Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.
P is for palm, which is either a tree or a part of the hand. The body part is not recorded until around 1300, it came to English from Old French
paume and Latin
palma 'the flat of the hand'. Both are derived from Proto-Indo-European
pele 'flat, to spread' and for obvious reasons.
The tree or the word for the tree, correctly known as the date palm, spread to Western Europe along with Christianity. It is thought to describe the leaves of the tree which have a spreading effect like the fingers on the hand.
The sense of 'palm' meaning a bribe is seen as early as 1620, but then the term was 'palm oil'.
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