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The apricot got its name because the Romans regarded it as a type of early ripening peach. They therefore applied to it the epithet praecocus (a variant of praecox, from which English gets precocious). This passed via Byzantine Greek berikokkia into Arabic where, with the definite article al, it became al-birqūq or al-barqūq. Catalan adopted this as abrecoc, which is how English acquired the word (the earliest recorded English spelling is abrecock). The final -t came soon after, from French.
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