DESERVING EARTH

Apparently you can pronounce turmeric with and without the first r and still be correct. It's only recently that the spelling's been standardized, too: in the past, it took on forms like tarmaluk, tamanick, tamaret, tormarith, turmerocke, and more. When the word was first used in English in a 1538 book about herbs, it was spelled tormeryke, and that is thought to come from the Old French term terre merite, which meant "deserving earth" (although that's somewhat debated; it could also be Arabic). Terre comes from Latin terra, which is a relatively common root and further derives from Proto-Indo-European ters, meaning "dry". Merite is from Latin meritus, which meant "earned" and is the source of our word merit. That in turn traces to PIE mer​, "to assign". Usage of the word turmeric has been pretty constant since the eighteenth century.