In a Word: Petit Fours and Petty Crimes

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

At a local coffeeshop last week, I had the opportunity of enjoying a couple of tasty petit fours with my latte. I don’t eat petit fours — small, light cubes of layered sponge cake covered in icing — very often, and I had only ever given brief thought to why they were called that.

The petit is recognizable as the French word (in the masculine form) for “small,” and for a long time I assumed that they were called petit fours because maybe they were traditionally made with four thin layers of cake in them. But why would we mix a French word and an English one like that?

Well, in general, we wouldn’t. And as I looked down at the delicious, half-eaten orange crème petit four in my hand last week and saw that it contained only three layers of sponge cake, I decided it was time to do a little etymological digging.

Four, I learned, means “oven” in both Modern and Old French. It traces to the Latin furnus “oven,” which, yes, eventually gave English the word furnace. A petit four, then, is literally a “small oven,” though in essence it’s a “little baked good.”

And “petit four” sounds a lot more elegant than “little chunk of cake,” no?

We often see the feminine form petite in English, most often to describe the size of a piece of clothing or the woman wearing it. This link to clothes makes sense considering how long Paris has been a center of fashion. But petit doesn’t get a whole lot of play in everyday English. It does have its place in English discourse, though, particularly in medicine and law.

In most cases, if there is a petit something, there is also a grand something. Grand is French for “large” (and I, for one, would take a grand four over a petit four any day). Here is where you’re most likely to hear the word:

Someone with epilepsy might suffer a grand mal seizure, which causes them to lose consciousness and their muscles to spasm. A milder seizure that doesn’t cause loss of consciousness is a petit mal seizure. Mal is French for “bad, evil.”

If you’ve ever been called for jury duty, it was likely to serve on a petit jury, a group of 12 people who decide on the facts of a trial at issue. For some state felony cases and all federal felony cases (as dictated by the Fifth Amendment), a grand jury is convened first; this group decides whether there is enough evidence to proceed with a trial against an accused person. Jury traces to the Latin iurare “to swear an oath,” from ius “oath, law.”

There’s no great secret to why one jury is petit and one grand; the latter just has more people on it, so it’s larger. Grand juries used to be more widespread internationally, but today only the United States and Liberia still use that system.

Staying in the court system: Someone facing a judge might be accused of grand larceny or petit larceny. Tracing to the Latin latro “robber, bandit,” larceny is just a fancy word for theft. Each state sets its own bar for separating petit larceny (a misdemeanor) and grand larceny (a felony) based on the value of the stolen item and how it was procured.

Pronunciation for all these petit phrases is confusing, so much so that arguing for one pronunciation or another is probably pointless. In the original French, it’s “puh-TEE” (or the feminine “puh-TEET”). But Anglicized (or Americanized) pronunciations also occasionally give us “PET-it.”

To return to where we began, I usually hear petit four pronounced “PET-ee four,” which brings us to another little etymological gem: The word petty was originally just an English phonetic respelling of the French petit. That’s why one doesn’t keep a lot of money in petty cash, and why one might be accused of petty theft, which is legally and etymologically identical to petit larceny.

The idea of physical smallness evolved to metaphorical smallness, giving English the sense of petty as “too insignificant to be considered.”