smyrlingsþumlar (mummy-thumbs, date-fruit)

The word date originates from the Latin dactylifera, which means "finger-bearing".  But dates don't actually look like fingers, they look like a special kind of fingers, they are "thumb-shaped'.  And they look brown and wrinkly, like the thumbs of a mummy.  The term "mummy-thumbs" actually pack a remarkable lot of information about how dates look like: The first element smyr(ð)lingur, "mummy" refers to Egypt, which is situated in that part of the world where dates are cultivated, while it describes the brown colour and wrinkly surface of the fruit, while þumlar, "thumbs" is descriptively more precise a reference to the etymology of the word "date".