vermouth [E19th] One of the common ingredients of the aromatic wine vermouth is wormwood, a bitter-tasting shrub. Their names go back to the same source:vermouth came through French from German Wermut ‘wormwood’, which corresponds exactly to Old English wermōd. People in the late Middle Ages modified this to wormwood, as if the word had in fact been formed by putting together two more familiar words worm and wood. The alternative medieval name for wormwood was absinthe, known as the name of a French drink flavoured with wormwood since the beginning of the 19th century.