Jade is a word which appears in English via translations from various languages.
In his The Discovery of Guiana which was published in 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh describes how easy it was to find gold in South America. In his somewhat exaggerated recording of the wealth of the countries, he translated from the Spanish “peidras hijadas”, to record “a kind of green stones” called in i.e. jade stones, which were used to “cure maladies of the spleen”. Only three years later in his Italian dictionary, John Florio described the “Iada, a kind of precious stone like an emerald”. Jade also appears in a translation by John Davies of Vincent Voiture a French letter writer where the word is rendered ejade. So most of the earlier references in English are about a wonderful source of wealth that was entirely unknown to the writers, so much so that they did not even know how to spell the word. It was only in the Chamber Cyclopaedia published in 1728 that jade became the official spelling (even if jade and jad appeared later as alternatives).
But the early references give no indication of the value it had to the dynasties in Central America and Asia. In China it has a higher status than gold or diamonds.
