Apricot

Apricot
Apricot fruit
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae Division: Magnoliophyta Class: Magnoliopsida Order: Rosales Family: Rosaceae Genus: Prunus Subgenus: Prunus Section: Armeniaca Species: P. armeniaca
Binomial name
Prunus armeniaca L.

The Apricot (Prunus armeniaca, "Armenian plum" in Latin, syn. Armeniaca vulgaris Lam."Tsiran" in Armenian) is a species of Prunus, classified with the plum in the subgenus Prunus. The native range is somewhat uncertain due to its extensive prehistoric cultivation, but most likely in northern and western China and Central Asia, possibly also Korea and Japan.^[1][2]

Description

Apricot tree in Central Cappadocia, Turkey

Fresh ripe fruit

It is a small tree, 8–12 m tall, with a trunk up to 40 cm diameter and a dense, spreading canopy. The leaves are ovate, 5–9 cm long and 4–8 cm wide, with a rounded base, a pointed tip and a finely serrated margin. The flowers are 2–4.5 cm diameter, with five white to pinkish petals; they are produced singly or in pairs in early spring before the leaves. The fruit is a drupe similar to a small peach, 1.5–2.5 cm diameter (larger in some modern cultivars), from yellow to orange, often tinged red on the side most exposed to the sun; its surface is usually pubescent. The single seed is enclosed in a hard stony shell, often called a "stone", with a grainy, smooth texture except for three ridges running down one side.^[1][3]

Cultivation and uses

History of cultivation

The Apricot was first cultivated in India in about 3000 BC.^[4] In Armenia it was known from ancient times, having been brought along the Silk Road;^[4] it has been cultivated there so long it is often thought to be native there.^[5][6] Its introduction to Greece is attributed to Alexander the Great,^[4] and the Roman General Lucullus (106-57 B.C.E.) also exported some trees, cherry, white heart cherry and apricot from Armenia to Europe. Subsequent sources were often much confused over the origin of the species. Loudon (1838) believed it had a wide native range including Armenia, Caucasus, the Himalaya, China and Japan.^[7] Nearly all sources presume that because it is named armeniaca, the tree must be native to or have originated in Armenia as the Romans knew it. For example, De Poerderlé asserts: "Cet arbre tire son nom de l'Arménie, province d'Asie, d'où il est originaire et d'où il fut porté en Europe ...." ("this tree takes its name from Armenia, province of Asia, where it is native, and whence it was brought to Europe ....")^[8] There is no scientific evidence to support such a view. Today the cultivars have spread to all parts of the globe with climates that support it.

Apricots have been cultivated in Persia since antiquity, and dried ones were an important commodity on Persian trade routes. Apricots remain an important fruit in modern-day Iran where they are known under the common name of Zard-ālū (Persian زردالو).

Egyptians usually dry apricot and sweeten it then use it to make a drink called "'amar al-dīn".

More recently, English settlers brought the apricot to the English colonies in the New World. Most of modern American production of apricots comes from the seedlings carried to the west coast by Spanish missionaries. Almost all U.S. production is in California, with some in Washington and Utah.^[9].

Many apricots are also cultivated in Australia, particularly South Australia where they are commonly grown in the region known as the Riverland and in a small town called Mypolonga in the Lower Murray region of the state. In states other than South Australia apricots are still grown, particularly in Tasmania and western Victoria and southwest New South Wales, but they are less common than in South Australia.

Cultivation

Fresh apricots on display.

Dried organic apricot, produced in Turkey. The colour is dark because it has not been treated with sulfur dioxide (E220).

