Unfortunately, the plants we colloquially call laurel in England, Prunus laurocerasus, P. lusitanica, and -quite different again - Aucuba japonica are not even members of the true laurel family. We call true laurel, bay (or bay-laurel for avoidance of confusion). The word bay comes via French baie from the latin for berry baca, and is first recorded in English in the early 16th century. The word laurel was known in English from the 13th century. In Greek, bay-laurel is called daphne, a name we have appropriated for something rather different.

This is a common situation - there are a limited number of simple common names for plants and animals and they tend to get reapplied to something else if the original referent is absent, or even just uncommon, locally. For example, the "sycamore" of the bible is a kind of fig tree. Here in England we appropriated the name for a kind of maple, because its leaves are lobed like those of the sycamore fig. In North America, they applied the name to some species of plane family, which have similar leaves to the sycamore maple. In North America, the names robin and blackbird are applied to quite different bids from the original European version. In Australia, names like ash and box are applied to various species of Eucalyptus, the original referents being absent there. In Spanish the word for oak is roble: but they don't have oak trees in South America, so there they apply it to a species of southern beech. Avellana is Spanish for hazel, but they don't have that in South Americal, so they apply it to a local proteaceous tree related to the Macadamia. In Bolivia I bought some Brazil nuts, and discovered the locals called them by the Spanish word for chestnuts.