On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Look up aubergine, brinjal, or eggplant in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Most commonly purple, the spongy, absorbent fruit is used eggplant baba ganoush recipe several cuisines.

Typically used as a vegetable in cooking, it is a berry by botanical definition. It was originally domesticated from the wild nightshade species thorn or bitter apple, S. This section does not cite any sources. The eggplant is a delicate, tropical perennial plant often cultivated as a tender or half-hardy annual in temperate climates.

Botanically classified as a berry, the fruit contains numerous small, soft, edible seeds that taste bitter because they contain or are covered in nicotinoid alkaloids, like the related tobacco. India, where it continues to grow wild, Africa, or South Asia. It has been cultivated in southern and eastern Asia since prehistory. The aubergine is unrecorded in England until the 16th century. This plant groweth in Egypt almost everywhere bringing foorth fruite of the bignes of a great Cucumber.

We have had the same in our London gardens, where it hath borne flowers, but the winter approching before the time of ripening, it perished: notwithstanding it came to beare fruite of the bignes of a goose egge one extraordinarie temperate yeere but never to the full ripenesse. Because of the plant’s relationship with various other nightshades, the fruit was at one time believed to be extremely poisonous. The flowers and leaves can be poisonous if consumed in large quantities due to the presence of solanine. The eggplant has a special place in folklore. In 13th-century Italian traditional folklore, the eggplant can cause insanity. In 19th-century Egypt, insanity was said to be “more common and more violent” when the eggplant is in season in the summer. The plant and fruit have a profusion of English names.

The name eggplant is usual in North American English and Australian English. The white, egg-shaped varieties of the eggplant’s fruits are also known as garden eggs, a term first attested in 1811. The Oxford English Dictionary records that between 1797 and 1888, the name vegetable egg was also used. Bāḏinjān is itself a loan-word in Arabic, whose earliest traceable origins lie in the Dravidian languages.

Brinjal or brinjaul, usual in South Asia and South African English. 1717 manuscript of a work by the thirteenth-century Persian Zakariya al-Qazwini. All the aubergine-type names have the same origin, in the Dravidian languages. Modern descendants of this ancient Dravidian word include Malayalam vaṟutina and Tamil vaṟutuṇai. The Indic word vātiṅ-gaṇa was then borrowed into Persian as bādingān.

From Arabic, the word was borrowed into European languages. The French name was then borrowed into British English, appearing there first in the late eighteenth century. Thus although Indian English brinjal ultimately originates in languages of the Indian Subcontinent, it actually came into Indian English via Portuguese. Illustrations of an eggplant from a possibly fifteenth-century French manuscript of a work by Matthaeus Platearius.