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I know that "わさび" 'wasabi' can also be written using kanji as "山葵" and that
these two characters mean respectively "mountain" and "hollyhock", but
hollyhock doesn't seem at first glance to be related.

So are the hollyhock and wasabi plants related or are the kanji some kind of
ateji which would explain why the hiragana spelling is more common. Or is the
origin of the word something more subtle or mysterious?
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2011-06-03T12:32:59.307
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etymology food compounds ateji
What is the etymology of [山葵]{わさび}?
I don't have a full answer here (at least not yet), but I do want to note that
the kanji here are definitely not any kind of _ateji_ \- they are actually the
exact opposite, a _gikun_ (義訓 - 'meaning reading'), since 山 has no reading わさ,
and 葵 has no reading び.

That means the etymology of the word わさび itself is unrelated to the etymology
of the kanji わさび, and both should be treated separately.

The kanji chosen for this word means means 'Mountain Aoi (葵)'. Now, I'm not
expert in Japanese botany (or in botany at all) - the best you can get out of
me is probably recognizing a rose, and even that is only when I get pricked by
one of it's thorns. :) But what I do know is that the word 葵 is used for
several kinds of flowers that are not all of the same family. Some of them
belong to the Malvaceae family, which also includes Genus Alcea (the flowers
called Hollyhock in English), but some of them belong to an entirely different
family. Wasabi is apparently similar enough to some of them, like
[カンアオイ](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AB%E3%83%B3%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AA%E3%82%A4),
so the kanji chosen to represent it in meaning was mountain Aoi.

As for the origin of the word itself (disregarding the kanji its written in),
there is no clear answer. It appears as early as the 10th century [in a
medicinal herbs manual](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi#Etymology) as 和佐比,
which is just an ateji rendering of the word, so it doesn't tell us anything
about its origin. Some unproven theories can be found at
[Gogenjiten](http://gogen-allguide.com/wa/wasabi.html):

  1. It's an abbreviation of the expression 悪障疼（* _わ_ *る * _さ_ *わり ひ* _び_ *く), which probably means something along the lines of 'causing horribly irritating pain'.
  2. The わさ in わさび comes from わしる, which is an old pronunciation of the verb 走る（はしる), _to run_ , and it describes the pungent taste that "runs" all the way to your nose, while the び is the denasalized form of 実（み）, _fruit_ or _nut_.
  3. The last theory is that the name comes from 早葵 , which was pronunced `wasaapupi` in Old Japanese and written わさあふひ in historical kana usage (today it would be just わさあおい). This transformed (with a little elision and voicing of the ending syllable `pi`) to `wasabi`.
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2011-06-03T12:42:59.397
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Wasabi 「山葵」 is jukujikun
-([熟字訓](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%86%9F%E5%AD%97%E8%A8%93#.E5.8B.95.E6.A4.8D.E7.89.A9)
\- word reading), which is kind of 当て字、but based on word 「熟語」 level

Regarding origin, [語源辞典](http://gogen-allguide.com/wa/wasabi.html) says that
山葵's leaf is looks like Hollyhock 葵, so used it such way from Heian-Era
「794年-1185年」

Following are "Three Hollyhocks inside Circle" logo from Tokugawa clan and
Wasabi leaf.

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mYzaT.png) ![enter
image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PwUpF.png)

Note: Images taken from Wikipedia
[1](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%82%B5%E3%83%93),
[2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollyhock)
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