means A pale-green, smooth-skinned variety of melon with sweet, mild flesh; the word also refers to a sugary secretion left on plants by aphids.

from A transparent compound of "honey" and "dew" — literally "honey-dew," the sweet sticky film that appears on leaves, named centuries ago when people thought it fell from the sky like a sugary dew (it's actually aphid excretion, but the romantic name stuck). The melon borrowed the name later, presumably for its sweetness; "honey" traces back through Old English hunig to ancient Germanic roots, and "dew" likewise from Old English dēaw, a word old enough that its cousins scatter across the Germanic languages.