I usually try to discuss words whose origin is so uncertain that, when it comes to etymology, dictionaries refuse to commit themselves. But every now and then words occur whose history has been investigated most convincingly, and their history is worth recounting. Such is the word odd. Everything is odd about it, including the fact that its original form has not survived in English. Odd appeared as odde in the fourteenth century. It was a borrowing from Scandinavian, where oddr meant “spear point” and metonymically “spear.” But next to oddr Old Icelandic oddi “triangle; a ‘tongue’ of land” existed. From “triangle” the meaning “an odd number,” as opposed to “an even number,” developed. The compound oddamaðr (ð has the value of th in Modern Engl. the, this, that) meant “the third man, he who gives the casting vote” or simply “an odd man,” that is, the third, fifth, and so forth. It is from oddamaðr that English has “odd man (out).” Icelandic oddatal “odd number” has the same structure as oddamaðr; tal is related to Engl. tell “count,” as in tell the beads and others (compare also the noun teller). Icelandic vera í odda continued into English as to be at odds, and this is also why heroes fight against overwhelming odds. Odd in twenty odd years, three hundred odd (any number between 300 and 400) has the same source. Even oddball, coined apparently in America close to the middle of the twentieth century, harkens back to the Old Scandinavian word. Such are the odds and ends of etymology. Some dictionaries devote separate entries to the adjective odd and the plural noun odds, but there is no need to do so. The singular — the odd — occurs in whist and golf; since the meaning of the odd is “handicap,” it resembles the plural in the common phrase odds-on. Odd is an ideal playing ground for puns. Is odd couple “an extra pair” or “two people who don’t match”? An odd trick in whist is not a peculiar trick but the seventh, the first the winners count toward the score (incidentally, the terminology of games is not the same in Great Britain and the United States).

Oddi was frequent in Scandinavian local names, and it was on a farm called Oddi that Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) grew up. Here a modern picture of Oddi is reproduced. This photo, along with geysers, volcanoes, mountains (in which only ghosts live), and Þingvellir (the place of the most ancient European parliament), is one of the best-known sights used in advertising trips to Iceland (þ = th in Engl. thin). Snorri was a great historian, poet, and politician. He wrote a book known today as The Prose Edda, or The Younger Edda, a manual of Old Scandinavian poetics and myths, as they were remembered in the thirteenth century. He also wrote a history of the kings of Norway (Heimskringla; the book still reads like a thriller — it exists in two excellent English translations) and possibly one the best sagas (The Saga of Egill; in English translations, usually one l is retained: Egil). He was killed by his enemies, and never has a more tragic event happened in the history of Icelandic literature. The origin of the name Edda is a mystery (though the conjectures by etymologists are many), and attempts have been made to connect Edda and Oddi, but the connection is, almost certainly, due to chance and is not more convincing than the one between Boston and best. It is for the sake of Snorri, if for nothing else, that the etymology of odd deserves our attention.

In Icelandic oddr, dd goes back to rd, and with ord we immediately find ourselves on familiar ground. Old Engl. ord meant “point, spot, place.” Its German cognate Ort still means “place,” though a few idioms have retained older senses. Above, I said that the demise of the original form of odd is surprising, and so it is. Old Engl. ord meant the same as Old Scandinavian odd, so why did people substitute a borrowing for the native word? But such events are common. If even they, them, and though were allowed to replace their native rivals, odd had to live up to its capricious meaning. Not only can we trace the paths of odd as it moved from language to language; we even know where the ancient form ord- came from. In Old Germanic, the consonant z became r. Consequently, when we come across an Old Germanic word with r, we have to decide whether it traces back to r or to z. For example, in the verb rear the first r is old, while the second began its life as z. The change of z to r is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho, and we can affirm with certainty (a rare case in etymological studies) that r in ord is rhotacized z. The information comes from names.

Both Ort- and Odd- were common elements in Germanic personal names like Oddgeirr (spear-spear, a tautological compound: both elements mean the same, because geirr means spear, as its English cognate still does in Engl. garfish and garlic, let alone the common favorite Garfield; clearly, the boy was expected to grow up a great warrior; I once devoted a post to such compounds), Oddleifr (a much sadder name, for it refers to what has been left of spear play: presumably, the enemies’ corpses were meant), Oddrún (a female name: “spear’s counselor”), Þoroddr (Þórr was one of the great gods of the ancient Scandinavians), and so forth. In some cases, people may have no longer been aware of the inner form of the most popular names, such as -rún and -leifr, but no one would have missed the message of Oddgeirr. In continental Germanic, we find Ortger, a twin of Oddgeirr, Ortwin, Ortlieb, and other devotees of the spear. Against this background, the name Usdibadus, recorded in Greek letters, comes in most useful. Usdibadus was a Gepid (an East Germanic tribe closely related to the Goths), and his name followed the familiar pattern: usdi + badus, that is, “spear” + “battle.” Usdi- is an obvious cognate of ord, with s, pronounces as z before d, not rhotacized (East Germanic lacked rhotacism: either this change happened later than the fourth century, when the Gothic Bible was translated from the Greek, or it simply never had it). I think his mother called him Uzdi. So this is then the beginning of ord- ~ odd: it was uzd-, from usdo- “spear (point),”perhaps from uz + do, approximately “up” + “put,” an object pointing toward its target. Quite appropriately its Lithuanian cognate means “thistle.” Such is the long history of our word, from Indo-European or at least Germanic warfare to modern golf and whist. If I had a taste for coy titles (and I once professed my dislike of them), I would have called this essay “From Sword to Ploughshare, from Spear to Niblick, Or an Episode in the History of Indo-European Disarmament.”

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

The question about the origin of gay “homosexual” has been asked and answered many times (and always correctly), so that we needn’t expect sensational discoveries in this area. The adjective gay, first attested in Middle English, is of French descent; in the fourteenth century it meant both “joyous” and “bright; showy.” The OED gives no attestations of gay “immoral” before 1637. Yet it is not improbable that this sense is much older but that it remained part of low slang, unfamiliar to the majority of English speakers, even such as were sensitive to street usage. Dickens began writing Dombey and Son in 1846 and gave the family name Gay to Walter, the future husband of Florence, the sweet and suffering character (one can even say the protagonist) of his novel. The combination Mrs. Walter Gay (or Florence Gay) did not shock or amuse his contemporaries, though gay woman “prostitute” had already made it even into printed books (the earliest citation in the OED goes back to 1825). Gay “homosexual” dates to the 1930’s, but it could hardly have been the product of slow semantic development from “depraved” and “perverse.” While “unnatural attraction,” to use the euphemism of the past epoch, was looked upon as a deviation and a vice, gay “male prostitute,” along with “whore,” would suggested itself to many. In the sixties of the twentieth century, homosexual men accepted gay as a neutral term, and that is the end of the story. A slight touch of novelty in my summary is that I don’t believe in “merry, joyous” acquiring negative connotations gradually and suspect that they have been present since the middle period but were suppressed or even tabooed; see also below. The sense “male prostitute,” perhaps especially with reference to a passive homosexual, may be old too. Thus, if I am right, the history of gay did not run parallel to that of faggot: in fag ~ faggot, reference to homosexuals indeed appeared only in the twentieth century.

The main mystery is the origin of the French word, the etymon of Engl. gay. The first edition of the OED offered no solution; the OED online expanded considerably the etymological part of the entry but refrained from taking sides and only listed a few proposals. This is natural: the history of gay is obscure and will, most likely, remain a matter of controversy in the future. Before I say what little I can on this subject, a short introduction is needed. It is well-known that words like warranty and guarantee, warden and guardian, William and Guillaume, among many others, are etymological doublets pairwise. The French for war is guerre, that is, the doublet of guerre serves also as its English gloss. We have here Old Germanic words with initial w-. When Central Old French borrowed them, w-, a sound alien to Romance, was replaced with gu- (first only before the vowel a); with time, w after g was lost. Later such words often migrated to English, where the spelling gu- bears witness to their stay “abroad.” But in Northern and Anglo- French, the dialects of greater importance to the history of English than the French of Paris, initial w- survived. Consequently, both warden and guardian are ultimately of Germanic origin, but guardian was taken over from Central French, whereas warden is a guest from Northern French, so that w- makes the word look as though it had never left it Germanic home.

The main old hypotheses concerning gay were based on the idea that it had come to French from some Germanic language: central (Franconian) or southern (Gothic). Therefore, scholars looked for appropriate adjectives beginning with g or w. The main candidates were Old High German gahi “quick, precipitous, daring” and wahi “shining, beautiful” (both with long a). Those adjectives have been recorded with several more senses, but we do not need full lists. Romance etymological dictionaries (at gai and so forth) usually defend wahi or more rarely gahi (look up jäh, the reflex of gahi, in German dictionaries if you are interested in more information). Both etymologies encounter considerable difficulties, because the path from either “precipitous” or “shining” to “merry” is hard to reconstruct. The second variant is preferable on account of Engl. gay “showy,” but, in English, “showy” seems to be a figurative meaning, while in French gai this sense does not exist at all.

To be sure, the sought-for etymon did not have to be Germanic: it might as well be a Romance word, and here our story again branches off into two. Latin gaudium “joy” has been suggested as the source of the adjective (do many people still remember the “hymn”: “Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus”? “Let us therefore rejoice while we are young”). The other guess connected gay and jay (the bird name). The interplay of initial g- and j- in French deserves a long essay, but we’ll let it be, because the idea that French gai meant “merry as a jay” (or that the jay got its name because it was “a merry bird”) has been refuted quite efficiently. The derivation from gaudium still has distinguished supporters. A stray publication once defended German geil “lecherous, randy, horny” as the etymon of gai. This idea lacks value. I am now coming to the climax of my etymological thriller.

The regular readers of this blog know that I am a great admirer of Frank Chance, whose piercing judgment and etymological acumen (when I am agitated, I begin to speak like Anthony Trollope or like Kipling’s bicolored python—sorry) was equal to Skeat’s and James A. H. Murray’s. Oxford University Press would do the world a great favor if it reprinted ALL his contributions in a cheap slim volume with an index. In 1861 he published in Notes and Queries a short article (“note”), which I’ll reproduce with numerous abridgments:

“Gaîne. –The etymology of this Fr. word signifying sheath seems to me instructive. It comes…from the Lat. vagina…. The g in gaîne, therefore, really corresponds to the v in vagina…. In a similar way, I think, our adj. gay might be readily deduced from the Lat. vagus, or perhaps rather from the corresponding Ital. vago, which means both wandering, roaming, and pleasant, agreeable, the connexion apparently being the freedom from restraint implied by both classes of words.”

Some time ago, I devoted a post to the origin of the word bigot. Its etymology was discovered in a short review that no one seems to have read. Before that I told a similar story about conundrum. Quite naturally, French, Spanish, and German scholars have never heard of Frank Chance, for he published his letters only in Notes and Queries and occasionally in The Academy. But Skeat and Murray read this periodical and regularly contributed to it, so that it is incomprehensible why they missed Chance’s conjecture.

A hundred and thirty years later the noted German historical linguist Harri Meier offered exactly the same etymology and even referred to vagina as a piece of corroborating evidence. He cited not only Latin vagus “wandering, rambling; inconstant” (compare Engl. vague, vagrant, vagabond, extravagant, vagary, and others with the same root) but also (and this is especially important) the senses current in the living Romance languages and such derivatives as Italian svagarsi “divert one’s mind “and “enjoy oneself,” svago “relaxation, diversion, amusement,” and a few French verbs of the same type. Incidentally, Old French gai already meant “high-spirited; frivolous, fickle; libertine,” while Latin poets called a flighty girl vaga puella and vaga juventa (quite possibly, such maidens were not just flighty). It appears that Latin vagus ~ vaga indeed continued into the Romance languages with the sense “free from restraint” and underwent what is called an amelioration of meaning (from “libertine; frivolous” to “merry, vivacious”). For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip the question of whether gai had anything to do with its partial synonym gaillard. Middle English gay must have inherited both senses, but one became “standard,” whereas the other (because of its negative connotations) led an undignified life as part of low slang, until it came to the surface and ousted the idea of merriment. A gay man can now be full of pep or depressed and sad. We no longer hear either the tautology or the oxymoron. Thus, gay ends up as a Romance word without Germanic ancestors.