Although often thought of as a "subtropical" fruit, this is actually false - the Apricot is native to a continental climate region with cold winters, although can grow in Mediterranean climates very well. The tree is slightly more cold-hardy than the peach, tolerating winter temperatures as cold as −30 °C or lower if healthy. The limiting factor in apricot culture is spring frosts: They tend to flower very early, around the time of the vernal equinox even in northern locations like the Great Lakes region, meaning spring frost often kills the flowers. Furthermore, the trees are sensitive to temperature changes during the winter season. In their native China, winters can be very cold, but temperatures tend to be more stable than in Europe and especially North America, where large temperature swings can occur in winter. The trees do need some winter cold (even if minimal) to bear and grow properly and do well in Mediterranean climate locations since spring frosts are less severe but there is some cool winter weather to allow a proper dormancy. The dry climate of these areas is best for good fruit production. Hybridisation with the closely related Prunus sibirica (Siberian Apricot; hardy to −50°C but with less palatable fruit) offers options for breeding more cold-tolerant plants.^[10]

Apricot cultivars are most often grafted on plum or peach rootstocks. A cutting of an existing apricot plant provides the fruit characteristics such as flavour, size, etc., but the rootstock provides the growth characteristics of the plant. Apricots and plums can hybridize with each other and produce fruit that are variously called pluots, plumcots, or apriums.

Apricots have a chilling requirement of 300 to 900 chilling units. They are hardy in USDA zones 5 through 8. Some of the more popular cultivars of apricots include Blenheim, Wenatchee Moorpark, Tilton, and Perfection.

There is an old adage that an apricot tree will not grow far from the mother tree. The implication is that apricots are particular about the soil conditions in which they are grown. They prefer a well-drained soil with a pH of 6.0 to 7.0. If fertilizer is needed, as indicated by yellow-green leaves, then 1/4 pound of 10-10-10 fertilizer should be applied in the second year. Granular fertilizer should be scattered beneath the branches of the tree. An additional 1/4 pound should be applied for every year of age of the tree in early spring, before growth starts. Apricots are self-compatible and do not require pollinizer trees, with the exception of the 'Moongold' and 'Sungold' cultivars, which can pollinate each other. Apricots are susceptible to numerous bacterial diseases including bacterial canker and blast, bacterial spot and crown gall. They are susceptible to an even longer list of fungal diseases including brown rot, Alternaria spot and fruit rot, and powdery mildew. Other problems for apricots are nematodes and viral diseases, including graft-transmissible problems.

Production trends

Apricot output in 2005

Top Ten Apricot Producers — 2005 (1,000 tonnes)
Turkey	390
Iran	285
Italy	232
Pakistan	220
Greece	196
France	181
Algeria	145
Spain	136
Japan	123
Morocco	103
Syria	101
World Total	1916
Source:[11]

Turkey is the leading apricot producer,^[12] followed by Iran. In Armenia apricots are grown in Ararat Valley.

Kernels

Main article: Apricot kernel

Seeds or kernels of the apricot grown in central Asia and around the Mediterranean are so sweet that they may be substituted for almonds. The Italian liqueur Amaretto and amaretti biscotti are flavoured with extract of apricot kernels rather than almonds. Oil pressed from these cultivars has been used as cooking oil.

Medicinal and non-food uses

Cyanogenic glycosides (found in most stone fruit seeds, bark, and leaves) are found in high concentration in apricot seeds. Laetrile, a purported alternative treatment for cancer, is extracted from apricot seeds. As early as the year 502, apricot seeds were used to treat tumors, and in the 17th century apricot oil was used in England against tumors and ulcers. However, in 1980 the National Cancer Institute in the USA described laetrile to be an ineffective cancer treatment.^[13]

In Europe, apricots were long considered an aphrodisiac, and were used in this context in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as an inducer of childbirth, as depicted in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.

Due to their high fiber to volume ratio, dried apricots are sometimes used to relieve constipation or induce diarrhea. Effects can be felt after eating as few as three.

Research shows that of any food, apricots possess the highest levels and widest variety of carotenoids . Carotenoids are antioxidants that help prevent heart disease, reduce "bad cholesterol" levels, and protect against cancer . In traditional Chinese medicine, apricots are considered helpful in regenerating body fluids, detoxifying, and quenching thirst.

Some claim that the kernels also have healthy properties, including toning the respiratory system and alleviating a cough . However, the tip of the apricot holds a concentrated amount of the chemical laetrile, which can be upsetting to the system . The tips of the seeds should be removed and consumption should be limited to no more than five a day .

