Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org posted a Big List entry for tarot focusing, as always, on its history in English, but he says “The name is a borrowing from the French tarot, which in turn is from the Italian slang/dialectal *tarocco (plural tarocchi) meaning fool or foolish,” and I wondered if it could be taken farther back. Wiktionary told me that the Italian word was “Borrowed from Sicilian taroccu (‘Citrus sinensis’), from Arabic تُـرُنْج (turunj, ‘citron’),” the Arabic entry said it was “أُتْرُنْج (ʔutrunj) with epenthesis,” and that link said:
Borrowed from Aramaic אַתְרוּגָּא (ʾaṯruggā, ʾaṯrungā), from Old Persian [script needed] (turung), from Sanskrit मातुलुङ्ग (mātuluṅga). Cognate to Classical Syriac ܐܛܪܘܓܐ (ʾaṭruggā, ʾaṭrungā).
And the Sankrit word was “Borrowed from Dravidian, compare Tamil மாதுளம் (mātuḷam), மாதுளங்காய் (mātuḷaṅkāy, ‘pomegranate, citron lemon’).”
I thought that was interesting enough to pass along; note that only the t is left of the etymon.
Update. As Giacomo Ponzetto and Nat Shockley point out in the comment thread, the Wiktionary etymology is very implausible. See below for details.
I suppose Hebrew ‘etrog ‘citron’, familiar to many Jews from the holiday of Sukkot, is a cognate. But I don’t see an explanation of why a citrus fruit meant “fool” and why a slang word for “fool” meant a card game.
I once had to do a translation at university which had a random list of items on sale at a market including “tarocchi canori”. Neither “singing tarot cards” or “singing Sicilian oranges” seemed plausible but interesting to see the claim that they could have been etymologically related.,,
I suppose Hebrew ‘etrog ‘citron’, familiar to many Jews from the holiday of Sukkot, is a cognate.
Apparently so; see this 2011 post for details.
For a proposal relating to the sense ‘Tarot card’, see for example the TLFi here and the FEW on Middle French tarau here, the end of the article for Arabic etymon Arabic ṭarḥ (see especially the very end of the article). The reference to G. de Gregorio ‘Nuovo gruzzoletto di voci arabo-sicule’ Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 49, p. 531 can be found here. The article on tara ‘parte de peso que se rebaja’ (< Arabic ṭarḥ) in Coromines and Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico is also worth consulting, but the Internet Archive is down, so I won’t link there.
I don’t think anyone knows where tarocco ‘variety of blood orange’ comes from.
The Fool is an important Tarot card, from what little I understand, so maybe that’s the connection.
As for the link to citron, maybe people back then thought only fools would suck on a lemon, as the expression goes.
the Internet Archive is down
Apparently there was a big data breach, and the user name/email address/password file was leaked. Many are rushing to change their passwords (a good idea), making the site unresponsive.
From the Xxixxer feed: they are fighting off a big DDoS attack.
The passwords in the file were salted-encrypted.
Data were not corrupted.
They are upgrading the systems.
אַתְרוּגָּא (ʾaṯruggā, ʾaṯrungā), from Old Persian [script needed] (turung), from Sanskrit मातुलुङ्ग (mātuluṅga)
There is no Old Persian turung ‘citron’. There is however a Middle Persian ⟨wʾtlng⟩ wādrang ‘citron’ (New Persian بالنگ bālang). The Aramaic is doubtless a loanword from a related Middle Iranian form. And the Middle Iranian words are doubtless loanwords from India.
Mandaic has trunga with no initial vowel, and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic apparently has similar forms: תרונגה. Syriac has ܛܪܘܓܐ ṭruggā (with ṭ !) as well as ܐܛܪܘܓܐ aṭruggā. I wonder if such ‘aphetic’ forms actually represent the older form, and other Aramaic varieties show prosthesis of a-. Was a Middle Iranian initial wā- segmented off in transmission as Aramaic wa- ‘and’? Maybe more tomorrow morning.
