The English word barn originally meant a store for barley
Barley was among the first grains humans ever farmed, domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 9000 BC. It fed Mycenaean workers, flavoured a sacred drink at Eleusis and gave English the word barn. Today most of it feeds livestock, and much of the rest ends up as beer or whisky.
Barley, Hordeum vulgare, is a grass grown for its grain across temperate regions. Early farmers selected plants whose spikelets stayed on the stalk instead of shattering, which made harvesting far easier, and domestication rounded the grain from long to almost spherical. By 2000 BC barley had spread across Eurasia, reaching eastern Finland as early as 4200 BC. Barley grown in Eritrea and Ethiopia may come from a separate domestication in eastern Africa, and genetic markers point to Tibet as another possible centre.
The words are old. Old English called it bere, a name that survives in northern Scotland for a local six-row strain. Modern barley comes from the adjective bærlic, of barley, and barn derives from bere-aern, barley store. The Latin genus name hordeum is probably linked to horrere, to bristle, fitting a plant whose awns can reach 160 millimetres and make the ears look tufted.
Its structure explains the familiar types. Spikelets grow in threes in a herringbone pattern. In six-row barley all three in each cluster are fertile; in two-row barley, like wild barley, only the middle one is. The plant self-pollinates and has 14 chromosomes, and its genome, about 5,000 megabase pairs, was sequenced in 2012. It prefers cool weather and good drainage and copes with drought and salty soil, though it is less winter-hardy than wheat or rye, its close relatives.
In 2023 barley ranked fourth among grains at 146 million tonnes, behind maize, rice and wheat. About 70 percent goes to animal feed and 30 percent to malting, brewing, distilling and food such as soups and breads. Linear B tablets at Knossos and Pylos record barley rations, and English folklore personifies the grain as John Barleycorn.
Source: Barley
