clove [ME] You might have two different types of clove in your kitchen cupboard, one in a jar on the spice rack and one in a garlic bulb. These are two different words. The older, the spice clove, comes from Old French clou de girofle (source of the name gillyflower [LME] for the similarly scented pink), meaning ‘nail of the clove tree’. You can see why—cloves look like nails. The clove of garlic is an Old English word related to cleave [OE] and cloven [ME].