The Fool is an important Tarot card, from what little I understand, so maybe that’s the connection.
Oddly enough, one of the OED’s citations for “taroc” is
“1816
The pack of cards with which Tarocco is played, consists of two parts; the first is fifty-six cards of the usual Italian suits, Spade, Coppe, Bastoni, and Denari… The other part consists of twenty-two cards,..twenty-one of these are called Tarocchi, and the twenty-second Il Matto, or the fool.
S. W. Singer, Researches into History of Playing Cards 236″
So if that was true when tarocchi was first used, they were all the trumps except the Fool. But it’s a long way from Italy to England, and a long time from 1419 (from the Big List article) to 1816, so maybe that wasn’t so true.
Not to be confused with durak.
> The article on tara ‘parte de peso que se rebaja’ (< Arabic ṭarḥ)
Well that’s a fun proposal. It would make English tarot and tare (the weight of the vessel holding the commodity you’re trying to weigh) a doublet.
@Hat: Thanks for the link.
@Y: Well, that certainly shows that a card game can get a name meaning “fool”. At least one kind of card game.
The similarity in sound can probably be explained by the Mossi-Dagomba hegemony mentioned in another thread.
The Sicilian etymology can be safely assumed to be spurious. The first use of the word tarocchi to refer to tarot cards was at the other end of the Italian penninsula: the earliest mentions are from Brescia in 1502 and Avignon (!) in 1505; those are followed by many other examples in northern Italy, but it seems to have taken decades for the term to become current even in central Italy, let alone the south.
In the case of the Avignon example, the word already appeared in the French form taraux, in which the final x was probably pronounced originally, but in standard French that final consonant was unsurprisingly very soon dropped, giving rise to various other French spellings including tarots.
The most credible etymology I have seen so far is that it derives from taroc meaning tree trunk, which was used in some form from Lombardy to Catalonia. By the late 15th century (and possibly earlier), that word was being used figuratively at least in the Italian part of its range to mean a stupid or foolish person. Cf. “blockhead” in English.
It’s not at all surprising that someone gave a card game a name that meant something like fool, idiot, silly, foolish, etc.: people still use names like that for card games today. Y gave one example, but there are others, including some more from those early centuries.
Possibly I should also mention that tarocchi was probably chosen as the name in part because it had at least a few phonemes in common with the previous term trionfi, which had to be replaced because it had come to refer to trumps more generally, i.e. also in card games that did not use the tarot deck. Originally the tarot trumps were the only trumps that existed—the concept of trumps was first popularized through the invention of the tarot deck—but within a few decades the idea was transferred to games using the regular deck too, so a new word had to be found.
Trionfi in this sense is, of course, the origin of the English word trump.
As Nat Shockley already noted, Wiktionary is unreliable.
Better Italian dictionaries have two different entries for the playing card and the Sicilian orange, and refuse to commit to an etymology for either.
For the card, Battaglia reports:
For the orange, merely:
I should, however, disagree with Nat Shockley on the distinction between trionfi and tarocchi. A tarot deck has five suits: the usual Italian suits of spade, bastoni, coppe, denari and the unusual suit of trionfi.
There is no confusion between trionfi as a fixed suit in a tarot deck and the trump suit in other games, which is called either the briscola or the atout suit: in my experience, overwhelmingly the former in traditional card games and overwhelmingly the latter in bridge.
The problem is synecdoche. Battaglia’s position is that all 78 cards in the deck are tarocchi, while only the 22 special ones are trionfi. Treccani’s position is that only the 22 special cards are tarocchi, and the others are just regular cards tagging along. Battaglia is normally taken as the gold standard, but one could check corpus evidence for the relative prevalence of mentions to a mazzo di tarocchi (composed of tarots) vs. a mazzo dei tarocchi (including and characterized by tarots). Anyway it’s a distinction without a difference. It’s clear that tarocchi is used both for the special suit and for the whole deck, so the hair-splitting question is which way the synecdoche goes.