I believe that Chance’s etymology, rediscovered by Meier, who was unaware of a talented predecessor, is the best we have, but I am not a Romance scholar and will let specialists resolve the dispute. Regardless of their reaction, one thing is clear. Etymologists constantly force open doors. They lack solid bibliographies and rediscover old solutions or wander in the dark. I said this in my posts on conundrum and bigot. I’ll say it again now.

This is a portrait of John Gay (1685-1732), the author of The Beggar’s Opera. Of those who have borne this name, he may be the most famous representative.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

The Infamous C-Word

1. In Sackcloth and Ashes. In the post on the C-word, I made two mistakes, for both of which I am sorry, though neither was due to chance. In Middle High German, the word kotze “vagina” existed, and I was going to write that, given such a noun, the verb kotzen “copulate” can also be reconstructed. Instead, I wrote that Modern German kotzen has such a meaning, though I knew only too well that kotzen means “puke, barf.” The modern verb seems to have a different origin; however, the available information is meager and not fully convincing. I also misspelled the name of the author in the picture. The illustration at the bottom of this post will reveal the full depth of my contrition.

2. Use and origin. One of our correspondents was told that in British English the C-word does not necessarily have offensive connotations when applied to women. This will be news to most of us. Perhaps the source of the information was the OED. In the past, c**t could indeed be used more freely. The same holds for the F-word (compare windfucker), but no conclusions follow for the present, as explained (quite correctly, to my mind) in a comment by another correspondent. The word was unprintable for a long time, and even now people usually avoid it. As for its origin, final -th in the protoform is impossible, for it would either have been preserved as -th or become d. Also, if the word had ended in -nth, the modern vowel would have been long, as in uncouth or in south. Like one of our correspondents, I also think that fuzzy-muzzy was coined on the analogy of fuzzy-wuzzy, alluding to pubic hair. Finally, beware of knowing little or no Italian. When English speakers, ignorant of the language, come to Italy and see some drink called caldo, they are surprised to get hot tea or hot coffee. I thought of this dilemma, while leafing through the old issues of the Italian journal Filologia antica e moderna in search of publications for my database. The title “Anatomia dell’eros ne Lo cunto de li cunti di Giambattista Basile” caught my fancy. The book by Basile is the famous Pentamerone, an early collection of Neapolitan fairy tales. It is known in English as The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones. Cunto (compare Modern Italian racconto and French conte) means “tale” in Basile’s seventeenth-century dialect. Quite a different word is the noun cunta “delay,” from Latin cuncta. Those who have read the history of the Second Punic War will remember Fabius Maximus, the cunctator (“delayer”). English dictionaries give the noun cunctation “delay,” a nice word to use in casual conversation. So much for cunto, cunta, and their English look-alike.

Engl. critter ~ Norwegian (Nynorsk) krøter. Mr. Jade Sandstedt pointed out this correspondence to me and asked how the two are connected. His question may affect the way the entry critter will be treated in our etymological dictionaries, assuming that they will ever deign to include such a word. One can sometimes read that critter is an Americanism traceable to creature. This is wrong on both counts, for the word is widespread in British dialects, but there it seems to be only or mainly a derogatory term for a worthless man, while in American English critters are first and foremost animals. In regional Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, the word has numerous variants: kryter, krætur, kriter, and so forth. It occurs in Faroese; kritter and kretter were also attested in Old Danish. In Scandinavian, the prevailing meaning is the same as in American English. The ultimate etymon of critter and its variants is, of course, Latin creatura, but the situation in English deserves more attention. Dictionaries say that critter is an alteration (according to the unfortunate formulation of The Century Dictionary, a vulgar corruption) of creature (but at that time vulgar might mean “popular, related or pertaining to vulgus”). In light of the forms cited above, this conclusion should be modified. Critter is, more probably, a borrowing from Scandinavian, even though we have no textual evidence to support this claim from Middle English.

Ache and Its Remote Past. The question was why I did not make use of Raimo Anttila’s root *ag-. That I have read and used Anttila’s article is obvious, for how else would I have known the Finnish words cited in the post? The root Anttila reconstructed is not original, but more important is that I in general treat Indo-European roots and extensions, which so many researchers take for granted, with great caution. As follows from my post, I doubt that ache had an Indo-European ancestor in the sense in which father or one had them. Some migratory word (Wanderwort) or its sound symbolic analog may have existed, but its history is obscure. Even Holthausen, who slavishly followed Walde-Pokorny in his Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, did without such a root. I am not a fan of his dictionaries, but in this case he seems to have acted wisely.

Diametrically opposed. Is this phrase legitimate, when used about opinions? If usage justifies “correctness,” it is, for diametrically with the sense of “entirely” has been around for centuries. However, this adverb does not add anything to the meaning of the statement; it only makes it more emphatic. Many adverbs are equally redundant. He actually missed the train, and that’s why he is late. I definitely oppose your plan, and the like. Actually has become an invasive species: people use it much too often (a mere buzzword).

The Verb would and the Sequence of Tenses. The rule of the sequence of tenses has broken down not only in English but also in the Scandinavian languages and to some extent in German. It is instructive to look at some examples. “Evans said he hopes the crew will begin unloading the fuel by Sunday.” The old rule that after a verb in the past the verb in the subordinate clause should also be in the past (“Evans said he hoped the crew would begin unloading the fuel on Sunday”) appears to be dead. The fate of would is particularly interesting. “The Obama administration is relying on a secret channel of communication to warn Iran’s supreme leader… that closing the Strait of Hormuz is a ‘red line’ that would provide an American response, according to US government officials.” The writers (two of them from The New York Times) must have had a vague recollection that would is sometimes needed in subordinate clauses but did not know why and when. From the same article “Senior Obama administration officials have said publicly that Iran would cross a line if it made good on recent threats to close the strait….” Sometimes it seems that all is not lost. Compare: “Majority House Republicans said that they would (bravo!) hold a vote next week on a resolution of disapproval.” Alas, the next sentence returns us to the starting point: “But such a resolution would not clear the Democratic-led Senate, and the White House says Obama would veto an objection to avoid default” (The Associated Press). Even in the following example, in which would is roughly equivalent to could and seems to mark the subjunctive, it was probably uses automatically, instead of will: “It is implausible that this would happen to such prestigious sites as ….” I am afraid that people no longer know why sometimes will is required and in other cases would. The future of the abused verb may be in their hands.

My Favorite Plural. “A child’s expression of their religious identity in school isn’t banned, just as a soldier’s expression of their queer identity shouldn’t be.” I agree. A child know how to address their God, and a soldier know how to deal with their sexuality.

An Especially Elegant Split Infinitive. “It has prompted the Northern League partly to at times call the north to secede….”

Lexicographers should be encouraged. Dr. Fitzedward Hall (born in America , but his adopted country was England), whom I have quoted in the past and whose belligerent style is moderately funny, said the following about dictionaries: “Most people…, after they have learned to spell, keep books of this class mainly for show, the end they best fulfill. Lexicographers apart, it is only a curious inquirer, here and there, that appreciates intelligently their deplorable vanity and delusiveness” (Modern English, 1873, p. 135). Vanity and delusiveness…

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

To an etymologist ache is one of the most enigmatic words. Although it has been attested in Old English, its unquestionable cognates in other languages are few. Low (that is, northern) German dialects have äken “hurt, fester,” ake “finger inflammation; whitlow; secretion from the eye,” and the like. Bavarian acken “hurt” is isolated in the south, and its status in relation to Engl. ache is unclear. It has been suggested that Finnish äkä “hatred” is a borrowing from German. May Finnish linguists discuss this idea. We will content ourselves with saying that the “Germans” who colonized Britain brought the noun ak- and the verb aka- to their new home and preserved it.

This is what people failed to discover about the origin of ache: (1) Does the English-Low German word have congeners outside its restricted area? and (2) Did its meaning (today it is “dull, steady pain”) develop from an abstract notion referring to discomfort, or was its starting point the name of some painful symptom, as suggested by “fester” and “inflammation”? Etymological dictionaries either present dogmatic answers, without pointing out that the truth is hidden, or drown their ignorance (of which they need not be ashamed) in extraneous information. Following the OED, they often explain in excessive detail that ache, verb, and ache, noun, had different forms in Old English, that the noun was indeed pronounced with ch, that the immensely influential lexicographer Samuel Johnson was unaware of the true state of affairs, and that this is mainly the reason we have the preposterous spelling still used. But the OED does not have to offer etymologies when those are unknown, while special dictionaries are expected to say something definite on the subject, a temptation to which they often yield, though keeping silent is preferable to misleading or hoodwinking readers. Some dictionaries send us away with the verdict “origin uncertain,” which is correct but uninspiring. It seems that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. My task is easier: I will describe the situation and leave it at that.

The earliest English etymologists, from the seventeenth century on, believed that ache had been derived from Greek ákhos “grief, pain.” Today we know that English was not “derived” from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Gothic, or German, but even juxtaposing ache and ákhos is hard, because Greek kh does not match Engl. k. Yet a bond between the two nouns can be imagined if we assume that both go back to some interjection like German ach! (that is, akh!). Although Old English ak ended in k rather than kh, interjections need not follow rigid phonetic rules. This etymology has been proposed by such different people as Hensleigh Wedgwood, a scholar who attempted to trace too many English words to sound imitation, and (tentatively) by Ferdinand Holthausen, a cautious researcher who never allowed fantasies to run away with him. All things considered, an exclamation is an unlikely source of ache, though akh!, okh!, ukh! can serve as the foundation of words for moaning, groaning, and the like. (Gothic auhjan “make a noise,” if pronounced as ohjan, is perhaps one of them.)

Since, outside Germanic, Engl. k corresponds to g, etymologists exploring the origin of ache looked for Indo-European words beginning with ag-. Greek had ágos “a great sin incurring a curse.” The Old Engl. for ache was æce (æ, as a in Modern Engl. man) ~ ece, and ágos is a tolerably good match for it, except that one expects Proto-Germanic ákis, not ákos (only i in the second syllable would have caused the change of a to e). This etymology occasionally turns up in modern dictionaries, though with some hedging. More about ákhos and ágos will be said below. Some of our most authoritative sources state that ache is related to Latin agere “drive,” with an unexplained change of meaning (via “impel, force”). The frequentative form of agere is agitare “agitate,” which seems to provide a link between “drive” and “pain”; a few moderately convincing Scandinavian and Finnish parallels of a similar semantic shift have been cited. Despite the near consensus on the agere-ache etymology among many distinguished scholars (note that the OED offers no proposal on the origin of ache!), I would risk a minority opinion. With respect to physical pain, and that is what ache seems to be about, we may remember the questions doctors ask when they want to find out what is wrong with us: “Will you describe your pain as burning, piercing, stabbing, or throbbing?” Some concrete notion like “burn” or “throb” would be a more acceptable basis for “ache” than “drive.”

Two circumstances may be relevant to our search. In the Germanic languages, we find a group of similar-sounding words referring to unpleasant sensations. Such are German Ekel “nausea; disgust,” which at one time competed with a synonym having r in the middle (erken ~ erkeln “to abhor, loathe”), Dutch akel “grief” (the common word is the adjective akelig “dismal; nasty”), German heikel “tricky, delicate” (said about a situation; known only since the sixteenth century), Old Icelandic eikinn “raving mad,” corresponding to Old Engl. acol (with long a) “frightened,” and ekla “lack.” Also, there is no shortage of analogous ag- words: for instance, Gothic aglo “anguish; affliction” (its English cognate is ail) and agis “fear” (here the English cognate is awe). Old Engl. ag-læc ~ ag-lac (both vowels were long) meant “grief, distress”; aglæca “monster” is familiar to the readers of Beowulf in the original. With other vowels we find Old Icelandic uggr “fear” (the root of Engl. ugly); in Norwegian and Swedish agg “anger” corresponds to it. In Icelandic, agg means “squabble, quarrel,” and one can easily imagine the character of the Icelander who once had the nickname Aggi. Incidentally, the Indo-European root ak- meant “sharp,” and its reflexes are many, for example, Latin acutus “acute” (from which English has, via French, ague). It is as though all over Europe, from Greece to Scandinavia, ag- ~ ug- and ak - ~ aik- ~ eik ~ ek- ~ (?) heik were at one time the favorite syllables for designating things causing pain, arousing fear, loathsome, and “icky,” those about which we say yuck.

