Pickle vs Gherkin: What’s Actually the Difference?

Pickle or gherkin? The words are often used interchangeably, but we think there's a useful distinction. At inabitofapickle, we like to keep it simple:

Pickles refer to all pickled cucumbers. Gherkins are generally a smaller, sweeter style of pickle.

That's not a strict botanical definition. The terminology varies around the world, and gherkin is particularly well established in British usage. But if you're trying to make sense of the different jars you encounter in the pickle aisle, it's a pretty useful way to look at it.

What is a pickle?

Technically, you can pickle almost anything. Onions, beetroot, carrots, chillies and plenty of other foods can all be preserved through pickling. Go on. Pickle whatever you want.

But around here, when we talk about pickles, we're talking about pickled cucumbers. As in, all of them. And that covers a very broad range.

There are dills and kosher dills, bread & butter pickles, full sours, half sours, gherkins and cornichons. Then there are more modern varieties incorporating chilli, mustard, alcohol and other flavours.

In other words, pickle is the umbrella term.

So, what is a gherkin?

This is where terminology gets a little blurry.

A gherkin is generally a small cucumber used for pickling, with the word historically used for small or immature cucumbers.

The word gherkin comes from Early Modern Dutch gurken or augurken, meaning - you guessed it - a small pickled cucumber.

In practice, when we think of a gherkin, we tend to think of the smaller, sweeter pickled cucumbers traditionally sold whole in jars.

They're still pickles. They're simply one style within the much broader world of pickled cucumbers.

The word gherkin is also more generally used in Brtain. In Britain and Ireland, gherkin is commonly used to refer to a pickled cucumber, where North Americans would be more likely to simply say pickle. 

In Australia, you'll certainly find products labelled as gherkins, but pickle has increasingly become a useful broader description, particularly as American-style dill, sour and other pickle varieties have become more familiar.

Where do gherkins sit in the Pickle Universe?

Our Pickle Universe doesn't classify every pickled cucumber according to whether someone has called it a pickle or a gherkin. Instead, it considers the style of pickle and characteristics such as sweetness versus sourness and softness versus crunch.

Under that approach, what we'd typically think of as a gherkin sits towards the Sweet Pickled part of the universe. Sweet pickles use sugar to balance the acidity of the brine. A good example is the Three Threes Sweet Spiced Gherkin.

That makes more sense to us than treating gherkins and pickles as two separate things.

A gherkin is a pickle. It's simply a particular style of pickle. With a funny-sounding name.