Etymology
The older Chinese name for this plant is 銀果, meaning "silver fruit", nowadays pronounced as yínguǒ in Mandarin. The most usual names today are 白果 (bái guǒ), meaning "white fruit", and 銀杏 (yínxìng), meaning "silver apricot". The former name was borrowed directly in Vietnamese as bạch quả. The latter name was borrowed in Japanese ぎんなん (ginnan) and Korean 은행 (eunhaeng), when the tree itself was introduced from China.
The scientific name Ginkgo appears to be due to a process akin to folk etymology. Chinese characters typically have multiple pronunciations in Japanese, and the characters 銀杏 used for ginnan can also be pronounced ginkyō. Engelbert Kaempfer, the first Westerner to see the species in 1690, wrote down this pronunciation in his Amoenitates Exoticae (1712) with the "awkward" spelling "ginkgo". This appears to be a simple error of Kaempfer, taking his spelling of other Japanese words into account, a more precise romanization would have been "ginkio" or "ginkjo".
Read more about this topic: Ginkgo Biloba
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