The word originally entered English as an adaptation of the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque.
However, it was subsequently changed to match the related French word abricot (where the 't' is silent).
It is also useful to compare this to the Italian albercocca or albicocca and the Old Spanish albarcoque.
These all stem from the Spanish-Arabic al-borcoque, which itself comes from the Arabic al-burqūq (literally "the" + "birqūq").
This Arabic term was adapted from Greek, appearing in the writings of Dioscorides around the year 100 AD.
The Greek word was probably adapted from the Latin præcoquum, a variant of præcox (plural præcocia), which translates to "early-ripe" or "ripe in summer."
In earlier Roman times, the fruit was actually called the "Armenian plum" or "Armenian apple."
By around the year 350, the writer Palladius was using both terms, referring to them as "Armenian or early-ripe" fruits.
The reason we use a "p" in English (apricot) instead of a "b" (abricot) is likely due to a mistake in etymology.
In 1617, the scholar Minsheu explained the name as if it meant in aprico coctus, or "cooked in a sunny place."
This "sunny" explanation stuck, even though it was technically incorrect!
In the theory of the psychology of creativity, there are phenomena which constitute distortions of the motivational setting for creative problem-solving which are referred to as 'extrinsic rewards'. Management theory bumped into this kind of phenomenon with the advent of the introduction of the first appearance of 'gamification' as a motivational toolkit, where 'scores' and 'badges' were awarded to participants in online activities. The psychological community reacted to this by pointing out that earlier research had shown that whilst extrinsics can indeed (at least initially) boost participation by introducing notions of competitiveness, it turned out that they were ultimately poor substitutes for the far more sustainable and productive intrinsic motivational factors, like curiosity, if it could be stimulated effectively (something which itself inevitably required more creativity on the part of the designer of the motivational resources). It seems that the motivational analogue in inference engines is an extrinsic reward process.
The word originally entered English as an adaptation of the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque.
However, it was subsequently changed to match the related French word abricot (where the 't' is silent).
It is also useful to compare this to the Italian albercocca or albicocca and the Old Spanish albarcoque.
These all stem from the Spanish-Arabic al-borcoque, which itself comes from the Arabic al-burqūq (literally "the" + "birqūq").
This Arabic term was adapted from Greek, appearing in the writings of Dioscorides around the year 100 AD.
The Greek word was probably adapted from the Latin præcoquum, a variant of præcox (plural præcocia), which translates to "early-ripe" or "ripe in summer."
In earlier Roman times, the fruit was actually called the "Armenian plum" or "Armenian apple."
By around the year 350, the writer Palladius was using both terms, referring to them as "Armenian or early-ripe" fruits.
The reason we use a "p" in English (apricot) instead of a "b" (abricot) is likely due to a mistake in etymology.
In 1617, the scholar Minsheu explained the name as if it meant in aprico coctus, or "cooked in a sunny place."
This "sunny" explanation stuck, even though it was technically incorrect!