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Comment by zoky | Hacker News Reader

A pumpkin is a specific type of squash. If you can either 1) carve a face into in and set it on your doorstep on Halloween, or 2) bake it into a tasty pie served on Thanksgiving, it's a pumpkin. Also, if it vaguely looks like one of the above mentioned gourds, but is strictly ornamental, you can call it a pumpkin, even though it probably isn't. Otherwise, it's a squash.

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As a child in the 80s UK - a gourd was the commonly used word for all squashes - and gourds were pretty rare to find in a shop. If you saw a gourd it was often an ornamental dried gourd that someone would have as a gift from the states. 'Squash' was a real Americanism, and wasn't wildly used in the people I knew until the late 90s. I remember my bother working as a farm hand an bring some squashes home with hi to eat, and him having to explain them as gourdes to family/neighbours who were interested in how 'ugly' they looked.

Pumpkins were always the orange, large and round ones - and back in the 80s we still carved turnips or swedes in the North of England, as pumpkins were too expensive.

Im from US, and we always had a vegetable garden growing up. Names were much the same from my point of view. Gourds were mostly hard and ornamental, squash is an edible gourd, and they weren’t really too much of a thing until the internet made everything popular.

Being from the US, I’d say a gourd is any “hollow” squash, especially one you don’t normally eat in its normal form. So a pumpkin is both a gourd and a squash. Butternut squash is probably a gourd but definitely not a pumpkin. Zucchini is neither a gourd nor a pumpkin, but is decidedly a squash.

In German, all of the above are simply called "Kürbis" - except for the zucchini, which is a Zucchini...

I think "pumpkin pies" should actually be made with butternut? much sweeter/tastier

I believe most canned pumpkin that you might buy actually is butternut.

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