sesame [LME] One of the stories told in the Arabian Nights is that of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’. Ali Baba gains access to the robbers’ cave by saying the magic words ‘open sesame!’, at which the door flies open. This and the other Arabic tales in the collection were published in French in the early 18th century and were quickly translated into English. This gave a new lease of life to, and fixed the form of, sesame as the name of a plant with oil-rich seeds, which had appeared occasionally since the later Middle Ages in a variety of spellings. The word itself is recorded in Greek as sēsamon or sēsamē, but is probably connected to Arabic simsim. Since the early 19th century an open sesame has meant an easy way of securing access to what would normally be inaccessible.