Kiosk Was a Persian Garden Pavilion Before It Sold Newspapers

Picture a garden on a hot afternoon, with roses, a long pool of still water and, at the end of the path, a small building that is mostly roof. Slender pillars hold it up, the sides are open to the breeze, and inside there is nothing to do except sit in the shade with something cool to drink. For centuries, across Persia and the lands of the Ottoman Empire, that was a kiosk. Nobody in it was selling anything.

Where the word began

The word is Persian. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the Persian kushk as a palace or villa, and also a pavilion or portico, and the Turkish form that grew out of it as a pavilion or summer house. The dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy follows the same trail one step further back, to a Middle Persian word meaning pavilion. Open-sided garden pavilions of this kind were common in Persia, the Indian subcontinent and the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward, notes Language Log, the linguistics blog hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, and several still stand around the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.

How it travelled west

European visitors liked what they saw and took both the building and its name home. French made it kiosque, and English had kiosk by the 1620s, meaning a kind of open pavilion of light wood, often held up by pillars. In the 17th century such pavilions were put up in the gardens and parks of western Europe as ornaments. Spanish took quiosco from the French, and its first dictionary meaning is still the old one: the open bandstand in a park where concerts are played. Russian has the word too, as киоск.

1. 1620s English first records kiosk, meaning an open garden pavilion
2. 1865 The word is used for a street newsstand
3. 1928 Britain names its telephone kiosk
4. Today Booths, snack stands and touch screens

Then the word moved from the park to the pavement. Small street stands with a little roof on top looked rather like garden pavilions, and by 1865 kiosk was being used for a newsstand, a sense that may have begun in French. In 1928 Britain gave the name to its telephone kiosk, which, the etymology dictionary says, influenced the modern meaning. Today, as Language Log lists them, the word covers small booths offering goods and services, food stands in Australia, and the freestanding touch screens known as interactive kiosks.

What people often get wrong

Because the kiosk on the corner is small and modern, it is natural to think the word is too, some bit of recent shop talk. It is the other way round: an old word for something grand, which got a little smaller every time it changed country. A second easy guess is that Russian, with Turkic languages spoken close by, picked the word up directly. Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian says it did not: киоск arrived through the German Kiosk or the French kiosque, so the word went to western Europe first and then came back east.

How we know

Word histories are pieced together from the earliest dated appearances of a word in writing, which is why dictionaries can name the 1620s and 1865 with some confidence. They do not agree on every step. Language Log quotes one derivation that puts an Italian form, chiosco, between the Turkish and the French, while the Online Etymology Dictionary and the Spanish Academy go straight from Turkish to French. What none of them doubts is the starting point. So the next time you buy a bottle of water from a booth the size of a wardrobe, you are, in a small way, shopping at a palace.