicinal uses:
“Wið weartan genim þysse ylcan wyrtemeolc & clufþungan wos, do to þære weartan” (“Against warts, take this same plant’s [spurge’s] milk and clover’s juice, apply to the warts”).
The passage is from an illustrated manuscript (Cotton MS Vitellius C III, f. 29v) at the British Library, which describes it as “an Old English translation of a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognised as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.”
A search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that “coconut milk” is now the most popular of the plant-based terms, followed by almond, soy, oat, rice, and cashew milks.
The earliest OED citation for the verb “milk” is from an 11th-century manuscript (Julius MS, 15 September, at the British Library) of the Old English Martyrology, a collection of the lives of saints and other church figures:
“Se geþyrsta mon meolcode ða hinde ond dranc þa meolc” (“The thirsty man milked the hind and drank the milk”).
Finally, here’s an image on the British Library’s website of a page from the Old English herbal mentioned above:
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