eat your words The Etymology of the Word 'Yogurt'

Food words have some seriously gnarly roots, but follow them far back enough, and you can see culinary history all tangled up in a few short syllables. Welcome to Eat Your Words

Yogurt has become such a ubiquitous part of American breakfast-and-healthy-snack culture that it's been naturalized as a plain English word. Like zucchini or pita, it's completed the journey from utterly alien loan-word to humdrum noun, one that we can throw around without the italics of foreignness or "according to locals" scare quotes.

But "yogurt" began in Turkish, as yoghurt (there go the italics!). The Turkish word itself comes from an Old Turkish root, yog, meaning something like "condense" or "intensify," which is pretty much what happens to milk when you let it curdle into yogurt. Makes sense! And the actual dish has been around for thousands of years--not surprising for something as simple as "old warm milk"--and was popular in ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece (where they called it oxygala, "acid milk").

 

http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2013/06/where-word-yogurt-comes-from.html