The answer to why Marmite is called Marmite has been printed on every jar for over a century, and almost nobody has noticed it. It is the little picture in the middle of the label: a round, bulging, lidded pot. That pot is a marmite, and the spread is named after it.
A marmite is a cooking pot
Marmite is a French word for a large covered cooking pot, the deep earthenware or metal kind you would leave simmering a stew or a stock in all day. Nothing to do with the spread at first. Just a pot.
The connection is delightfully literal. When the Marmite Food Company started up in Burton-on-Trent in 1902, the spread was sold in small earthenware containers shaped like a French marmite, little pots with that same bulging, lidded form. So the product was, quite simply, named after the thing it came in. You bought a marmite of Marmite.
The earthenware pots gave way to glass jars in the 1920s, and the rest of the jar has barely changed since: the same squat bulging shape, the same red and yellow, the same picture. But the picture is now a small monument to a packaging decision everyone forgot. The pot on the front of your jar is a drawing of the original pot the jar replaced. The spread kept the portrait of the container it outgrew.
The stranger story behind the word
The pub-fact version gets better the deeper you go. The French word marmite did not start life meaning a pot. The traditional etymology traces it back through Old French to a word for a hypocrite.
The logic, as it is usually told, is rather wonderful: a covered pot hides what is bubbling away inside it, the same way a hypocrite hides their real nature behind a calm lid. The pot that conceals its contents took the name of the person who conceals their character. Word historians are a little cautious about how solid that derivation really is, and you will see it described as charming but not certain, so treat it as the traditional account rather than gospel. But it is too good not to know.
Which gives Marmite a name with an almost suspiciously fitting double meaning. The spread that splits the nation into people who love it and people who cannot abide it, the one thing nobody is honestly neutral about, is named, at one remove, after a word for someone who is not quite what they seem. You could not invent it.
So, the short version
Marmite is named after the French cooking pot it was first sold in, and the pot is still drawn on the label as a memento of those original 1902 earthenware versions. Dig one layer deeper and the French word for that pot once meant a hypocrite, on the grounds that a lidded pot keeps its secrets. For the taste that earns all the strong feelings, there is a piece on why Marmite tastes the way it does, and for the word’s other modern life, as an adjective for anything divisive, there is the meaning of ‘a bit Marmite’.
