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A typical Spanish dessert is the quince jelly (Spanish: carne/dulce de membrillo), which is also known as codoñate in areas of Catalan influence. Now, the Spanish word for quince is membrillo, which comes from Latin melimēlum 'honey apple'. But Catalan codonyat comes from the Catalan word for quince: codony, and this one comes from Latin cotoneum, cotonei 'quince'.

So it seems that the proper word for quince in Latin was cotoneum but I was wondering how is that the Spanish word membrillo comes from apparently a different fruit. So:

• Is it possible that the Latin words melimelum and cotoneum meant the same thing in Classical Latin? Or maybe the word melimelum came to mean quince in Late or Medieval Latin?


• Was cotoneum indeed the most used word for quince?

This is from Plin. Nat. Hist. Book 15, ix, 37 —

his proxima amplitudine mala quae vocamus cotonea et Graece cydonea, e Creta insula advecta. incurvatos trahunt ramos prohibentque crescere parentem. plura eorum genera: chrysomela incisuris distincta, colore ad aurum inclinato, qui candidior nostratia cognominat, odoris praestantissimi

— which, answering the second part of your question, seems to remove any doubt about cotoneum being the proper word for a quince.

However, I can't find melimelum anywhere, either directly through a search of the relevant books in Pliny's Natural History or Packhum, and I wonder where the word occurs?

Very strangely, there is no entry for melimelum in (the electronic version of) L&S. I do not have the print version before me at the moment, but there are lots of good references (Pliny and others) in Gaffiot:

https://www.lexilogos.com/latin/gaffiot.php?q=melimelum

and in Georges:

http://www.zeno.org/Zeno/0/Suche?q=melimelum&k=Georges-1913

EDIT: L&S do have it, but only as a plural:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dmelimela