The name “eggplant” seems strange when you picture the large, glossy purple vegetable in the supermarket. But the name is a clue to what some eggplants once looked like.

In the 1700s, Europeans were familiar with varieties that produced small, white or yellowish fruits about the size and shape of hen's eggs. They looked so much like eggs growing on a plant that English speakers began calling them eggplants. The name stuck even as larger purple varieties became more familiar.

But not everyone calls them eggplants. In Britain, they're aubergines, a name with a much longer journey behind it. The word can be traced from ancient Sanskrit through Persian and Arabic, then into European languages and eventually French aubergine, which English borrowed. Brinjal, widely used in South Asia, is another branch of the same linguistic family.

So one vegetable ended up with very different names: one traveled across languages and continents for centuries, while the other came from the simple fact that some eggplants really did look like eggs.