spruce: Spruce ‘neat’ [16] and spruce the tree [17] are completely different words, of course, but they could have a common origin – in Spruce, the old English name for Prussia. Spruce the tree was originally the spruce fir, literally the ‘Prussian fir’. And it is thought that the adjective spruce may have come from the expression spruce leather ‘Prussian leather’, which denoted a particularly fine sort of leather, used for making jackets. The word itself is an unexplained alteration of Pruce ‘Prussia’, which was acquired via Old French from medieval Latin Prussia. => prussia[spruce etymology, spruce origin, 英语词源]