History & Folklore

The Salty Words in Your Vocabulary

Salad, sauce, salary, halogen and the -wich towns of England: the surprising story of how the ancient words for salt shaped English.

By The Salt AlmanacPublished November 8, 20266 min read

Short answer: Dozens of everyday English words come from the ancient words for salt: Latin sal, Greek hals, and Old English sealt. You use them every time you order a salad, pour sauce or get paid a salary.

From Latin sal: the kitchen words

Romans used sal for salt and salsus for “salted,” and a surprising share of the English menu grew from those two words.

• Salad comes from the Latin idea of salted greens: vegetables seasoned with salt.
• Sauce and salsa both come from Latin salsa, “salted”: a salted liquid poured over food. Spanish kept the older form; English got sauce through French.
• Saucer began as a small dish for holding sauce, long before it sat under a teacup.
• Sausage traces back to Late Latin salsicia, meat seasoned and preserved with salt.
• Salami is Italian, from salare, “to salt.”
• Saline and salinity describe how salty something is.

Salary: a true link, a doubtful story

Salary comes from Latin salarium, a regular payment, and salarium really does share its root with sal. The popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, though, has no supporting evidence. Word historians trace it to nineteenth-century dictionaries, and nobody knows exactly how salt became linked to pay. It's a good example of a “fact” that sounds right and gets repeated without proof.

From Greek hals: the science words

• Halite is the mineral name for rock salt.
• Halogen means “salt former,” from hals (salt) and a Greek word for producing. German chemist Johann Schweigger proposed the name in 1811, and Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius applied it to fluorine, chlorine and iodine in 1826. Chlorine, one half of table salt, is a halogen.
• Halophyte (salt-loving plant) and halotherapy (salt therapy) come from the same root.

The word salt itself

English salt comes from Old English sealt, a cousin of German Salz, Latin sal and Greek hals. All of them descend from one very old word, which shows how long people have needed to name it.

Salt on the map

• The “-wich” towns of England. The ending -wich comes from Old English wīc, borrowed from Latin vicus, a village or settlement. In salt-making places it came to mean the buildings around a brine pit and, later, a salt-works. That's why the inland brine towns of Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich and Droitwich carry the name; Droitwich was already paying salt dues when Domesday Book was compiled in 1086.
• Salzburg in Austria means “salt castle,” and the river beside it is the Salzach, the “salt river.” Its wealth came from nearby salt mines.
• Hallstatt, also in Austria, is home to one of the oldest known salt mines, and the Hall- in its name is tied to salt-making: older accounts link it to a Celtic word for salt, while some scholars now trace it to a Germanic word for the salt crust that forms on boiling brine.

Salty sayings

• Worth your salt: good at your job, worth what you're paid.
• Salt of the earth: a good, honest person; the phrase comes from the Bible (Gospel of Matthew 5:13).
• Take it with a grain of salt: be a little skeptical. It translates Latin cum grano salis; an antidote recipe in Pliny the Elder may have inspired it, though that's uncertain. The English phrase on its own appears by 1647.
• Rub salt in the wound: make a bad situation worse.
• An old salt: an experienced sailor, after years on salty seas.

Try this

Next time you read a menu, count the salt words. Sauce, salsa, salad, sausage, salami: a single Roman word is still seasoning English two thousand years later.