In a Word: Shopping in Ancient Greece and New York City

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.

When the ancient Greeks wanted to store some items away to use or sell later, they would put them in an apothēkē, or “storehouse,” from apo- “away” and thēkē “receptacle, chest, case.” This became the Latin apotheca. A person who ran an apotheca — that is, a storekeeper — was an apothecarius, from which English derives the word apothecary.

Though etymologically apothecary doesn’t indicate the storage or distribution of a specific product, by the time the word reached English by the 1300s, it applied to both the person and the shop where medications were stored, mixed, and sold. In America, we call these drugstores today, and though they are your source for pharmaceuticals, modern drugstores also carry a little bit of everything.

That’s not the only linguistic course that apotheca took. In Old Provençal, the first, unaccented syllable fell away, and a small shop was called a botica, which evolved into the Modern French boutique, which has been used (in France) to refer to a retail shop since the 1200s. The word didn’t establish itself solidly into English unto the mid-20th century, to refer to a small specialty shop.

This makes sense: In the 1950s, Paris was the unchallenged capital of the fashion industry, and so owners of small clothing or accessories businesses, in order to associate their product with high fashion, would want to refer to their shop with a French name, not an English one. The fashion industry is where the word boutique got its first firm foothold in English, but it didn’t stay there, and now a boutique is any small retail shop.

The Latin apotheca also took another turn in Spanish. Again, that unaccented first syllable dropped off, but the consonants stayed softer than they did in French. The word evolved into bodega, which was applied to warehouses where sherry was aged or where wine was stored and sold.

Bodega found slightly different uses among speakers of different kinds of Spanish — notably Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Mexican — before it came to America. Thus, it has different senses depending on where you are. On the West Coast, a bodega is more often a winery or wineshop, but in the East, and especially in New York City where the term took off, a bodega is a small urban grocery or convenience store, and especially one that specializes in Hispanic products. You might or might not find wine on the shelves of a NYC bodega.

Bodega cats, like the one pictured above, are not required for a business to be called a bodega, but (at least to people like me) they are preferred and appreciated.