How Strawberries Stole an Ancient Hebrew Word

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]You're looking at two fruits, the strawberry and the mulberry. In English, two unrelated words. In Hebrew, both are toot. But only one of them was the original toot. This one, the mulberry.

[00:00:10]The earliest known attestation of the word toot is not even in Hebrew. It appears in a broken cuneiform business document from the Persian Empire about 2,470 years ago. Mulberry wood. One couch of willow, one couch of toot. The first toot we know of was a tree, wood for furniture. A Hebrew source says the mulberry appears later in the Mishna, where the rabbis discuss when tuttim become liable for tithes, the moment they turn red.

[00:00:35]And the tree itself never quite went away. In the early Zionist colonies, hundreds of thousands of mulberry trees were planted for a hoped-for silk industry. The project failed. The trees stayed.

[00:00:46]This one is a newcomer. When strawberries arrived in the early 20th century Palestine, Hebrew needed a name for it. Several got tried. Toot Sefardi, French toot, used by Haim Ben Yehuda.

[00:00:57]Toot Adamah, earth toot. And Toot Sade, field toot. The one that eventually stuck was Toot Sade. It was coined by Issar Yosef Einhorn in 1910, and picked up a few years later by a gardener in Ramat Gan named Aaron Halevi, who started selling strawberry seedlings under that name. At first, the distinction was clear. The old fruit was toot. The newcomer was Toot Sade, field toot. Then the distinction collapsed.

[00:01:21]Toot Sade shortened itself to toot, and the original toot had to take a surname, Toot Etz, tree toot. The newcomer took the name. The old fruit got demoted to Toot Etz. Now you know.