Finally, it seems more likely that the name of the card game gave rise to the adjective for foolishness (either out of contempt for the players, or because of the uniquely noticeable gameplay of the Fool card) than vice-versa, but all I can provide as reference is that Treccani doesn’t even list the adjectival meaning, and Battaglia puts it far down the list.
Finally, it seems more likely that the name of the card game gave rise to the adjective for foolishness (either out of contempt for the players, or because of the uniquely noticeable gameplay of the Fool card) than vice-versa
This is unlikely, both because it is easier to imagine the semantic shift going the other way—as noted earlier, we have other examples of card games being given derogatory names, but I know of no confirmed instances of derogatory terms deriving from the names of card games—and also because the earliest instances of taroc (also spelled taroch) to mean foolish predate the use of the term for the tarot cards: the first known examples of the former meaning are from 1494 and 1499.
As for trionfi versus tarocchi, it is incontestable that the tarot cards and game were originally referred to as trionfi, and only later as tarocchi. The tarot game and deck were invented by 1440 and were known at that time as trionfi, whereas there is no evidence of them being called tarocchi until 1502. All the known mentions of the game and the cards from before 1502 use only the term trionfi.
Some players would have continued to use the term trionfi to refer to the trumps in the tarocchi deck sometimes, precisely because trionfi continued to be the standard term for trumps in general, as I said above. So people could have used trionfi to refer to those trumps, just as they would with any other trumps. The term tarocchi was only necessary to distinguish the special trumps of the tarot deck from those used in regular decks.
The terms briscola (Italian) and atout (French) were not used as the word for trumps until considerably later. In the context of card games, a briscola was originally a sequence of cards that scored a certain number of points: the current form of the word is descended from earlier forms that include brezigola, verzigola, verzicola, and versicola, dating back to the 16th century. The trump sense came much later.
As Nat Shockley already noted, Wiktionary is unreliable.
Well, rats. I’ll add an update to that effect, and I hope someone cleans up the Wiktionary entry.
@Nat, what’s the reference for the taroc ‘tree trunk’/‘fool’ etymology?
Reminds me of Algerian ṭnǝh: “bollard” or “idiot”.
@Nat Shockley and Giacomo Ponzetto: Thanks for the interesting etymological information!
@Nat, what’s the reference for the taroc ‘tree trunk’/‘fool’ etymology?
Sorry to take so long to reply, but there were a couple of things I wanted to check that are now only accessible via the Wayback Machine.
The “foolish, silly, stupid, mad” meaning is stated clearly in various sources from 16th century Italy, including:
– Florio’s great 1598 Italian-English dictionary: Tarócco. see Da tarócco. Datarocco – foolish, gullish, wayward, froward, peeuish. Taroccare – to play at Tarócchi. Also to play the froward gull or peeuish ninnie.
(While we’re here, we can also note that Florio gives trionfo as the Italian word for “a trump at cards”, with trionfare as the corresponding verb: “to trump at cards”. The word briscola is not listed in his dictionary.)
– Francesco Piscina, Discorso … sopra l’ordine delle figure de tarocchi, 1565, connecting the “foolish” meaning to the “tarot” meaning:
questo sapevo io che molti diranno che un Tarocco ha favellato e trattato de Tarocchi, e se si può dire Tarocchamente
– Francesco Berni, Capitolo del Gioco della Primiera col Comento di messer Pietropaulo da San Chirico, 1526, doing the same but more explicitly:
…che altro non vuol dir Tarocco che ignocco, sciocco, Balocco…
The two sources from the 15th century are somewhat less clear, but nevertheless the meaning seems consistent with those of the 16th century:
– Giovan Giorgio Alione, Frotula de le dòne, ca. 1494: the date is tentative. The author’s works were not printed until 1521, but this and other minor works in the vernacular are thought to be from the poet’s younger years.