The second consideration is this. In Indo-European, the vowel a occurs with some regularity in words denoting lack and physical defects. This has been noticed by Ferdinand de Saussure, a great language historian and one of the founders of structuralism, though most of his examples are not from Germanic. Such observations are too general to furnish a clue to individual solutions, but it is characteristic that hardly any word mentioned above has an established etymology. The same can be said about words for “illness,” including smart, sick, and especially ill (Engl. ill is a borrowing from Scandinavian). In this area, taboo must have been rampant: don’t call an ailment by its name, and the spirit controlling it will be kept at bay.

So what is the conclusion? Ache is of course a word “of uncertain etymology,” and such it will remain for all times. It might be a symbolic coinage of sorts, with the vowel a playing some role in its early history, and it might be part of a sizable group of words beginning with ag-, ak-, -aik, all of them referring to guilt, fear, suffering, and disgust. If so, Greek ákhos and ágos belong with it in a loose way, but neither can be called its cognate. (A conclusion along these lines must have appealed even to such a serious scholar as Jan de Vries, who compared Old Icelandic ögurr, allegedly “pain,” and Greek ákhos.) I would dissociate ache from Latin agere ~ agitare and advise lexicographers not to give this etymology as proven. Other than that, ache is ache.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Like all word columnists, I keep receiving the same questions again and again.  Approximately once a month someone asks me about the origin of the F-word, the C-word, and gay.  Well, the C-word has been investigated in great detail, and a few conjectures are not so bad.  By way of introduction, I should note that, judging by the examples in the OED, the English C-word was not offensive or at least not always offensive in Middle English.  No combination of sounds appeals to our prurient instincts because of their intrinsic qualities.  To shock or make us blush, they need a certain attitude on our part.  Hoochie-coochie may be funny or indecent, but by itself it is neither “good” nor “bad.”  In such matters, everything is a matter of agreement.  “I am a woman of an unspotted reputation,” protests Clelia, featured in Spectator No. 276, “and know nothing I have ever done which should encourage such insolence; but here was one, the other day,—and he was dressed like a gentleman, too—who took the liberty to name the words lusty fellow in my presence” (quoted by Fitzedward Hall in his book Recent Exemplifications of False Philology. New York, 1872).  The protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando fainted at seeing a woman’s ankle.  Keep reading and don’t faint.

Words for the genitals and sexual activities have always been tabooed, but not necessarily out of prudery.  Throughout history people have believed that pronouncing the name of a thing aloud can have practical consequences; hence universal belief in curses and charms.  Therefore, for example, the Germanic word for “bear” (= “a brown one”) is the product of taboo.  If you disguise the animal’s real name, the brute, which, of course, knows what it is called (the name was taken for an integral, natural part of everybody and everything that exists), may not come.  All kinds of prohibitions connected with sex are of the same nature: being too open with words may have deleterious effects on health, sexual power, and childbearing.  People would intentionally garble words (transpose sounds in them, coin a rhyming synonym, and so forth; compare gosh, golly, and other euphemisms for god).  Perhaps also thanks to taboo, the same word may designate the buttocks and the vagina (there is less fear to offend the backside than the genitals), though other reasons are not unthinkable: both the anus and the vagina are hollows; compare the much-discussed history of fanny.  In addition, contiguous organs and body parts are sometimes called the same.  For instance, Latin vulva meant both “vagina” and “womb.”  To complicate matters even more, words in question are often borrowed from other languages.  For instance, the origin of poontang is debatable, but it is almost certainly a “loan” from abroad. All this makes an etymologist’s task hard, sometimes even hopeless.

Finally, there are innumerable descriptive and playful names for the genitals.  Is our C**t one of them?  I have looked at Classical Greek, Elizabethan, Modern German, and American students’ names for “vagina, vulva” and compared them with a list collected from the Samoyeds, a Ural-Altaic people inhabiting the tundra lands of the north, and another list from Italian dialects, that is, words used by people having minimal contact with book culture.  The repertory is rich but similar the world over.  The vagina can be “a hole” (with positive or depreciating epithets), any type of orifice, “a slit,” “a crack,” “a sack,”, “a hill” (alluding to the mons Veneris), “a house,” “a vessel” (numerous varieties, including “cup”), “a stove” (a veritable Freudian feast), “a berry,” “a hair house” (hence hairy Mary, bush, and beaver hunting), and “a penis” (with or without reference to the clitoris).  However, having the same metaphor or even the same word for both “penis” and “vagina” is not typical.  I have excluded from my survey such descriptive terms as rosebud and love box and silly formations like fuzzy-muzzy.  Whether all of them have been invented by men is a moot question. It has been observed that the words for “vagina” hardly ever refer to what comes out of it, but only to what enters it; the thought process is directed toward coitus, not procreation.

The most common words for “vagina” in the Germanic languages sound approximately like put, fut, and kut ~ kunt (u frequently alternates with o in them).  An unsolved question is whether they are in any way connected, that is, whether we are dealing with some sort of rhyming slang, taboo, or even variants of fuzzy-muzzy.  As a rule, they are looked upon as three independent words, each of which needs an etymology.  A related question is whether n in kunt belongs to the original root.  Numerous words in Germanic have so-called nasalized variants, that is, n is secondary in them.  Dutch kont (which, incidentally, means both “buttocks” and, in dialects, “vagina”) has a synonym kut.  Engl. cut, now obsolete or dialectal (mainly northern), was defined in the OED as an opprobrious term for women (its synonym is cutty).  This cut ended up as one of the senses of the noun cut “something cut (off),” but it is almost certainly a different word.  The path from cut ~ kut to kunt ~ kont is easier to imagine than from kunt ~ kont to cut ~ kut.  If n is secondary, comparison with Latin cunnus “vulva” (known to English speakers from cunnilingus) becomes impossible.  Also, double n in cunnus needs an explanation.  It has been suggested, on the strength of Greek and Lithuanian cognates, that cunnus goes back to kus-nus. Regardless of the origin of -nn-, Latin k- should have corresponded to English h-. However, this may not be an insurmountable obstacle in dealing with kunt, because if the protoform began with sk-, the k ~ k correspondence is possible, on condition that both Latin and Germanic or one of them lost s- along the way.  Initial s- is unstable in Indo-European, and there is even a special term for it, namely s mobile (movable s).  With so many undocumented steps, an ancient tie between the Germanic and the Latin noun begins to look rather improbable.

The Old English for kin was cynn, with y from u by umlaut (some related words are kind “variety,” kind “generous, warmhearted,” kindred, and German Kind “child”).  Kunt can be related to cynn, only if its -t is a suffix, and Lithuanian gimtis “sex” gives some support to this reconstruction, but there are hardly any examples of a word for “sex” or “birth” yielding the name for “vagina.”  Besides this, it seems preferable not to separate the kut ~ kot group from kunt, thus taking -t for part of the root.  Most likely, the initial form of the word we are exploring was kut- or kot-.  Dutch kut ~ Engl. cut, as noted, mean the same or practically the same as the C-word.  Therefore, I gravitate toward the conclusion that Germanic kunt is indeed a nasalized variant of kut (because of taboo or for expressive purposes).  Given this etymology, kin, along with Latin cunnus, fades out of the picture.  The origin of cut ~ kut may not be too obscure.  It is probably related to Engl. cot (cottage is the same word with a French suffix added).  Dutch kot means “sheep pen; dog kennel; pigsty,” and the English dovecote (which should not be fluttered) belongs with them.  Obviously, we have here the name of an animal house, an enclosure or some elevation above the ground.  If so, our word may once have meant “hole” or “little house,” both being among the most common designations for “vagina” in various languages.  The distant origin of the root need not bother us here.  Dutch kuit “fish roe, spawn,” presumably from “soft mass,” should also stay outside our picture.  The history of Germanic fut ~ fot and put ~ pot is a special story.

My initial idea was to call this post Vagina’s Monologues, but good journalism prohibits using other people’s successful titles like Great Expectations or A Room with a View.  So I confined myself to reproducing a picture of Eve Ensler, a modest tribute to the author of this award winning play.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

As promised, the first of the fifty-two posts due to appear in 2012 will be devoted to the verb begin, whose siblings have been attested in all the West Germanic languages (English is one of them) and Gothic. Surprisingly, they did not turn up in Old Scandinavian, except for Danish (under the influence of German?).  Old Icelandic for “begin” was byrja, and its cognates continued into Norwegian and Swedish, let alone Modern Icelandic and Faroese.  The etymology of begin has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction, but such is the history of most etymological flesh.

Begin is a combination of the prefix be- and the root -gin, and the verb’s cognates never occurred without a prefix, though the prefixes varied widely: we find -gin with du-, on-, ont-, in-, be-, bi-, and a- (the latter designated long a, as in Engl. father).  Usually, when prefixes are appended to a root so freely, the root is transparent.  Today, we may not understand how get is connected with forget or how German entsprechen “correspond” is related to sprechen “speak,” but it would be no less odd to have forget and entsprechen without get and sprechen than to have defrost without frost.  What then was gin, a root that could not stand on its own?  To make things even worse, begin tended to have an irregular preterit; the irregularity, which seems to be old, suggests that the verb is also very old.  Some scholars think that the mysterious gin came from a substrate, an early unrecorded indigenous European language, and was later combined with multiple prefixes only in Germanic.  Such a hypothesis would carry more conviction if we were dealing with a plant or an animal name or a term of material culture, but why should a word like begin have ousted its native synonym?  Wherever the speakers of the Germanic languages may have come from, they surely had some word for “begin.”  Anyway, such a hypothesis makes further thoughts on the problem unnecessary, because nothing is known about that substrate, and the question about the inability of gin to function without prefixes remains.

Etymologists in search of a solution routinely do several things.  They collect all the recorded forms of the word.  With regard to begin, this has been done.  After that they comb through the closely related languages in the hope that the cognates may match phonetically but have somewhat divergent senses and therefore furnish a clue to the word’s original meaning.  The Germanic cognates of begin (with some prefix) are in plain view, and all of them mean the same.   This procedure is followed by a hunt for cognates outside the main group.  We will soon see that though the hunters were many, the game escaped.  Finally, as many synonyms as possible are netted, and the question is asked: “What is the ‘motivation’ for calling a spade a spade?” (In our case: “From what less abstract concepts does the sense ‘begin’ usually develop?’”).

Let us first look at the synonyms.  The earliest meaning of Engl. start was “jump, leap,” as in to start at the sound of a shot.  Start “set out for a journey” and “begin” developed later.  Commence, ultimately from Latin, goes back to some form like comminitiare, and initiare “initiate” is a derivative of init-, from in and ire “go,” so that the foundation of commence is “go into,” a good basis for “begin.”  Icelandic byrja is obscure, and we will not yield to the temptation of explaining one opaque word by referring to another equally opaque one (nothing good ever comes from this procedure).  German, in addition to beginnen, has anfangen and anheben (both mean the same; however, the use of anheben “begin” is restricted).  Fangen means “catch,” and heben means “raise,” while an- corresponds to Engl. on.  The path from “catch” and “raise” to “begin” must have been fairly straightforward.  One can continue stringing such synonyms for a long time, and I’ll cite only one more word.  The stem of origin, from Latin origo, is oriri “arise.”  It now becomes clear why etymologists wander among the Indo-European words meaning “catch,” “rise,” and “go,” expecting to find a solid match for -gin.

However, Germanic itself has a few forms that resemble the root of begin.  The Old Icelandic prefix gin- meant “great, vast,” presumably, from “wide open”; its cognate was Old Engl. ginn “spacious.” Ginnungagap is the vast void of the Scandinavian creation myth (gap is related to Engl. gape).  If begin and Icelandic gin- are indeed related, begin must have first meant “open widely,” and its root is akin to Engl. yawn.  We obtain “begin” = “open.” (To this day, we can “open” a meeting, that is, begin it.)  The way the verb is used in the Old Germanic languages, especially in Gothic and German (I will skip the details), confirms this reconstruction.  However, like all the other etymologies, it fails to explain why begin and its congeners needed a prefix.  Icelandic has ginna “to fool, dupe,” apparently, from “entice; bewitch”; this sense seems to have been the product of religious usage.

