pudding

Pudding comes from Middle English podynge, meaning a sausage or meat-filled animal stomach, borrowed from Old French boudin ("blood sausage, black pudding"), itself from Latin botellus ("sausage, small intestine"). An alternative theory traces it instead to a Proto-Germanic root *put-/*pud-, meaning "to swell," linking it to words for bellies and swollen lumps.

The word began attached to sausages and stuffed stomachs, a sense that survives in "black pudding." Over time in English it broadened far beyond sausage casings to cover all kinds of boiled, steamed, and eventually sweet dishes.

Pudding is a doublet of boudin, the French word for blood sausage still used in English for that very dish today.