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Assess – Podictionary Word of the Day

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Yesterday on the main podictionary blog and podcast I talked about the word size and how, when it first came into English, it didn’t mean “bigness” but instead was related to assize, a word meaning “judicial panel.”

It was because the judges determined the “enormity” of the tax bill people had to pay back 600 or 700 years ago in England that the word size began to take on a meaning of “magnitude.”

With this little snippet of information it isn’t much of a leap in logic to understand how the word assess might be related to assize and size.

While assize and size once were related to evaluating the amount of tax you pay, assess still is to this day. It’s as familiar as the phrase tax assessment.

The word assess first turned up in English about 550 years ago. Originally it was only used in relation to assessing taxes. In fact for almost 500 of the years since then it has “exclusively” been used in relation to assessing taxes.

It was only in 1935 that we get the first citation for assess being used for the assessment of anything but taxes.

Only within the last hundred years have we begun to assess men and assess opportunity and assess situations.

The word assess came to English from Old French and along the usual path, before that, from Latin. The English association between tax and the word assess reflects the meaning that the late Latin parent word held. But this Latin word was built on earlier roots.

When a judge sat in judgment he often had an assistant to help him out. Believe it or not the words size, assize, and assess all run back to a word root meaning “sit.”

In earlier Latin assess didn’t mean taxes, it meant “to sit beside” as would an assistant to the judge.

The American Heritage Dictionary goes further in tying the words to an Indo-European root sed also meaning to “sit.”

The 1935 citation in the Oxford English Dictionary that liberates assessment for uses beyond taxation is credited to Webster. Since by 1935 Noah Webster had been dead lo those 90 years we will turn our gaze instead to the New International Dictionary, Second Edition that was printed in his name in that year.

No doubt the dictionary was accurate in its assessment of assess, but there is one famous error contained elsewhere in its pages.

Have you ever come across the word dord?

It appeared in the 1935 New International Dictionary but not because it was a word.

It appeared because one of the contributors suggested that the word density could be abbreviated by either a capital D or a small d. Whoever read the submission didn’t read “D or d” they read dord and thus a new word was born.

It took a few years but the mistake was caught and dord removed. That’s why none of the mainline dictionaries I consulted include dord as a word. But it appears at Urbandictionary and with—I think—an appropriate definition.

They say it’s the word meaning a word that doesn’t exist.


Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of Carnal Knowledge – A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia as well as the forthcoming short format audio book Global Wording – The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English.

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