squash

As a verb meaning to crush, squash comes from Middle English squachen, from Old French esquacher, tracing back to Vulgar Latin *excoāctiāre — likely reinforced by a similar-sounding French word esquasser meaning to shatter or break. As a noun for the vegetable, squash is a shortening of the Narragansett word askutasquash, meaning something eaten green or raw, from askut (green, raw) and asquash (eaten). A third, separate sense comes from clipping musquash, the name for a muskrat.

The crushing sense and the vegetable sense developed completely separately before English speakers ended up using the same spelling for both. The vegetable name was trimmed down from the much longer Narragansett original into something easier for English mouths to manage.

The crushing sense of squash is connected to the word quash, since Middle English quashen and its French ancestor esquasser likely shaped how squash came to mean crush.