candy

Candy comes from Middle English sugre candy, from Old French sucre candi, meaning "candied sugar," which came from Arabic sukkar qandī. That traces back to Arabic qand, "rock candy," itself from Persian kand, ultimately from Sanskrit khaṇḍa, "piece, fragment, candied sugar," or possibly from Proto-Dravidian *kaṇṭu, compare Tamil kaṇṭu, "hard candy."

The word began as a description of sugar broken or shaped into hard pieces, and that sense of a solid, crystallized sweet has stayed remarkably intact as it moved from Sanskrit or Dravidian roots through Persian, Arabic, French, and finally into English.

The Sanskrit root khaṇḍ, "to divide, break into pieces," also underlies khaṇḍana, which passed through Marathi khaṇḍī into English as a separate word for a unit of weight — a distant cousin bound to candy by the same idea of breaking things apart.