Chickenpox

In his dictionary of 1755 Samuel Johnson says that chickenpox is so called “from its being of no very great danger.” And the Oxford English Dictionary says that it is probably “from the mildness of the disease.” Although this banal explanation is probably the correct one, other suggestions abound.

For instance, in his Exanthemologia of 1730, Thomas Fuller suggested that it was from “the smallness of the Specks, which [our Women] might fancy looked as tho' a Child had been picked with the Bills of Chickens.” Well, believe it if you like.

Then Charles Fagge in The Principles and Practice of Medicine, published posthumously in 1886, proposed “chick-pease” as the origin. And Lerman (Clin Pediatr 1981;20:111-2) showed that chickpeas can look like chickenpox vesicles, by, wait for it, soaking them and placing them on 2 cm pink discs laid on flesh coloured paper. However, according to the OED, “chick-pea” came into being only through a scribal error for “cich-pease,” from the Latin Cicer arietinum (see BMJ 1999;320:990); and that happened in the 18th century, by which time the term chickenpox was already in use.

Another suggestion is that chickenpox has something to do with the Old English word giccan, to itch (Lancet 1978;1:1152). But this is unlikely. Firstly, the g in giccan transliterates the Old English letter yogh, which looked like the upper two strokes of a lower case zed on top of the lower half of an Arabic three, and which in giccan was pronounced like a y. This gave the Scots word yuke and the modern German and Dutch words for itch—jucken and jeuken (both pronounced something like yooken). And, as Edmund Weiner at the OED confirmed when I asked him, yogh never became ch.

Moreover, giccan lost its initial letter and became itch in the14th to15th centuries, too soon to give rise to “chickenpox,” whose first recorded use was not until 1694, in Richard Morton's Exercitatio de Febribus Inflammatoriis: “quod Variolae istae (quod primo monui) erant maximae Benignae eae scil. quae vulgo dicuntur Chicken-Pox” (a citation that surprisingly hasn't yet made it into the OED).

Now, having peddled the unlikely postulates (?pustulates) of others, I offer a folk etymology of my own. An Arabic word, sikka^h, a coin die, was used to name the mint in Venice, the zecca, which produced the zecchino, a coin that came to be known in English as a chequeen. In Pericles, Prince of Tyre (4:2:28 or 16:24, depending on which edition you read) Pandar says that “three or four thousand chequeens were as pretty a proportion to live quietly, and so give over.” In Shakespeare's time a chequeen was a gold coin worth about eight old shillings (40p). Through French the zecchino got the name sequin, which was later devalued and came to mean a cheap sparkling decoration—for example, on a dress.

But in the 15th century the chequeen travelled to India, where it became a chickeen or a chick, a coin worth about four rupees. And the earlier form of the word also survived there, as a sicca rupee, a newly minted silver coin held to be worth more than a worn one. In their Anglo-Indian dictionary of 1886, Hobson–Jobson, Yule and Burnell conjectured that chicken hazard, a dice game played for small stakes, “chicken stakes,” came from the chequeen. And a chicken nabob, according to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1961), was a man returned from India with but a moderate fortune.

So perhaps the chickenpox was, by comparison with those more serious infections, the great pox and the small pox, merely as you might say a catchpenny.