Английский Этимологический словарь - pie (1)

- "pastry," 12c., from M.L. pie "meat or fish enclosed in pastry," perhaps related to M.L. pia "pie, pastry," also possibly connected with pica "magpie," on notion of the bird's habit of collecting miscellaneous objects. Not known outside Eng., except Gaelic pighe, which is from Eng. In the Middle Ages, a pie had many ingredients, a pastry but one. Use of the word in printers' slang for "a mass of type jumbled together" (also pye) dates from 1659. Pie-eyed "drunk" is from 1904. Phrase pie in the sky is 1911, from Joe Hill's Wobbly hymn parody. Obsolete piepowder, M.E. for "wayfarer, itinerant merchant, etc." is folk etymology alteration of M.L. pede-pulverosus "dusty-footed."