Several non-Germanic roots have been compared with -gin.  One can be seen in Latin pre-hendere “seize” (compare Engl. comprehend and prehensile).  Prehendere is a perfect match for German anfangen, but neither has anything to do with “open wide.”  The same holds for Slavic kon-, which, as mentioned in the post on end, occurs in words meaning both “begin and “end” and is very possibly related to Latin recens “fresh” (the ultimate source of Engl. recent; re- is a prefix).   An unsolved question is whether the putative cognates of begin should have initial g- or k-.  In the scholarly literature on the etymology of this verb, a few other possibilities have been weighed and many words from Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Irish, Welsh, and Albanian have been mentioned. But the problem is clear, and there is no need to multiply forms from all over the world.  If we stick to the “open wide” idea and choose g- cognates (with g- from Proto-Indo-European gh-), we should look for them among words like Latin hiare “gape” (compare Engl. hiatus), related to yawn, German gähnen (the same meaning). Icelandic gin-, and so forth.  Of the imperfect solutions known to me this one is perhaps the best.

No “images” of the ginnungagap I have been able to find look frightening enough to me.  So I have chosen a picture by the great Lithuanian painter Mikalojus K. Čiurlionis.  The medieval Scandinavians would have probably liked it: a strange creature watching the still uninhabited world.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Last Wednesday, in anticipation of the inevitable calendar leap, I discussed the origin of the word end.  The end has come.  This post happens to be the last in 2011 — not really a rite of passage, for a week from now another Wednesday will bring the world another post, dated January 4, 2012.  As announced, it will be devoted to the verb begin.  One should not take December or oneself too seriously, but I am pleased to say that this blog is read and quoted by many and that I continue to receive letters and comments from all over the world.  I have noted in the past that the best way to learn whether one has a readership is to make a mistake or to say something that needs clarification.  Not long ago, I mentioned a strange inconsistency, namely that we say go to college (no article) but go to the university (with the definite article).  I should have said not “we” but “in American English,” and several people immediately corrected me.  Since in my childhood and youth I identified English with its British variety, I knew that in England people go to university, but I forgot or did not know that the same article-less usage prevails in Scotland, Australia, and Canada.

MI was also pleased to hear from Heiner Gillmeister, who discovered my old posts on golf and tennis and referred me to his publications I had missed.  Mr. Gillmeister is an eminent specialist in the history of sport, and my suggestions on the etymology of both golf and tennis were heavily dependent on his results. (I may repeat my usual request to everybody: inform me of your works on etymology: this is the most precious grist that comes to my bibliographical mill.)  Perhaps my survey of the literature on Rotten Row will elicit more comments and even a new hypothesis on the origin of this place name.  So far I have received only two (positive) responses, and I may add another old suggestion to those I discussed in the essay: an nineteenth-century author traced Rotten to rowan (not to be taken seriously).

In February 2012 the world will celebrate the bicentennial (bicentenary) of Charles Dickens’s birth.  Somebody quipped that, according to the famous Russian literary scholar Yuri Tynianov, the main event in modern Russian history was Pushkin’s birth. Tynianov (stress on a) may have been right.   In similar fashion, I believe that few dates in recent European history can eclipse February 7, 1812.  Also in 1812, the first edition of the Grimms’ tales was published.  Dickens’s novels and the Grimms’ tales defined European culture like few other literary works.  To be sure, in 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia.  And where is he?  In history books.  But Dickens and the tales are locked forever in our hearts.  I cannot promise that I will be able to write a post about Dickens or even about the brothers.  Dickens, unlike the Grimms, was not an etymologist, though thanks to him, a time-honored phenomenon received the name wellerism, and linguists still argue over the accuracy of his rendition of the Yorkshire dialect (in Nicholas Nickleby) and cockney.  Walter Skeat had full confidence in Dickens’s power of observation as regards London speech, and he knew what he was saying.  Even if I don’t devote a post to Dickens, my conscience will be clear, for Oxford University Press asked me to write a holiday essay about some of its classics, and I wrote a comparison of David Copperfield and Thackeray’ Pendennis, both of which appeared in 1850*.  Incidentally, Skeat died in 1912, and there will certainly be a post about that centennial (centenary).

One of our correspondents wrote that his firm frowns on the use of the word Christmas and advises the coworkers to replace it with winter festival.  He wanted to know the origin of the phrase winter festival and the word winter.  I cannot tell who coined the collocations season’s greetings and winter festival, but the latter was easy to come by.  For example, some old dictionaries defined Yule as “Christmas festival,” and any period appointed for celebration or commemoration is called festival.  Likewise, folklorists and ethnographers describe agrarian festivals.  The origin of winter is debatable.  The answer depends on where the earliest speakers of the Germanic language spent their winters.  Did they see snow in their winter?  Was it a cold or a mild season?  Several etymons (sources) of the word winter have been proposed, wind, wet, and a Germanic cognate of Old Celtic windo- “white,” among others.  Gothic, an old Germanic language recorded in the fourth century CE, had wintrus, practically the same word we know from English.   In the previous “gleanings,” I touched on the difference between ecology and ecosystem. The comment that -ology need not designate the name of a scholarly discipline is correct, and I am well aware of this fact, for I constantly speak about etymology as a science and the etymology (= origin) of a word.  But this development is unpredictable: it occurred in some words but not in others.

Category and talent.  Why have these words changed their meaning so drastically, and how common are such changes?  Greek categoria meant “accusation, charge,” literally, “statement made in the assembly” (agora “market place, assembly”).  Its fortunes in the European languages were defined by Aristotle, who used the word in his logic.  There it refers to the highest notion, especially one derived from the logical analysis of the forms of proposition.  From Greek, via late Latin, the word made its way into French and from French into English.  Also the history of talent was determined by a chance event.  Its Greek etymon designated “scale (balance); a particular weight, especially of gold.”  But the word’s modern sense “marked aptitude”   goes back to the phrase in Matt. XXV, 15.  Words do sometimes modify their meaning under the influence of famous books (in English one can cite examples from the history of Shakespeare’s vocabulary), but this situation is relatively rare.

I am including the next question in the hope that somebody versed in Semitic etymology will be able to answer it.  Our correspondent writes: “I have found significant overlap between the words and related words for “myrtle” (hadas) and “betrothal” (eirusin) and their possible connection to Eros.”  He wonders what I think about the possibility of this relationship.  In the letter, the forms were reproduced, not only transliterated.  At first glance, the words in question are hardly related.  The origin of the Greek name is unknown;  its connection with a Sanskrit word meaning “”filled with desire” has been suggested.

A few parting shots

Who/whom.  The confusion is so well known that it is silly to feel amused.  Yet some people distinguish the forms.  Even undergraduates sometimes do.  From a letter to a student newspaper: “About a month ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a guy who she thought I would be great for.”  The “guy” lived up to the girls’ expectations but was less active than expected.  Perhaps he was intimidated by his date’s flawless grammar: in such and all other circumstances, he probably says whom she thought.  A writer for the Associated Press knew that there was danger here but could not recognize it.  Hence the following passage: “He purged or banished senior officials who he considered power-hungry.”

Generic plural

I think the reason I detest sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait is that the antecedent of they/them has the indefinite article.  And this is probably why the plural after somebody, anybody, and even someone does not sound offensive.  “A student” cannot be “they.”  “…a manager cannot have such a relationship with someone they oversee.”  I agree, but I also believe that a manager cannot be “they.”  “…each writer clearly, succinctly and intelligently stated their cases.”  More of the same?  Not quite, for both writers were men; yet the letter writers (two signatures) used the only pronoun they were taught to use in such constructions.  I once overheard (and even quoted) the following snippet of conversation.  “I met John at a party and liked him a lot.  We exchanged telephone numbers.”  “And did they call back?”  There are no limits to people’s stultification.

A Happy New Year to timorous and temerarious lovers of men, women, and words, to all those who already love us, and to those who will discover us in 2012!

And here is a picture of my colleagues, the gleaners.

The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) by Jean-François Millet (1857)

* NB. This post will appear tomorrow.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

The year 2011 is coming to an end.  Strange that we say “come to an end,” even though a year, unlike a rope, a street, and even life, in which it is hard to make ends (or both ends) meet, can have only one end, but such are the caprices of usage.  In any case, the end of the year is close at hand.  Those interested in such tricks may recollect that year sometimes needs neither the definite nor the indefinite article when we speak about this time of year, and so it has been for centuries.  Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 opens with the line: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold…”  Likewise, end feels quite comfortable without an article in the phrase stand on end.  Next Wednesday will be devoted to December’s “gleanings,” but to celebrate the season, today I am offering a short essay about the word end; by contrast, January will start with the verb begin.

“End” is a more abstract concept than, for example, “edge” or “border,” and, although it is not an immutable law, in language abstract notions tend to develop from concrete ones.  The first recorded sense of Old Engl. ende “end” was “extremity, final limit,” but there must have been other senses.   In Gothic, a Germanic language known from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament (the language has been dead for a long time), andeis, a cognate of end, glossed Greek telos “termination, completion; result,” and exactly the same meaning of end surfaced in thirteenth-century English.  Possibly, it existed earlier but found no reflection in texts or at least in extant texts.  Telos also referred to many more things that happen “in the end”: “final solution; tax; prize” and, especially important, “aim, goal” (hence English learned words like teleology and pseudo-Greek coinages like telegraph, telephone, and television, from tele-“at a distance far off”).  In English, end “purpose” surfaced only in the fourteenth century, and again we may suppose that this late attestation is an accident of transmission rather than of semantic history.  We still say to that end and the end justifies the means.  The sense “remnant” has been preserved mainly in the idiom odds and ends and  in candle end.  Yet looking through books reveals a few curious idioms.   There is fiddlestick’s end (preceded by fig’s end) “rubbish, nonsense,” and pack up one’s ends and awls (with a pun on awl ~ all) means “pack up all one’s belongings.”  Perhaps in fiddlestick’s end, end should be glossed as “tip,” for to have something at one’s fingers’ tips had (or has?) a variant to have something at one’s fingers’ end.  As the OED and other dictionaries tell us, in East End, West End, and the ends of the earth we have a survival of the sense “quarter, region.”

The word end, most obligingly, allows historical linguists to trace its development.  English does not provide enough material, but related languages do.  Old High German had andi and endi (those were two variants of the same noun), which correspond to Old Icelandic enne (nn in it is from nd).  All of them meant “forehead.”  In Icelandic, ende “end” also existed, so that ende and enne were etymological doublets, the result of a split.  Engl. forehead, which in the pronunciation of most speakers of American English does not rhyme with horrid (as happens in the poem about a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead) gives away its origin at once: fore-head is the front part of the head, its “end.”  Latin antiae “forelock” is close enough.  The Lithuanian cognate of ende means “breast,” that is, “the front of the body,” while Latin ante “before” corresponds to Greek anti “opposite” (not everybody agrees that ante- ~ anti-belong here; however,  they probably do).  The picture could not be clearer: from forehead (concrete) to end (abstract).  But “beginning” and “end” are relative concepts, and poets have been forever exploring the ambiguity their relation entails.  Indeed, what is the end of a street for one is its beginning for another.  Even the ends of the earth are its ends only if we look at them from the center (where we are at the moment).  Once we address the inhabitants of those quarters, they will respond that we, not they, occupy the earth’s “end.”

Language sometimes reflects this state of affairs, and here Slavic offers a particularly good example.  Russian konets (stress on the second syllable) “end” has the root kon- (-ets is a suffix), and the verb nachat’ “to begin” (also stressed on the second syllable) has the prefix na- and the root -cha- (-t’ is the marker of the infinitive).  Both words have numerous cognates.  I will not go into detail and only state what can be accepted as fact: from an etymological point of view, -kon- and -cha- (ch goes back to k, and there once was an n after the vowel) are forms of the same root.  Thus, we end where we begin.  In some authoritative dictionaries, Slavic lob- “forehead” was compared with a Greek word for “the nape of the head.”  The comparison is dubious, but the idea is sound: the back and the front are also interchangeable concepts.

