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You've probably seen them before. The little hearts with messages like

Be Mine and Call Me. You may have received them in a Valentine's day card,

or picked some up in a shop to nibble on at home. Like candy corn at Halloween,

they are a holiday treat that's hard to forget, with their fruity flavours,

chalky texture, and satisfying rattle as they fall out of the box.

They trace their roots back to apothecary lozenges from the 1800s.

Medicine and candy, well-being and sugar, these seemingly opposite things have long been

intertwined. But looking through the lens of history, it makes sense why.

The story of candy stretches back generations and spans the globe.

Even something as simple as its name helps us piece together its journey to the present day.

Depending on where you live now, you make all sugar confectionery different things,

like sweets or lollies. But in the United States, where our conversation hearts were first made,

candy is the name of choice.

The word comes from the late middle English verb, to sugar candy, or to preserve by coating in sugar.

That came from the French phrase that meant crystallised sugar, which was borrowed from Arabic,

and stems from an earliest Sanskrit word, meaning fragment.

Candy and its predecessors have been tantalising people's taste buds for thousands of years.

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