Where does the word absinthe come from?
The word absinthe is derived from the Greek word “apsinthion” meaning “bitter”, because of the bitterness of the wormwood leaf. Contrary to widely-held belief, the Russian word for wormwood is not “Chernobyl”. In Ukranian, “chornobyl”, translating roughly as “black stalks”, refers to mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), not to wormwood (Artemesia absinthium). The fable that Chernobyl = wormwood originates from a 1986 New York Times article that quoted an unnamed “prominent Russian writer” as claiming the Ukrainian word for wormwood was chernobyl. This erroneous attribution took root in the popular imagination, because it enabled associations with the famous verse in the Apocalypse of St. John: “Then the third angel sounded: And a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the water, because it was made bitter.
