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Pent Up – Podictionary Word of the Day

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The LA Times tells me that “pent up demand explodes for retailers in March.”

The Kansas City Star has similar good news; “gains were partly driven by pent-up demand from shoppers.”

This is good news for the capitalist dogs; which I only say because in a circuitous way being pent up has to do with dogs.

One gets the feeling that something pent up is trapped and wants to get out.

I’ll walk you through the etymological links as laid out in The Oxford English Dictionary.

The first appearance of pent up seems to have been in Shakespeare’s Henry VI where it meant an enclosed and confining room.

The OED etymology points to an adjective pent whose definition gives a sense of built-up pressure and whose etymology in turn says that apparently pent is the past participle of a word pend.

Following the link to the word pend I see a citation as recently as 1960 of its use in describing how a shoe pressed or pinched if it didn’t fit correctly. So here we still have a sense of containment under pressure.

Following once more the etymology link I see that pend was just a regional variation a word pind. Where people in the south east of England said pend, people in the rest of England and Scotland said pind.

Clicking once more on the link to get to the word pind I at last approach the end of my dog walk because there I see that the word pind in Old English meant to enclose, to confine or even to dam up water, but now in Modern English means “to enclose or impound,” often to impound livestock. But most importantly the word pind is said to have the same Old English root as the word pound which is of course the place where stray dogs are kept.

Based on the word’s meaning 800 years ago though a bigger threat to society back then were stray cattle. It was cows that were rounded up and sent to the pound.

Instead of running out in front of horse drawn wagons or biting the precursors of letter carriers, the problem with stray cattle was the biting and trampling of crops in fields where cows were not expected to be.

In a time before crop insurance when most people ate what they themselves grew, a few hours of cow damage could mean the approach of starvation.


Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of several books including his latest History of Wine Words – An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology from the Vineyard, Glass, and Bottle.

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