OU blog

Personal Blogs

Richard Walker

Etymology of 'Rollmop'

Visible to anyone in the world

I had rollmops for lunch today and decided to look into the origin of the name. A rollmop as you probably know is a pickled herring fillet, rolled up and usually held together with a short wooden skewer. I got the roll bit but the mops was a mystery.

I looked it up in the OED and it turns out it's a 19c borrowing from German Rollmops, which is Roll + mops, meaning 'pug', so Rollmops literally means 'roll pug'. The plural is Rollmöpse, Rollmops being the singular, and English rollmop a back formation.

This is a bit like 'pea', which is a back formation from 'pease', as in pease-pudding. 'Pease' sounded like a plural and so people assumed one of them would be a pea.

Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 2923994