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Aug 3, 2020 · 1500s, earlier haliday (c. 1200), from Old English haligdæg "holy day, consecrated day, religious anniversary; Sabbath," from halig "holy" (see holy) + dæg "day" (see day); in 14c. meaning both "religious festival" and "day of exemption from labor and recreation," but pronunciati
By 1694 the word was listed in Gilles Ménage 's Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue françoise, with the meaning of a shared meal, with each guest paying for himself, but with no reference to eating outdoors. [2] It reached the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française in 1840 with the same meaning.
Jul 7, 2019 · Where the word ‘picnic’ comes from is something of a mystery. The French root may derive from the verb piquer (‘to peck’ or ‘to pick’) and the noun nique (‘a small amount’ or ‘nothing whatsoever’); but this is just speculation. What is certain, however, is that, originally, it did not refer to anything we would now recognise ...
Jul 22, 2016 · MEANING. a meal eaten outdoors. ORIGIN. This word is from French pique-nique, probably formed with reduplication from the verb piquer, to pick. (Similarly, pêle-mêle, the origin of English pell-mell, was probably formed with reduplication from the verb mêler, to mix.)
Sep 12, 2023 · The English word picnic ultimately comes from the French pique-nique, although it may have come via German. The French word originally referred to a meal where everyone paid for or contributed their share of the food, but later came to mean a meal eaten outdoors. The pique comes from the verb piquer, to stick or sting, to bite like an insect.
Nov 13, 2023 · The word picnic derives from the 17th-century French term “pique-nique,” which referred to a social gathering where attendees each contributed with a portion of food or another useful item. The term picnic did not appear in the English language until around 1800, but it did not originate in the United States.
Picnic's first appearance in English — with that spelling — came in 1748, with a description involving social drinking and card-playing, and in 1815, picnic was first used as a verb. In nineteenth-century America, landscape painters in the Hudson River School often included picnickers in the foregrounds of their work to add a sense of scale ...
