The English word truffle is borrowed, by way of Old French, from the Latin tūber — literally "lump", "swelling" or "tuberous root". An older folk-Latin form, terrae tūber ("tuber of the earth"), seems to have shaped the word as it travelled through Romance dialects, where the unstressed second syllable softened and shifted into the forms we recognise today.
The Romance descendants
Italian uses tartufo, French truffe, Spanish and Portuguese trufa, Catalan tòfona. All these forms trace back to the same Latin root, but the path was not straight. Folk etymology, regional dialects and the influence of nearby words — particularly tuffer in old Provençal — produced a small family of words for a small family of fungi.
Into English
English picked up the word from French in the late sixteenth century. By Shakespeare's time the spelling and meaning were settled. The plural is regular — one truffle, two truffles — but the singular is also used collectively, as in "truffle season" or "truffle hunting", much as English uses "fish" or "deer" without a plural -s in collective contexts.
A note on capitalisation
The genus name Tuber is always capitalised and italicised, as is the convention for botanical Latin: Tuber magnatum, Tuber melanosporum, Tuber uncinatum, Tuber aestivum. The common English names — white truffle, Périgord truffle, Burgundy truffle, summer truffle — are not capitalised unless they begin a sentence or contain a proper noun (Périgord, Alba).
The chocolate is not the same
A "chocolate truffle" is a chocolate confection rolled in cocoa powder. It is named only for its visual resemblance to a knobbly, dust-covered truffle dug from the earth — the two share nothing else. The confection is a nineteenth-century French invention; the fungus is older than written history.
- Latin root
- tūber
- Italian
- tartufo
- French
- truffe
- Plural
- truffles
For the German-language counterpart on grammatical gender (der/die Trüffel?), see the German companion article on trueffel-shop.com.