Since I began this essay with Gothic, I will also end with it.  The Gothic historian Jordanes (unfortunately, he wrote his book in Latin) mentioned Gothiscandza, the name of a stretch of shore on the Baltic Sea where the Goths once landed.  For a long time it was believed that Gothiscandza stood for  Gutisk-andeis, that is, Gothic “end” (or peninsula), a place name like Ostende (Dutch Oostende, a town in West Flanders).  But it may have been a folk etymological alternation of Gutisk-Skandia “Gothic Scandinavia, Götland.”  Although history finds the Goths on the shores of the Black Sea, their homeland may have been in Scandinavia.  Such is all philological speculation.  It either leads to a dead end produces worthy results.  Andilaus is Gothic for endless, and the Greek word is aperantos (stress again falls on the second syllable), obviously a piece of valuable information to store up and use in the year to come.

Land’s End, Cornwall,  the extreme westerly part of England’s mainland.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Some time ago, a colleague asked me what materials I have on the place name Rotten Row; she was going to write an article on this subject.  But her plans changed, and the article did not appear.  My folders contain a sizable batch of letters to Notes and Queries and essays from other popular sources dealing with Rotten Row.  I am not a specialist in onomastics, and, if I am not mistaken, the question about the etymology of Rotten Row has never been answered to everybody’s satisfaction.  Still a survey, however incomplete, may be of some interest to our readers, and perhaps somebody has new ideas on the derivation of this place name and will share them with us.

In a way, the etymological chase being offered below looks like an exercise in futility, for Rotten Row perhaps means what it says, that is, “rotten row,” but there is no certainty; besides, most etymological investigations look like rivers that fail to reach the sea.  As noted, I am mainly indebted for my information to Notes and Queries, this “unique meeting place of British ignorance and scholarship,” as John A. Walz, a Harvard professor of German, called it in 1913, Chambers’s Magazine, and dictionaries.  The main difficulty in a search for the origin of Rotten Row is that streets bearing this name are numerous in the north of England and in Scotland.  Rotten Row in Hyde Park goes back to the end of the eighteenth century, while the place name, distinct from the street name, occurs as early as 1561, and the variants of Rotten Row in Glasgow were known a hundred years earlier; thus, the fashionable bridle path in the capital could not be the model other towns emulated.  The borrowing went in the opposite direction.

Here are some of the derivations of Rotten Row I happened to come across. 1. From Latin Ratumena Porta, allegedly called this in memory of some Ratumena, a charioteer who died at that gate in Ancient Rome.  The accident was sad, but, as far as we are concerned, can be dismissed without much regret.  2. From Latin rota “wheel” (compare Engl. rotate) and “chariot.”  This guess has no advantage over the previous one.  Latin place names are numerous in Britain, but they are old, while no record of Rotten Row has been traced to the Anglo-Saxon times.  In Medieval Latin, rota also meant “road,” but why should an undistinguished road have been given a bookish foreign name?  3. From the woolen stuff called rateen.  The etymon of the English word is French, and in English rateen turned up too late to be of use in the present context, but a Rateenrow seems to have been mentioned in 1437 in Bury St. Edmund’s, which was the great cloth mart of the northeastern parts of the kingdom.  4. From the Old Germanic word rot “a file of soldiers” (compare German Rotte; many meanings, including “pack; herd,” otherwise, a common military term).  Although Engl. rat “a file of soldiers” occurred regularly in the seventeenth century, it hardly has anything to do with Rotten Row.  A similar derivation connects Rotten Row with the verb rottaran “to muster.”  I am not sure in which language this verb has been attested, but the famous William Camden, the author of this etymology, could not have invented it.

5. A folk etymological “corruption” of French Route du Rois “King’s Way” (an explanation one can read in numerous editions of Baedeker’s guide to London); a similar Irish Gaelic etymon, with the transliteration Rathad’n Righ, has also been proposed.  The streets called Rotten Row were, most certainly, not meant for royalty, while London’s Rotten Row is relatively recent (see above).  6. From Rother Row, rother being an old word for “cattle”; Shakespeare still used it.  No historical evidence shows that cows and oxen were driven along any Rotten Row.  Rother Street in Stratford-upon-Avon must be familiar to many, and there is a family name Rother (the meaning is no longer understood, which is a blessing in disguise: compare the family name Heifer).  One can see that Rother Street has not become Rotten Street. 7. From Old Icelandic ruddr, the past participle of a verb meaning “make a clearing” (its English cognate is rid in get rid of).  Allegedly, ruddr vegr meant “a smoothed, paved way.”  The chance of any Rotten Row having once been a paved way, an analogue of the Anglo-Saxon via strata, is as small as the chance of medieval “neat” running along it.  8. From the name of someone who had a business in that area; the name was said to contain a German cognate of Engl. red.  This eponymous ancestor of Rotten Row, supposedly a purveyor of red herrings (!), is no more probable than the Roman charioteer.  9. From Old Engl. rot (with a long vowel) “glad; bright; noble.”  Was Rotten Row named for its splendor?  10. From Engl. rattin “undressed timber.”  This is a ghost word (it never existed).  11. From Routine Row, on account of the processions of the church passing in that direction.  As Longfellow said in his anthologized lyric: “I shot an arrow into the air./ It fell to earth, I knew not where.”

A knowledgeable author summarized the case in 1867 so: “[these derivations] are all destitute of any substruction of historical evidence, and are all purely speculative or fanciful” (I wish I had his vocabulary).  Before I mention the only hypotheses that, in my opinion, deserve consideration, the following may perhaps be stated with some confidence.  The Middle English name seems to have originated in the north.  Alliteration and a shocking, “in-your-face” meaning contributed to its popularity.  The vogue for Rotten Row makes it unnecessary to reconstruct the circumstances that led to the naming of each street called this.  Rotten Row does not owe its origin to a local personal name or a local event.  Two etymologies sound more or less realistic.  Streets were often infested with rats.  In Scots and northern English dialects, rattan and rottan mean “rat.” Rotten Row emerges as Rat Row.  Conversely, many streets, regardless of the presence of rats, were indeed rotten, with decayed houses on both sides (for instance, a place called Rotten Spot, near Sheffield,  probably had some “rotten” structures in it), though the epithet rotten may at one time have referred to the surface good for the hooves.  If that putative meaning had any currency in eighteenth-century London, Rotten Row in Hyde Park was a playful adoption of the widespread name, with reference to the quality of the road.  Route du Rois would not have degenerated into Rotten Row so quickly under the influence of folk etymology.

It would be a good thing to discover the first Rotten Row.  We can imagine etymologists’ delight if that street turned out to be lined with dilapidated houses on both sides and serving as a habitat of rapacious rats. A historical linguist would feel like the Pied Piper of Hamelin or Dick Whittington, but carrying an etymological dictionary instead of a pipe or a cat.

Modern Rother Street. China.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

It’s tea now.  Once again I have little to add to what anyone can find in the OED and other easily available sources, though it will be a pleasure to continue singing praises to Hobson Jobson, and there is a redeeming quality to this post: at the end I’ll say something about tea caddy.  But first here are three quotations.  “That excellent and by all physicians approved China drink called by the Chineans Tcha, and by other nations tay, alias tee, is sold at the Sultana Head Coffee House, London.” (Mercurius Politicus, Sept. 30, 1658; The Century Dictionary).  “I remember well how in 1681 I for the first time in my life drank thee at the house of an Indian chaplain, and how I could not understand how sensible men could think it a treat to drink what tasted no better than hay-water” (1726), and finally, “There is among our people, and particularly among the womankind a great abuse of Thee, not only that too much is drunk…but this is also an evil custom to drink it with a full stomach; it is better and more wholesome to make use of it when the process of digestion is pretty well finished…. It is also a great folly to use sugar candy with Thee” (1672; the last two quotations are from Hobson Jobson).  In 1545 Chiai was said “to remove fever, headache, stomach-ache, pain in the side or joints,” and many other ailments, including gout.  I remember reading similar nineteenth-century ads, except that they recommended cigars for alleviating pain and clearing the lungs.

It will be seen that the main question about tea is the same as about coffee, namely: How did the form tea conquer its numerous rivals?  And the rivals were indeed many, though they can be divided into two groups: those beginning with ch- and sounding cha, chai, and the like, and those beginning with t- and spelled tee, tea, thee, etc.  Both variants are still known in the European languages: for example, English has tea (like Malay te), while Russian has chai (like Chinese Mandarin chha, according to one system of transliteration), homophonous with the first syllable of the word China.  In this case, the Malay may have been an intermediary between China and the rest of the world, but the word’s source is Chinese, for, as Hobson Jobson explains, “te [is] the utterance attached to the character in the Fuh-kien dialect.”  Knowing nothing about Chinese, I can only repeat what specialists say, and they seem to be unanimous in explaining the origin of the two variants.

The numerous forms of coffee (see them in the post for November 23) show that there was no progression in the development of the English name of this beverage.  We only witnessed different episodes in the history of its adaptation—a usual process in the fortunes of exotic articles of trade, plant and animal names, and so forth.  The same holds for tea.  Different forms coexisted, were affected by the pronunciation and spelling of the word in other languages (in English, Dutch and French influence has to be reckoned with), and at long last one such form became standard.  The state of “peaceful coexistence” is testified to by the first of the three quotations given at the beginning of this post and by an almost identical ad in The Gazette, which, also in 1658, advertised a China drink, “called by the Chinese Toha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee.”  Apparently, the norm had not yet solidified.  In 1711 Alexander Pope rhymed tea with obey.  In 1720 the rhyme tea / pay occurred.  In 1770 Samuel Johnson extemporized the verses in which tea was coupled in rhyme with me.  The spelling the (with an h) seems to be a borrowing from French, and it is amazing that English, despite its penchant for redundant letters, did not cling to the less rational variant.  Although mentioned by some Europeans considerably earlier, in England no citations of tea predate 1598.  In the seventeenth century, the product and the word gained in popularity, and the OED, like Hobson Jobson after it, gives multiple examples.  English has been spared the cacophony hidden in a phrase like “hot tea in a china cup,” but, if the Fuh-kien “utterance” had survived, the clash of two ch-words would have been obvious.

The history of caddy (originally, a box containing a certain weight), as in tea caddy, cannot be called dramatic. Authorities trace caddy to a Malay form, which is catty.  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology calls the substitution of -d- for -t- an unexplained alteration.  The first edition of the OED spoke of an apparent corruption of catty.  In those days, corruption was a common term in etymological studies.  Skeat went so far as to say: “Better spelled catty.”  I am not sure what would have been gained if a word universally pronounced caddy were spelled catty, but I would like to suggest that nothing has been corrupted or even altered in it.  Is it possible that the Englishman who transmitted catty as caddy was a speaker of a dialect in which t between vowels had become d?

The voicing of intervocalic t in American English is an open secret: matter and madder, latter and ladder, seated and seeded, tutor and Tudor, sweetish and Swedish, futile and feudal, Plato and play dough, and many others like them are homophones pairwise (textbooks usually cite writer and rider).  However, the Americans did not invent this pronunciation.  It has been attested almost all over the British north (I think it also occurs in Irish English), and the earliest example in a text goes back to the first half of the sixteenth century.  At least one word has even made its way into the Standard: French potage became poddidge and later porridge; the same happened to porringer.  (The change of a weakly articulated d to r is a process known from many modern Germanic dialects.  Incidentally, a change of some consonant to r is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho.)  Assuming that our merchant or traveler was from Lancashire or from any part of England in which matter merged with madder, the origin of the present day form caddy will stop being a riddle.  Unfortunately, there is no way to raise the spirit of that adventurous man.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Spelling and its implications

It was good to hear from Masha Bell, an ally in the losing battle for reformed spelling.  Her remarks can be found at the end of the previous post (it was about su- in sure and sugar), and here I’ll comment briefly only on her questions.  Is there a connection between erratic, partly unpredictable English spelling and 1) the number of etymologists and 2) the spread of dyslexia in the English speaking world?  I have often heard the second question and can repeat my usual answer.  Dyslexia does not seem to depend on the complexity of spelling in cultures in which a match between the sound and the letter is the basis of reading and writing, while researchers studying dyslexia in China and Japan, where hieroglyphs are used, are not unanimous in their conclusions.  As to the proliferation of etymologists, it certainly does not depend on the vagaries of spelling.  Even when there is a perfect match between a word’s phonetic shape and its written image, as in Finnish and Estonian, the origin of words remains a puzzle to speakers.  The number of etymologists reflects the nation’s interest in the history of its language and the priorities of linguistics as a science (for example, in the nineteenth century, etymology was “the cutting edge” of linguistics, whereas today it is a subject exciting only historical linguists and, fortunately, the public).  In English, man, put, and of give an accurate idea of how they sounded long ago, but their etymology is still hidden from our contemporaries, partly even from professional etymologists.

