Spicy folk know to treat ginger in the kitchen rather gingerly

Like a young Harry, prince of the gingers, ginger the spice is a bit of a player, to be found in all sorts of sweet and savoury places. But a bit of restraint, please

- Tony Jackman

The derivations of ginger, the English noun, and gingerly, the adjective or adverb, are quite different.

Ginger, the plant, is from the Zingiberaceae family and related to turmeric (which has a similar-looking clustered rhizome but is a vivid orange hue), cardamom and galangal, a key ingredient of Thai cuisine. Ginger, the spice, is made from the underground stem or rhizome of Zingiber officinale and is cultivated from the rhizome, not from seed.

But ginger, when used in reference to the likes of Harry Windsor, refers only to its colour, although the interior of the rhizome is hardly ginger in hue at all, more of a pallid yellowish-pink, even beige.

Ginger, the word, is from gingifer in the old English of the 14th century, and from the Latin gingiber before that, further derived from the Greek zingiberis, and on and on to the indecipherable Sanskrit srngaveram.