fruition

The word fruition doesn’t come from the word fruit, but enough people have made the association between those two words over the years that fruit actually changed the meaning of the word fruition!

fruition comes from the Latin verb fruī ‘to enjoy’, whereas fruit comes from the Latin frūctus ‘produce, fruit, crop’. They’re not directly related.

But the similarity between fruit and fruition in English caused the meaning of fruition to gradually shift from ‘an act of enjoyment’ to ‘having born fruit’.

But there’s a twist: I said that the words fruit and fruition aren’t directly related, but they are indirectly related because the Latin word frūctus does come from the Latin word fruī! frūctus is the past participle of fruī, so it originally meant ‘an enjoyment, delight, or satisfaction’. Later it expanded its meaning to include the things produced to create that satisfaction, such as produce and crops.

Below is a diagram showing how the two words evolved in parallel.

(Download a high-resolution SVG version here.)

📖 Recommended Reading

• A natural history of Latin: The story of the world’s most successful language (Janson, 2007)
• Ad infinitum: A biography of Latin (Ostler, 2007)
• Why do languages change? (Trask, 2009)

📑 Sources

• Etymonline: fruition
• Etymonline: fruit