Etymology

The scientific name armeniaca was first used by Gaspard Bauhin in his Pinax Theatri Botanici (page 442), referring to the species as mala armeniaca "Armenian apple". Most believed and many still believe that it came from Pliny the Elder; however, it is not used by Pliny or any other classical author, even in Late Latin. Linnaeus took up Bauhin's epithet in the first edition of his Species Plantarum in 1753.^[14] A popular name for this species is apricock.

The epithet probably is derived from an etymological identification of a tree mentioned in Pliny with the apricot. Pliny says "We give the name of apples (mala) ... to peaches (persica) and pomegranates (granata) ...."^[15] Later in the same section he states "The Asiatic peach ripens at the end of autumn, though an early variety (praecocia) ripens in summer - these were discovered within the last thirty years ...."

From this praecocia comes the standard etymology of "apricot". The classical authors connected armeniaca with praecocia:^[16] Pedanius Dioscorides' "... Ἀρμενιακὰ, Ῥωμαιστὶ δὲ βρεκόκκια"^[17] and Martial's "Armeniaca, et praecocia latine dicuntur".^[18] Putting together the Armeniaca and the mala obtains the well-known epithet, but there is no evidence the ancients did it; Armeniaca alone meant the apricot.

Accordingly the American Heritage Dictionary under apricot derives praecocia from praecoquus, "cooked or ripened beforehand", becoming Greek πραικόκιον "apricot" and Arabic al-barqūq "apricot" (although in most of the Arab world the word now means "plum"). The English name comes from earlier "abrecock" in turn from the Middle French abricot, from Catalan abercoc.^[19] Both the latter and Spanish albaricoque were adaptations of the Arabic, dating from the Moorish occupation of Spain. However, in Argentina and Chile the word for "apricot" is damasco, which probably indicates that to the Spanish settlers of Argentina the fruit was associated with Damascus in Syria.^[20]

The anecdotal evidence is the only link between the apricot and Pliny's tree, but even if true, the origin of the word is not the origin of the tree. The Romans had no idea why the tree was called armeniaca and presumed as did later botanists that it was "from Armenia", whatever that should mean. Scientifically nothing at all about the evolution or production of the wild tree or any of its cultivars or about the native range at the time of the Romans or any other time in history is implied. At best the tradition reflects Roman literary opinion concerning some now obscure horticultural events.

In Armenian it is called tziran (ծիրան), in Chinese it is called xìng (杏), in Hindi it is called zardalu, in Japanese it is called anzu (杏子, 杏 or アンズ) and in Urdu it is called khúbánī (ﺧﯘﺑﺎﻧﯽ).

In culture

The Chinese associate the apricot with education and medicine. For instance, the classical word 杏壇 (literally: 'Apricot altar') which means 'educational circle', is still widely used in written language. Chuang Tzu, a Chinese philosopher in 4th century BCE, had told a story that Confucius taught his students in a forum among the wood of apricot.

The fact that Apricot season is very short has given rise to the very common Egyptian Arabic expression "fil-mishmish ("in apricot [season]"), generally uttered as a riposte to an unlikely prediction, or as a rash promise to fulfill a request.

In The Wizard of Oz, the Cowardly Lion sings, "What puts the ape in the apricot? Courage!"

Among American tank-driving soldiers, apricots are taboo, by superstition. Tankers will not eat apricots, allow apricots onto their vehicles, and often will not even say the word "apricot". This superstition stems from Sherman tank breakdowns purportedly happening in the presence of cans of apricots.^[21]

Dreaming of apricots, in English folklore, is said to be good luck.

The Turkish idiom "bundan iyisi Şam'da kayısı" (literally, the only thing better than this is an apricot in Damascus) means "it doesn't get any better than this" and used when something is the very best it can be; like a delicious apricot from Damascus.

