cascara

The word 'cascara' entered English in the late 19th century as a direct borrowing from American Spanish, where 'cáscara' means 'husk, peel, or bark'. The Spanish term itself evolved from the Vulgar Latin 'cassicāre', meaning 'to peel off', which is a frequentative verb derived from the classical Latin 'cassus', meaning 'empty' or 'hollow'. The semantic logic traces a path from the concept of emptiness (cassus) to the act of peeling or stripping (cassicāre), to the resulting peel or bark itself (cáscara), which was specifically applied to the laxative bark by Spanish colonists in the Americas. Thus, the modern English term retains the original Spanish form and its concrete meaning.

This word is a direct loanword from Spanish, where it functions as a simplex noun. It is not productively segmented using English morphemes.