The word is of Persian origin, angārah, passing through Greek and Polish, and entering the English language from early modern Dutch, in which the diminutive gurkkijn or agurkkijn denotes a small cucumber. (The word ‘pickle’ itself is derived from the Dutch pekel, a salt or acid preserving fluid.) The similarly pronounced Swedish word, “gurka”, actually means cucumber, cognate with German “Gurke”.
The fruit itself may have originated in India, but the ‘pickled gherkin’ was known, although not by that name, to the ancient Mesopotamians no later than the 3rd century BC and enjoyed in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The gherkin is mentioned in English in the seventeenth century, although the English diarist Samuel Pepys describes the ‘girkin’ in his entry for 1661-12-01 as ‘a rare thing’. Knowledge of the condiment may have been disseminated throughout Europe from the Middle East in the course of the Jewish Diaspora.
The gherkin may have been introduced to the American public by one Minton Collins of Richmond, Virginia, who was offering it for sale in the Virginia Gazette in 1792, although it might have been known in Colonial times under another name. It was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson. Pickling of gherkins was at first a domestic activity, but the jar of pickles became a commercial product in France as early as the 1820s. The condiment rapidly became generally popular, although always more so in the USA than among the British, for whom the generic ‘pickle’ remained the small, sweet onion.
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Subject: gherkins 
Sat May 03, 2008 4:28 pm