The poem was written in a mix of Piedmontese dialect and macaronic Latin and is difficult to understand, but taroch seems to refer to foolish husbands betrayed by their unfaithful wives.
Marì ne san dè au recioch
Secundum el Melchisedech
Lour fan hic. Preve hic et hec
Ma i frà, hic et hec et hoc
Ancôr gli è – d’i taroch
Chi dan zù da Ferragù
Cole chi per so zovent
Ne se san fer der sul tasche
Con o temp devantran masche
Quant gnuni ni dirà pù nent
So dagn per ciò gl’abion el ment
Cho diao san furb el cù.
For an attempted translation into Italian, see https://web.archive.org/web/20240215153903/http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=264
– Bassano Mantovano, Maccheronea del Bassano, before 1499, probably ca. 1495, a poem in macaronic Latin containing the following:
Erat mecum mea socrus unde putana
Quod foret una sibi pensebat ille tarochus
Et cito ni solvam mihi menazare comenzat
As for the “tree trunk/stump” meaning in various dialects from Lombardy etc., I found (after reviewing my sources) that it has so far only been documented with certainty from later centuries.
These include a Milanese-Italian-French dictionary from 1848, which dates the sense back to at least 1725: Vocabolario milanese-italiano-francese by Eugenio Cappelletti, p. 226:
Tarocch … Pedale. Toppo. Tronco. Il fusto dell’albero, appena reciso, che serve per far fuoco. Fino nella tariffa daziaria del 1725 trovasi la voce Tarocch in questo senso.
Compare also Florio’s 1598 definition of Tronco: a trunk, a stock, a log, a block, a stump, a stem without boughes. Also a bodie without a head. Also a troncheon or a bat. Also a loggerheaded felow, a block-headed dunce, a heauie-nole.
According to Lewis and Short, Classical Latin truncus already had much the same range of meanings: stem, trunk of tree, but also a piece cut off from a tree, and even “blockhead, dunce”. Lewis and Short say the word is from a root “tark-, truc-” meaning to break, tear off. Maybe “taroch” was a parallel derivation from that “tark-” root?
L&S is from 1879, basically an English version of Freund’s Latin/German dictionary, which itself was basically a translation of Forcellini’s 18th century monolingual dictionary. I wouldn’t trust any etymological information coming from there. Modern etymological dictinaries like Ernout/Meillet or de Vaan know nothing about this supposed root *tark-/truc. According to de Vaan “it seems that the most original form was the adj. *tru/onko- ‘maimed, robbed of its branches or head.’ This may or not be another adj. of ‘physical impediment’ in *-ko-.” Ernout/Meillet say more or less the same. De Vaan rejects attempts to connect the word with words in other IE languages for semantic reasons.
It is interesting that the meaning “blockhead, dunce”, ultimately taken from Forcellini (who quotes a couple of passages from Cicero), is not included in the much more up-to-date Oxford Latin Dictionary (either that, or it is so well hidden in the articles on truncus that I simply overlooked it; why is it that the serious Latin dictionaries all have a near unreadable layout?).
what’s the reference for the taroc ‘tree trunk’/‘fool’ etymology?
See Coromines–Pascual under tarugo. For LH readers without access to a library with these volumes (the Internet Archive still being down), the text for Coromines 1954 (I think) is available here, differing minimally from the later Coromines–Pascual. (Search on the word tarocchi in the text. There are also a few minor OCR errors in that online text.) Also note the cross-reference there to the entry for naipe, available here.
There are lots of similes for ‘fool’ in European languages (and their sphere), literally meaning some heavy inert object. ‘Log’ above, ‘brick’ or ‘rock’ in English (or a sack thereof), etc. Hebrew ‘dumb as a shoe’ is supposedly calqued after Polish (and elaborated into ארוך כמו שרוך, טיפש כמו נעל aróx kmo srox, tipéš kmo ná‘al ‘long as a shoelace, dumb as a shoe’, an insult suitable for tall males.)