River and its kin.  Middle English rivere goes back to the Old French word that meant both “river” and “river bank.”  It is usually traced to the unattested Vulgar Latin feminine form riparia, from Latin riparius “of, pertaining to a bank” (Latin ripa “bank”).  Indo-European dictionaries, which revel in roots and extensions, reconstruct the root rei- “scratch, tear, cut” with the extension -p.   Reip- (the etymon of ripa) ended up meaning “that which is cut out by a river.”  The English verb rive (from Scandinavian) may be a cognate.

Sate versus satiated.  Both are bookish; sate even more so than satiate.  The origin of sate is not quite clear, but it can be a shortened form of satiate (this is not the prevailing opinion).  Today sate is rarely used except in its participial form (sated).  There is hardly any difference in the meaning of the two verbs.

Greek khrónos versus kairós.  Our correspondent asks whether Greek khrónos was regularly opposed to kairós as “natural time” to “mechanical time.”  The word khrónos, well-known to English speakers from chronic, chronology, and chronometer, meant “time as such” (so indeed “natural time”), while kairós referred to due time, proper moment, and the like (so not quite “mechanical time”).  Its main meaning was “measure.”

Davenport.  Why is its etymology often called unknown?  A davenport, it will be remembered, is a small cabinet, with a hinged flap made to open and serve as a writing desk.  The word is usually believed to be the name of the original maker, but obscurity envelops the life of this gentleman; hence lexicographic despair.  Mr. Davenport is perhaps more real than many other imaginary inventors of objects around us (beware of Tom Blanket and his cohorts), but not much more so.

Do we know what biweekly means?  No, unfortunately, we don’t.  Among the bi-words, referring to time, only biannual and biennial are unambiguous, because they are pronounced and spelled differently.  In other cases we depend on extralinguistic information.  Thus, no one doubts what bisexual and biped mean.  But biweekly payments may mean fortnightly payments (fortnight is not a word current in American English) or payments made twice a week (a rather unlikely situatioin).  If you are hired with a promise of bimonthly checks (cheques), “feel free” to ask for details.

In hospital versus in the hospital.  This is the most often cited example of differences between American and British usage.  In North America, people stay in the hospital.  In Britain, in hospital needs no article.  But all over the English speaking world people go to bed, to school and to college, though, to prove how unpredictable the norm is, they go to the university.  It is enough to say go to the bed, to realize the difference between to the bed and to bed.  Likewise, we sit at table or at the table, go to camp or to the camp, and so forth, depending on the measure of abstraction implied.

Ecology versus ecosystem.  Many people use these words as interchangeable synonyms (for examples, this is bad for the ecology), but the two nouns are supposed to mean different things. Ecology, as follows from its suffix, is a branch of biology studying ecosystems.  We don’t say:” This action is bad for the zoology of the Jungle.”  But every case is special.

The pronunciation of assume and related matters.  Of course, I know that Americans say asoom, for I hear the word almost every day.  My point was that the variants ashoom, shoot (the latter for suit), and the like did not stay even in the speech of those who occasionally pronounce kiss you as kish you.  Nor did I imply that everybody pronounces what you as watch you, but many people do.

Amusing typos.

In my previous post, I quoted the following: “…the child, whose parents say was snatched….”  There was a comment that this is acceptable grammar.  I am afraid the comment missed the point.  The sentence was made incomprehensible by the omission of the comma after say!  It should have been: “…the child, whose parents say, (!) was snatched….”   I have recently run into another enjoyable typo: “…if the duties are too high, they lesson the consumption…”  With regard to spelling, if not to etymology, we surely live in Wonderland.  The “lessoning” of the consumption reminded me that also a few days ago I had read about the consumption of the marriage, but it would be unfair to taunt the author, who happens to be a foreigner, though the editor of the conference papers (a native speaker) could have read what she was publishing.  But this is perhaps too much to expect.

Many thanks to Dr. Schumann for an interesting example of antiquarian Germanic zeal.  Next time the gleanings will appear shortly before the New Year.  It would be good if our correspondents, while sending us questions related to etymology, spelling, and usage, could think of some “seasonal” queries.

“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice….  “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle; “nine the next and so on.”  “What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.  “That is the reason they are called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked, “because they lessen from day to day.”  This was quite a new idea to Alice.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

All sources inform us about the Arabic-Turkish home of the word coffee, though in the European languages some forms were taken over directly from Arabic, so that the etymological part of the relevant entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias needs modification.  There is a possibility of coffee being connected with the name of the kingdom of Kaffa, but this question need not bother us at the moment.  The main puzzle is the development of the form coffee rather than its distant origin.  The OED is, as always, helpful, but particularly instructive is the array of variants found in a book with the funny title Hobson-Jobson.  Far from being a book of humor, it is a wonderful dictionary of Anglo-Indian words.  In its pages we find recollections about a very good drink called Chaube (1573), Caova (1580), cohoo (1609) and, surprisingly for such an early date, coffee (also 1609), cahue (1615), coho, and copha (1628).  The route to Europe is supposed to be from Arabic quahwa via Turkish kahveh.  Later coffee became the standard form in English.  But, as we can see, there was no real progression: in 1609 some people said cohoo, while others already knew coffee.  The cause may be that the Arabic and the Persian pronunciations competed, one being prevalent on the coast of Arabia, the other in the mercantile towns.  The writers quoted above were mainly English, Dutch, French, and Italian.  All of them recorded the foreign word according to their speech habits, though some may have repeated what they had heard from their countrymen.  (Incidentally, the transliteration of the Turkish word as kahveh and the Arabic as qahwah may not be quite right, for the so-called round gaf of the Turkish word, as this consonant is known among the Anglo-Indians, sounds very much like Arabic q.  I would be grateful to specialists for either corroborating or refuting this statement.  Perhaps there are dialectal differences of which I am unaware.)

Several researchers wondered how hw could become f.  This, I think, is less of an enigma than many people think.  The opposite change of f to hv (with a guttural h, that is, kh, approximately as in German ach and Dutch Schipol) often occurs in non-standard Russian.  At one time, the consonant f was alien to it, and names like Filip (stress on the second syllable) turned into Khvilip.  The same substitution still happens in Russian dialects.  To produce the consonant f, one needs a passage of air (otherwise, the result will be p) and active lips (or at least an active lower lip).  The group hv satisfies both conditions, except that breath and the lips participate in its production consecutively instead of concurrently, as happens in f.  Since, as a general rule, seventeenth-century Europeans could not pronounce hw or hv, they combined both elements of articulation in one sound and ended up with f.  Its voiced partner v fits the situation even better, and we should applaud the man who wrote caova.  Chaube (that is, khaube) is a close relative of caova, because b is also a labial sound. Some speakers were lazy and left out w altogether; hence cohoo and its likes.  For comparison, one may cite Finnish kahvi and Polish kawa.

The vowels give us grief too.  Both Arabic and Turkish have a in the first syllable, while the English word has o.  The Dutch for coffee is also koffie, as opposed, for instance, to German Kaffee.  These differences have never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction, but the suggestions known to me make sense.  The vowel a is extremely tricky.  It can be pronounced in the front part of the mouth, as in French papa, more or less in the middle of the mouth cavity, as in Engl. cuff, or far back, as in Engl. spa.  It seems that as late as the middle of the nineteenth century u in Engl. cuff was rather close to what one today hears in American Engl. curry.  In any case, Russian speakers did not identify it with their a, as they do now.  Likewise, o varies greatly from language to language and from dialect to dialect.  Although hot is spelled alike in British and American English, it is pronounced so differently in the two countries (especially when America is represented by the Midwest) that foreigners have trouble distinguishing between hot and what they believe should be hut.  Russian immigrants pronounce the first syllable of Boston like Italian basta and listen in disbelief when someone tries to convince them that dot.com is not dut.come.  Those who learned English in its British r-less variety are apt to take even Bob for Barb.  The assumption that the Europeans confused a and o in the native (Arabic or Turkish) name of the drink looks plausible.

Finally, we notice that Engl. coffee has stress on the first syllable, while some other languages accent the end and that the word’s second vowel is sometimes a and sometimes e.  The plural of Arabic kahwe is kahawi.  Both the Turkish form and the European forms with -e seem to go back to the Arabic plural.  Polish kawa and Czech kava adapted themselves to the Slavic system of declension and do not reflect an ancient ending.  Stress on the second syllable is clearly more “genuine,” but one should always reckon with the possibility that it was borrowed from French.  In similar fashion, those languages that have initial accent may have been influenced by English.  It appears that there are at least as many variants of the word coffee as there are varieties of the product.  This is nice, for diversity is supposed to make us happy.

Now a few words about the promised kingdom of Kaffa in modern Ethiopia (formerly in Abyssinia).  Coffee trees do flourish there, and coffee is the main article of export from that part of the world.  Disclaimers to the effect that we lack sufficient evidence connecting coffee with Kaffa do not go far, because no competing (preferably Arabic) etymology of coffee has been offered.  I was pleased to discover that Paul Kretschmer, an extremely cautious etymologist, saw no objection to the derivation of coffee from Kaffa.

John Jourdain, a Dorsetshire seaman, wrote in his diary (1609) that the group “rested in the plaine fields untill [sic] three the next daie, neer unto a cohoo howse in the desert.”  Lloyd’s “cohoo howse,” the oldest establishment of this type in London, was certainly not opened in a desert.  While reading this blog (the first thing to do early in the morning every Wednesday, wherever you live), enjoy your cup of coffee and forget about many wars that were fought against this beverage in the past.  The coffee haters are now forgotten; the drink has won (as expected).

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

The spelling of those two words does not bother us only because both are so common and learned early in life.  Yet why not shure and shugar?  There is a parallel case, and it too leaves us indifferent, though for a different reason.  Consider su in pressure, measure, pleasure, leisure, and the like.  We do not question the occurrence of su in the middle of a Romance word, with its phonetic value of sh (as in cushion) or ge (as in genre and rouge) and pay no attention to azure, in which the same sound is designated by a more natural group zu.  The French origin of pressure, azure, measure, and their ilk, let alone genre and rouge, is so obvious that perhaps even those who have never studied French are dimly aware of it.  By contrast, sure and sugar are fully domesticated (only etymologists know all the details of their descent), and, even more important, su in them occurs word initially.  It is their position at the beginning rather than in the middle of the word that causes surprise.  However, both sure and sugar also came to English from French and in this respect have common cause with pressure and measure.

From a historical point of view, the story is simple.  Consider the names of the letters U and Q, that is (in phonetic terms), yu and kyu.  Before y, t becomes ch, s turns into sh, and z yields the voiced partner of sh.  Listen to how you say what you…; it is probably indistinguishable from watch you.  Many (most?) people pronounce unless you as unlesh you, and I have seldom heard anyone pronounce the title of Shakespeare’s play As You Like It with z before you: it is usually the same sound as in Measure for Measure.  In the middle of the word, rather than at word boundaries, an analogous assimilation happened several centuries ago, and that is why nature and vision sound as though they were spelled nachure and vizion.  This brings us to sugar and sure.