See also

• List of apricot diseases
• Apricot kernel
• Pluot a cross hybrid of plum and apricot
• Prunus mume (or Ume, or Japanese Apricot)
• Amygdalin (or Laetrile)
• Apricot Project

References

External links

Wiktionary

Screenshot of wiktionary.org home page
URL	http://www.wiktionary.org/
Slogan	the free dictionary
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Online dictionary
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Multi-lingual (over 150)
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia community
Launched	December 12, 2002
Alexa rank	~1200
Current status	active

Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the Web site.

Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in Thesauruses and lexicons. Additionally, the English Wiktionary includes Wikisaurus, a category that serves as a thesaurus, including lists of slang words,^[1] and the Simple English Wiktionary, compiled using the Basic English subset of the English language.

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL.^[2] As of November 2006, Wiktionary features over 1.5 million entries across its 171 language editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 958,000 entries. English Wiktionary was surpassed in early 2006 by the French Wiktionary, only to regain the top position in September 2006. French later overtook English again, but in August 2008, English Wiktionary overtook French again. During September 2008, the French and English Wiktionaries traded top position twice more. French is currently the second largest with over 937,000 entries. Eight Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.

The use of bots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions (data from November 2007).

Despite Wiktionary's large number of entries, most of the entries and many of the definitions at the project's largest language editions were created by bots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously-published dictionaries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary^[3] created 163,000 of the entries there.^[4] Only 259 entries remain (each containing many definitions) on Wiktionary from the original import by Websterbot from public domain sources; the majority of those imports have been split out to thousands of proper entries manually. Another one of these bots, "ThirdPersBot," was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person conjugations that would not receive their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form of smoulder." Excluding these 163,000 entries, the English Wiktionary would have about 137,000 entries, including terms unique to languages other than English, making it smaller than most monolingual print dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, has 615,000 headwords, while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords). It should be noted, though, that more detailed statistics now exist to more clearly distinguish genuine entries from minor (small) entries.

The English Wiktionary, however does not rely on bots to the extent that somewhat smaller editions do. The French and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese.^[5] These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's offering. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported the approximately 20,000 entries in the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely-licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English and German.^[6]

The logo designed by "Smurrayinchester". Chosen by a contest at Meta-Wiki, it is used by seventeen Wiktionary editions.

Most of Wiktionary currently uses a textual logo designed by Brion Vibber, a MediaWiki developer.^[7] Despite frequent discussion of modifying or replacing the logo, a four-phase contest held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006^[8] did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped. As of June 2007, the French, Turkish, Vietnamese language, Arabic, Italian, Swedish, Korean, Dutch, Lithuanian, Persian, Sicilian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Simple English, Corsican, Wolof, and Yiddish editions have switched to the contest-chosen logo or variations of it; the remaining editions use either the textual logo or, in the case of the Galician Wiktionary, a logo that depicts a dictionary bearing the Galician coat of arms.

Critical reception

Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah’s Ark" for The New Yorker, (November 6, 2006)^[9]

There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary. There’s not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!" might be Wiktionary’s motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we can cobble one together ourselves?

Wiktionary isn’t so much republican or democratic as Maoist. And it’s only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers. If you look up the word "Webster" in the Wiktionary, you will be redirected to this handy tip:

Noah Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911 (published by Merriam-Webster, Springfield, MA) is a public domain dictionary, as is a 1913 edition, that can be used to empower Wiktionary with more definitions.

But, hey, at least they got his first name right.

Keir Graff’s review for Booklist was less critical:

Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there’s a market. And it’s wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today’s fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it’s best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources.

References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks in The Nashua Telegraph described it as wild and woolly.^[10] (Wooly is defined as "confused" and "unrestrained."^[11]) One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia.^[12] In 2005, PC Magazine rated Wiktionary as one of the Internet's "Top 101 Web Sites,"^[13] although little information was given about the site.

Wiktionary statistics

See also

• OmegaWiki, a translating multilingual dictionary based on an extension of MediaWiki.

References

External links

• Wiktionary front page
  • English Wiktionary
• Wiktionary's Multilingual Statistics
• Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
• Pages about Wiktionary in Meta.
• The Wiktionary Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles.

• The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction at Project Gutenberg