دلاع

Where it comes from

Sometimes considered a Berber borrowing, which would coincide with the spread of the watermelon in the Early Middle Ages from West Africa, however first attested in Imperial Aramaic as a plural 𐡃𐡋𐡏𐡍 (dlʿn, “gourds”) in the first quarter of the 5ᵗʰ century BCE, and it occurs in Hebrew from the Mishnaic period as דְּלַעַת (dəlaʿáṯ, “gourd”). The Arabic root د ل ع (d l ʕ) related to “sticking out, hanging out” is connected to the word in view of the watermelon’s way of growth. That it is first attested in Aramaic and appears only more than half a millennium later in Hebrew, sometimes with an Aramaizing plural ending, and the measure which the Arabic exposes varies in the first vowel and is in both cases for this semantic field more common in Aramaic than Arabic, points to the word having passed into Arabic from Aramaic.