Both definitions of the word maraschino, describing either the type of cherry or the liqueur obtained from distilling cherries, come from a diminutive form of the Italian word marasca, which referred to a specific kind of black cherry. That comes from the word amaro, meaning “bitter” (because the cherries tasted bitter; this is also probably the source of the name of the morello cherry), and amaro traces back to the Latin word amarus, also “bitter”. Finally, that’s reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European hem, meaning “raw”. Interestingly, the sch combination of letters should have shown up as an sk sound as the Italian word travelled into English, but Americans in the early twentieth century didn’t know how to pronounce it correctly, so they said it with an sh and that just kind of stuck, reaching the UK and beyond in the 1970s. Usage peaked in 1932, but it’s been trending upwards again in recent decades.