The vowel occurring in French sure was alien to most Middle English dialects, including the dialect of London, and, as the name of the modern English letter U shows, yu replaced French u in borrowed words.  We can observe this substitution even in such a recent loanword as menu (and compare nubile and other nu- words).  Once sure appeared in English, it turned into syure, and a similar change happened in sugar (syugar).  Later, syu- developed into sh- (compare bless you, session, and Asia, regardless of whether you have a voiced or a voiceless middle in the last of them, for the voicing is secondary).  As noted above, sure and sugar are such conspicuous monsters because word initially su- designates sh only in those two words.  (Actually, the plant name sumach also has a variant with shu-, but it is known too little.  Sumach makes a good riddle: “There are three English words in which initial su- has the value of shu-.  The first two are sure and sugar.  What is the third?”  This is a much better riddle than the famous teaser: “Three common English words end in -ry.  The first two are angry and hungry.  What is the third?”  Answer: “Such a common word does not exist.”)

Although the picture has now been clarified, it is curious to observe the twists in the history of sounds.  Today no one (except perhaps in some dialects), I believe, pronounces sh- in sue and suit.  Most probably, both succumbed to the tyranny of their written images and retained s-.  American English has taken a radical step and eliminated y in sue and suit altogether: they became soo and soot respectively, but, naturally, with a long vowel.  Therefore, Americans travel with “sootcases” and wear “soots.”  In British English such variants also existed and were criticized in the 1826 book Vulgarities of Speech Corrected.  On the other hand, some people whose pretentiousness made them finickin (finicky, if you prefer) in all matters, including their speech, enunciated every sound with excessive care and pronounced siu instead of syu.  The same book called such variants “pedantic vulgar-genteel” and recommended a pronunciation “with an easy flow, and not with a stiff and formal mouthing of a letter.”

Nowadays, censure and pressure have sh in the middle, rather than its voiced partner occurring in measure, pleasure, and usual.  Yet assume seems to be assyume everywhere.  (Compare presume with a voiced consonant!)  Ensure and insure do not differ from sure in this respect: not unexpectedly, with sure as their root, they followed suit (as it were).  But in the 18^th century, suit, as well as assume, consume, pursue, ensue, and even supreme and superb, were often pronounced with shoo-.  The spelling scheurley “surely” turned up as early as 1538, and at the end of the 16^th century we find sheute “suit” and shewtar “suitor.”  It is customary to think of language history as a straight line: allegedly, some features disappear, while others take over.  Facts are at variance with such a simplistic model.  Dialects have always fought one another for ascendancy, “educators” and vulgar-genteel pedants have always tried to impose conservative variants (and occasionally succeed in their endeavors), popular authors breed imitators, and book printing resulted in the development of what we now call Standard English (the same is, of course, true of other languages).  As a result, we witness many seemingly established later forms ousted (beaten back) the more conservative ones, even when other new, “vulgar” forms break through and find acceptance by the cultured class.

The history of sugar, which can be traced in some detail thanks to the recommendations of old grammarians, is a case in point.  A teacher who was active in 1676 warned his pupils against the pronunciation shoogar.  Another author called sh in sure and sugar barbarous (1685).  In 1695, the pronunciation with initial sh- was castigated as being “after the West-country-Dialect.”  In court records, the personal name Suger occurred alongside Shuger.  What was vulgar, barbarous, or ludicrously local in the days of Daniel Defoe and even Henry Fielding is the only acceptable pronunciation to us.  It is hard to believe that as late as 1791 the elegant, perhaps even the received, pronunciation of suicide was shuicide.  As always, puns tell their own story.  In Shakespeare’s days, suitor and shooter were, or at least could be, homophones.  “There was a Lady in Spaine, who after the decease of hir [her] Father hadde three sutors, and yet neer [never] a good archer.”  A sizable part of Act IV, Scene 1 of Loves’s Labour’s Lost turns around the suitor/shooter pun.  (“Who is the suitor, who is the suitor?”… “Well then, I am the shooter,” etc.)  A colleague of mine once quipped that a person who has read the works of the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure would never be so sure of anything.  Sorry for highlighting the relevant elements.  Some people despise puns, don’t hear or laugh at them.  They call every pun feeble and punning the lowest form of wit.  Rest assured: they act out of envy.

From shoo to shoe

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Last week I answered only the questions that needed relatively detailed answers.  Today’s “issue” will be devoted to shorter queries.

Riparian. Some letters we receive are so brief that I am not sure whether my explanations satisfy the writers.  For example, a recent query contained only one word, namely RIPARIAN.  It will be remembered that the protagonist of one of H. K. Andersen’s tales, a merchant’s son who played ducks and drakes with his inheritance (in the direct sense of the word: he loved to toss golden coins into water, to watch the rings), one day, when his prospects had become truly grim, received a gift from an old friend, a coffer to which the shortest note possible was pinned: “Pack up.”   This was easy, for the only thing the man still possessed was his old dressing gown.  He put it on, got into the coffer, and the coffer flew up into the air.  What happened to the merchant’s son after he landed in Turkey is irrelevant to my story, but I wish to ask our correspondents to give more details when they ask questions.  However, since the email had the subject ETYMOLOGY REQUEST, I assume that I am expected to discuss the origin of the word riparian.  This adjective usually means “pertaining to or situated on the banks of a river,” for it goes back to Latin ripuarius, from ripa “bank.”   The medical term riparian “pertaining to a ripa of the brain; marginal, as a part of the brain” (it is used in anatomy) is an extension of the same sense.  I may add that ripa is not related to Engl. rib and that river, a Romance cognate of ripa, is not related to rivulet.

Tell, its senses, tally, and the noun till.  Both senses of the verb tell—“count” and “narrate”—were already present in Old English.  Since tell was derived from a noun and this noun (Old Engl. talu, cognate with Old High German zala and Old Icelandic tala “tale”) also meant “reckoning” and “talk,” it is hard to disentangle the meanings, but, most probably, the semantic kernel was “ordered, or numerical, sequence,” from which “things told in order, a connected narrative” developed.  Therefore, from a historical point of view, “number” (as in German Zahl) seems to have preceded “speech” (as in Dutch taal).  In English, the sense “count” has been almost ousted by “narrate, recount” (compare count and recount!)  But the biblical usage, retained in he telleth the number of the stars and so forth, the phrases tell one’s beads, all told, and untold riches (wealth), as well as in the noun teller, remind us of tell “count.”  Talk has the root tal-, followed by the suffix -k, but tally traces to a Latin etymon (talea “cutting, rod, stick”; tailor, from French, literally “cutter,” as is still seen in Italian tagliatore, is its cognate).  Keeping count by notches on a stick was a universal procedure in the past.  Since Latin t does not correspond to Germanic t (either Germanic th- or non-Germanic d- is needed), tally cannot be a cognate of talea, but it is not absolutely improbable that the Latin word was very early borrowed into Germanic (in such cases one expects identities rather than correspondences).  The origin of talu ~ tala remains, to a certain extent, unknown.  Although its Latin provenance is possible, tale may be a native Germanic word related to Latin dolo (dolare) “to chop,” and, if so, we return to the idea of notches.  Be that as it may, in the history of tale and tell, the idea of counting must have preceded the idea of narrating.  A teller tells money and stands at the till; yet till is not related to tell.  Although its origin is obscure, no path leads from till to tell.

German Gau “region” and its putative English cognate.  Dr. Keith Briggs has read my old blog on the origin of yeoman and sent me his paper “Early English Region-Names with the Suffix -ia.”  Since the time I posted that blog, my article on yeoman has appeared in the McConchie Festschrift, and, if required, I will gladly reciprocate the gift and send the paper to the address given in the email.  The reason the two of us partly studied the same material is the disputable etymology of yeoman.  It has been suggested that the word means something like “region man” (Gaumann, as it were), which is wrong on all counts.  An English cognate of Gau has not been found.  Attempts to detect it in the place name Ely also failed.  Dr. Briggs’s paper explores numerous forms that were tangential to my interests.  As for yeoman, it probably first meant “an ‘additional’ man.”

Deceive ~ deception, receive ~ reception, interceive ~ interception? Why doesn’t the verb given above in bold exist?  Receive and reception were borrowed as individual “items” from Old French.  The same holds for deceive and deception, as well as for deceit and receipt (note the irritating difference in spelling!).  Recipe also came to English independently of receive and reception.  Intercept goes back to the past participle of Latin intercipire “seize; steal.”  Later the noun interception was coined, so that the verb suggested by the proportion receive/deceive ~ reception/deception ~?/interception never existed.  If someone invents it and other people agree to use it, it will appear in English, but it will be a brand-new word.

Does skedaddle have a Greek etymon? The Greek idea has occurred to many.  No, this Americanism can be traced to a British regional verb meaning “to spill, scatter.”  It would be odd if a verb current among the soldiers during the Civil War had a learned, bookish source.  In case our correspondent is seriously interested in the history of skedaddle, it can be found in my etymological dictionary; the entry lists numerous hypotheses on the word’s origin and traces its progress in 19^th-century American English.

Repertory and find.  Are they connected?  Yes, in a way.  Repertory, from late Latin repertorium (dictionaries of Classical Latin do not list it) first meant “index; storehouse” (among other things).  Its root reperire means “find.”

Fizzgig. The word does not seem to pose any problems: fizz refers to something inconstant, and gig makes us think of quick movement.  Perhaps an association with giggle was in play when the word emerged.

Dead as a doornail.  I am sorry to report that the origin of this idiom has been explored high and low and roundabout, that the results are uninspiring, and that everybody says the same.  If our correspondent searches for the phrase in the Internet, he will find what little is known about the phrase and the two current explanations of why the doornail is dead and why it is the doornail that shows no signs of life, rather than herring, mutton, and quite a few others that occur in the idiom dead as—.

GLEANING FOR DEAD EARS ON ONE’S OWN FIELD

Newspapers produce crops throughout the year.  I read them avidly, just as I gladly go to conferences, because linguists are never bored.  If a talk is vapid, they can follow the accent, and if a publication is inane, they can enjoy the felicities of style.

David Brooks of NYT meets an impressionable woman. He writes: “Let’s imagine that someone from 1970 miraculously traveled forward in time and space.  You could show her one of the iPhones that Steve Jobs helped create, and she’d be thunderstruck.”  I am sure she would.  “There are more ways than one to turn a girl’s head” (G.B. Shaw).

The man whom wrote this report’s competency is in doubt. “A federal judge gave prison officials four more months to try to restore the competency of the accused gunman ***, whom a psychologist said has shown remorse for killing six people and wounded 13….”

Let I quote a letter to the editor. “If President Obama had the courage, he… would be saying, in effect, ‘Mr. Cain, you aren’t crazy, and you have some good ideas.  Let’s you and I frame the discussion, and try to leave politics out of it.”  (This ludicrous usage has several variants.  For example, one often runs into sentences like “He greeted my wife and I.”)

Was the parents snatched too? “Investigators have no suspects and few solid leads despite an intensive search for ***, whose parents—*** and***—say was snatched from her crib Monday night or early Tuesday in ***.”

No doubt, this well-plowed field will never leave us without a good harvest.  All the best till next Wednesday.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

This has been a long month, and I was very pleased to have such generous feedback.  Today I’ll only respond to the comments and will deal with the questions next Wednesday.  Many thanks to our correspondents who take the time to agree and disagree with me and suggest new topics.  In one comment, my responses were called derogatory.  God forbid!  Why should they even sound such to anyone?  I may misunderstand an opponent or refuse to go all the way with him or her (“them”), but I am truly grateful for the attention my blog receives, and I like to hear counterarguments, even though no one’s opinion has ever changed as a result of discussion.  This is the spirit of true scholarship: the more objections we hear, the more convinced we become that our opponent is wrong.  Being at peace with oneself is the foundation of longevity and happiness, and I am in great need of both.

Bigot. So far (Friday afternoon) I have read seven observations.  If more appear, I’ll discuss them next week.  I wrote the post on bigot because I wanted to advertise Grammont’s etymology.  It seemed reasonable to our readers, but etymologies are not established by plebiscites, so that, as I said at the end of the previous post, I hope that Romance scholars will either prove Grammont wrong or congratulate themselves on having a hard riddle solved.  More than a hundred years ago the great French linguist Antoine Meillet said that all the good etymologies had already been offered and those being proposed were bad.  I sincerely hope he was mistaken.

