Picnic

A picnic is a meal taken outdoors (al fresco) as part of an excursion, especially in scenic surroundings, such as a park, lakeside, or other place affording an interesting view, or else in conjunction with a public event such as preceding an open-air theater performance, and usually in summer or spring. It is different from other meals because it requires free time to leave home.

Historically, in Europe, the idea of a meal that was jointly contributed to and enjoyed out-of-doors was essential to picnic from the early 19th century.

Picnickers like to sit on the ground on a rug or blanket. Picnics can be informal with throwaway plates or formal with silver cutlery and crystal wine glasses. Tables and chairs may be used, but this is less common.

Outdoor games or other forms of entertainment are common at large picnics. In public parks, a picnic area generally includes picnic tables and possibly built-in barbecue grills, water faucets (taps), garbage (rubbish) containers, restrooms (toilets) and gazebos (shelters).

Some picnics are a potluck, where each person contributes a dish for all to share. The food eaten is rarely hot, instead taking the form of sandwiches, finger food, fresh fruit, salad and cold meats. It can be accompanied by chilled wine, champagne or soft drinks.

The word comes from the French pique-nique. However, it may also have been borrowed from the German word Picknick, which was itself borrowed from French.

The earliest English citation is in 1748, from Lord Chesterfield (Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield) who associates a "pic-nic" with card-playing, drinking, and conversation; around 1800, Cornelia Knight spelled the word as "pique-nique" in describing her travels in France.

According to some dictionaries, the French word pique-nique is based on the verb piquer, which means 'pick', 'peck', or 'nab', and the rhyming addition nique, which means 'thing of little importance', 'bagatelle', 'trifle'. It first appears in 1649 in an anonymous broadside of burlesque verse called Les Charmans effects des barricades: ou l'Amitié durable de la compagnie des Frères bachiques de pique-nique : en vers burlesque (The Lasting Friendship of the Band of Brothers of the Bacchic Picnic). The satire describes Brother Pique-Nique who, during the civil war known as the Fronde, attacks his food with gusto instead of his enemies; Bacchus was the Roman god of wine, a reference to the drunken antics of the gourmand musketeers. By 1694 the word was listed in Gilles Ménage's Dictionnaire étymologique, ou Origines de la langue françoise with the meaning of a shared meal, with each guest paying for himself, but with no reference to eating outdoors. It reached the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française in 1840 with the same meaning. In English "picnic" began to refer to an outdoor meal only at the beginning of the 19th century.