The word jejune comes from Latin jejunus ‘fasting’. It was first used in English in the 17th century in the senses ‘without food’ and ‘not nourishing’ and, referring to land, ‘barren’. The subsequent sense ‘lacking in interest, dull’ was the prevailing one until the late 19th century, when a new sense, ‘naive and simplistic’, arose: it was first recorded in George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man (1898). This use may have arisen from the mistaken belief that the word is connected to Latin juvenis or French jeune ‘young’.