Dill, Anethum graveolens, is a feathery aromatic annual of the carrot family, grown since antiquity for its seed and leaf. Its English name is generally traced to an Old Norse or Saxon word, dilla, to lull or soothe, recording its old domestic use to quiet fretful infants, a folk practice noted here as history. It is named among the herbs of the ancient world; the Gospel of Matthew lists dill among the small garden herbs the Pharisees scrupulously tithed, an image of attention to trifles at the expense of weightier matters.
Dill was important enough to European agriculture that Charlemagne's ninth-century estate ordinance, the Capitulare de villis, names it among the herbs every imperial garden was required to grow, a rare case of a kitchen herb entering government regulation. Its seed remains best known today for flavouring the brined dill pickle of central and eastern European and American Jewish cuisine, a use that carries the herb's old reputation for easing digestion into an entirely secular, everyday food, and the plant's Old Norse root gives related Scandinavian languages their own closely matching words for it, dill in both Swedish and Norwegian, a name that crossed into English largely unchanged.