PASTINACEOUS/ˈpæstiːneɪʃəs/
Of the nature of or relating to the parsnip.
This is a very rare word in English: the OED has just the one citation for it. It derives from the Latin pastinaca, which could be the parsnip but might also refer to the carrot. Related words in that language are pastinare, “to dig”, and pastinum, a two-pronged digging fork or dibble, which probably lent its name to the vegetables because they so often formed forked roots in the ground (it would appear that difficulty in growing well-shaped parsnips is not solely a modern problem). The Latin survives in the systematic name for the genus of the parsnip, Pastinaca, and in the archaic English pastinate, “land prepared for planting”. Parsnip itself came to us through French and at first was spelt passenep, as though it were a kind of nep, Middle English for the turnip.
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