Since I am not a specialist in Romance linguistics, my opinions on the origin of French and Romance words have no weight, but, as far as I could judge by looking through the dictionaries, Grammont’s suggestion has not attracted anyone’s attention.  It must have been clear from my text that I felt uneasy about Italian sbigottirsi “to be amazed” (compare sbigottito “frightened; being at a loss”).  My unease had two reasons.  First, the meaning does not match that of bigot.  Second, etymological dictionaries offer conflicting hypotheses on the origin of the Italian verb.  As early as 1878, Napoleone Caix, the author of Studi di etimologia italiana e romanza (a book still worth consulting) suggested the etymon ex-pavo(r) for sbigottirsi, from Latin pavor (Italian paura) “fear.”  Since that time several other conjectures have been advanced (one was quoted in the comment by our correspondent), but the phonetic shape of the present day form has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction.  Caix could only refer to Toscanian s-pago, with inserted g; however, it is far from clear that sbigottirsi goes back to Toscanian dialectal pronunciation.  At some point the paths of the word from which sbigottirsi was derived and bigot seem to have crossed.  Even if the encounter was caused by folk etymology, the rapprochement is odd, for what do excessive piety and hypocrisy have to do with surprise, bewilderment, and especially fear?  In retrospect, I am sorry I did not devote a paragraph to the Italian word.

As regards Visigoths as a putative etymon of bigot, v is indeed close to b.  But all the examples cited in the comments can be subsumed under the rubric of regular phonetic correspondences (or foreign accents: everyone has heard Spanish speakers—though my experience is limited to Colombia—pronounce very as [beri]).  To make a case for Visigoth becoming bigot, we have to know when the event took place, in which dialect b was substituted for v (or w?), and, of course, what happened to the syllable -si-.  The Basil-Vasilii pair cannot be used as an argument, because such Greek words were borrowed into Russian and other Slavic languages through books and script, not through the process of oral communication.  Considering how long ago the Goths played an active role in European history and how late (in comparison) the word bigot is, the scenario suggested by the proponents of the Visigoth theory looks quite improbable.  However tempting it may be to connect bigot with the Spanish-Portuguese word for “moustache,” the connection seems rather tenuous to me.  Finally, I was glad to hear the opinion of a specialist that bigot cannot be traced to Yiddish bagotisch.  I had little doubt on that score but preferred to express myself cautiously (once bit, twice shy).

Ship and boat. With so many unknowns we will hardly ever know the truth.  At the very least I would suggest caution.  To be sure, one can do very well with Germanic-Slavic (Baltic) cognates in reconstructing some etymons (stone/stena “wall” is an excellent example, though in comparison with the skipta-ship pair, the meanings match much better).  In order not to recycle what I said last time, I will be brief.  The proposed Baltic-Greek cognates mean “stick” or “mast,” not exactly what one would expect the etymon of the name of a “primitive” ship (allegedly, a hollowed out tree) to mean.  I am also uncomfortable about the fact that Germanic has only a weak verb of presumably the same root and that it invariably means “to arrange,” again not the best protomeaning for “ship.”  Other than that, ein dunkles Wort (“an obscure word”), as German etymologists say in such cases.  Positing a substrate is a self-defeating procedure, for we know neither the language nor the etymon, and this is also my opinion.  Wherever the Germanic speakers’ original homeland may have been, the type of word formation of ship leaves several questions unanswered.  I only want this word to remain in its shadowy limbo rather than be presented as an item shining with more than oriental splendor, as Kipling put it in Just So Stories.  Too bad, he did not write a tale about how the first ship was built and how it got its name.

As to boat, thanks for referring me to Bammesberger’s article.  Of course, I knew it.  But since Bammesberger connects boat with the Old Norse verb beita (a subject discussed in my post), I did not mention his arguments.  No offshoot of the OED mentions Murray’s onomatopoeic guess, and I think we too can tactfully and tacitly ignore it.  On another note, it is true that an Indo-European word beginning with b- is always suspicious (some researchers insist that b-words existed, while the authors of the rejoinders state that they did not and could not exist), but initial bh- (as long as we stay with the traditional classification of Indo-European consonants) was common.  Yet no word beginning with IE bh- and meaning “boat” has been found.

Wife. The comment was that my etymology of wife is not convincing because I cannot cite analogs.  At the risk of incurring an accusation of hubris, I am almost afraid that my conjecture is right (afraid because when one announces the solution of a problem that has baffled people for three centuries, one always feels frightened, sbigottito; originality makes us vulnerable).  Sif (a pronominal root with the suffix -bh- in its collective meaning) is a perfect analog.  And only my etymology explains without twisting the data why the noun is neuter.  Those belonging to the “sif” (that is, “sib”) included family members (“siblings” in the broadest sense of the term), whereas the members of the “wif” traced their origin to the same woman.  Such nouns could be feminine (like sib) or neuter (like wif).  Thanks to those who reminded me that wife still means “woman” in Scots.

Comb and its ilk.  To be sure, a form like combing, with the syllable boundary after -m (com-bing), may have preserved the final consonant, but it would have happened only if suffixed forms had been much more frequent than the dictionary form (an unlikely situation), and that is all I wanted to say.  The ethnogenesis of the “Germans.” The latest theory on the origin of the Germanic speakers did not solve the big problem.  After all, we are dealing with a theory, rather than a smoking gun.  Where the “Teutons” lived before the First Consonant Shift and who they were is likely to remain a matter of debate for quite some time in the future.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Since floating vessels have been in the limelight this month, I thought you would enjoy an image of another “primitive” boat (mast and all?).  It appears on the Gosworth cross (Cumberland, England, the second half of the tenth century).  You will see the god Thor, Sif’s husband, fishing for the World Serpent, one of the two most terrifying creatures in Scandinavian myths.  Thor’s companion is the giant Hymir.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Nobody wants to be called a bigot, but accusations of bigotry are hurled at political opponents with great regularity, because (obviously) everyone who disagrees with us is a bigot, and it is to the popularity of this ignominious word that I ascribe the frequency with which I am asked about its origin.  Rather long ago I wrote about bigot in the “gleanings,” but answers in the “gleanings” tend to be lost, while a separate essay will pop up in the Internet every time someone will ask: “Where did bigot come from?”  Wherever it came from, the word has changed its meaning since the old days.  It used to mean “hypocrite; someone who professes his religious views with excessive zeal.”  Today a bigot is a fanatic, a dyed in the wool adherent of some political doctrine (which, as pointed out, does not coincide with ours).

The questions asked in connection with bigot are four: 1) Does bigot have anything to do with the word god?  2) Is bigot (from an etymological point of view) the same word as Spanish bigote “moustache”? 3) Is Romance big- “goat” the root of bigot? and 4) Did bigot, if it was coined as a term of abuse, target some religious group?  Before I answer those questions, I should warn our readers against the information one can occasionally find in the Internet and in printed sources.  For example, in October 1997, the Catholic Digest published on pp. 117-120 an article titled “Asphalt, Bigot, and Comma.”  It informed the subscribers that asphalt goes back to Leopold von Asphalt (1802-1880), that bigot derives from Nathaniel Bigot (1575-1660), an English Puritan preacher, and that comma traces back to Domenico da Comma (1264-1316), an Italian Dominican scholar whose signature punctuation mark led to a charge of heresy by the Inquisition (commas, apparently, were not found in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible and were therefore considered an insult to God).  Many other gentlemen, including Mr. Botch, Mr. Doldrum, and Mr. Fiasco, enlivened the pages of that publication.  I wrote a politely indignant letter to the editor but received no answer.  Beware of amateur etymologists.

According to an oft-repeated story, preserved in an old chronicle, Rollo of Normandy, on receiving the dukedom from Charles the Simple, refused to kiss the king’s foot and said (in English!): “Nese bi god,” that is, “No, by god.” Allegedly, this is how bigod, later bigot, became an opprobrious moniker of the duke and then of the Normans.  That Rollo should have offended the king and said something in English to him is beyond belief, but it is not improbable that some such taunting name of the Normans (who had the reputation for bad manners and swearing) existed.  Yet the constant association in the past between the word bigot and religious hypocrisy (that is, obstinate devotion to a creed) does not augur well for the bigod theory.  Also, the story has too strong a taste of a folk etymological guess invented in retrospect to explain an obscure word.  To this day French bigot means “excessively pious; superstitious.”  A convincing etymology of bigot should probably be sought in a religious sphere, where it had a concrete addressee; the slur as we know it must have been secondary.  For comparison, I may cite bugger, ultimately from Medieval Latin Bulgarus “heretic,” because the Bulgarians belonged to the Greek Church.  From Latin it made its way into French (where it already meant “sodomite”), from French into Middle Dutch, and finally, in the sixteenth century, into English.

Dali, a person who was certainly an 'hombre de bigotes' but not a bigot. ("Dali's Mustache" (1953) by Philippe Halsman)

One of the twentieth-century hypotheses on the origin of bigot connects it with Yiddish begotisch “pious, God-loving.”  Only in Yiddish do we find a positive sense of a bigot- word.  But there its structure is transparent: “(being) by God,” while whether bigot is bi-got or big-ot, or something else constitutes the main problem.  Otto von Best, the author of the Yiddish hypothesis, attempted to connect bigot not only with God but also with moustache, for Spanish hombre de bigotes, literally “a man with a moustache,” means “a steadfast man, a man of strong character.”  Von Best reconstructed a situation in which anti-Semites heaped abuse on the Jews clinging to their religion and refusing to shave off beards.  By contrast, the Jews reviled the beard shaving apostates. Thus did in his opinion, begotisch lose the positive connotations (preserved in Yiddish) and acquire its present day meaning.  The entire situation strikes me as rather improbable, and it remains unclear why and where the Romance languages borrowed the word bigot from Yiddish, but the point that in dealing with bigot we sometimes encounter positive or at least neutral senses is well taken, not so much on account of Yiddish as in light of Italian sbigottire “to dismay” (compare sbigottirsi “to be dismayed or amazed, dumbfounded”); amazement is not synonymous with fanaticism. (The Italian examples are from von Best’s article.)

It is not my purpose to go over the rather numerous etymologies of bigot, for, if, as I think, the word originated as a religious slur, moustache and goats (though goats have beards) should probably be left out of the picture, which  means that Spanish bigote has an etymology of its own.  (Even if mustachioed foreigners were mocked somewhere in Europe, the taunt could not have produced the sense “an over-devout person.”)  By a coincidence (?), bigot, like bugger, also surfaced in English texts in the sixteenth century, though it was known in southern France four hundred years earlier; it was applied to some people living there.  The ingenious derivation of bigot from Visigothi, that is, Visigoths, who were converted to Christianity in the fourth century and embraced Arianism (and were, consequently, looked upon as heretics), shatters at the difference between the initial consonants and the fact that a memory of the Goths and their beliefs would hardly have lingered for so many centuries.

Several religious orders had names sounding like bigot: Beghardi (from which we possibly have beggar), Beguines (like Beghardi, derived from the founder’s name), and especially Beguttæ.  All of them, as Wedgwood wrote, “professed a religious life, and wore a distinctive dress, without shutting themselves or binding themselves by permanent vows.  We don’t gather from the quotations that there was originally anything offensive in the names themselves….  But the pretension to superior strictness of life easily falls under the suspicion of insincerity, and thus these names soon began to imply a charge of exaggeration and even hypocrisy.”  Note the accent on the deterioration of meaning in the course of time.  Wedgwood traced bigot to Begutta (of which Beguttæ is the plural), but bigot was known earlier that Begutta, whatever the origin of that word is.

Of all the conjectures on the etymology of bigot I find the one by the French linguist Maurice Grammont (1866-1946) the best.  He was so prominent as an instrumental phonetician and a general linguist, and his suggestions on early bilingual education made him so famous among specialists that his ideas outside those two areas have been overlooked.  The curse of etymological work, to the extent that it goes beyond recycling the OED and Skeat, is that even the most dedicated researchers cannot keep track of hundreds of notes in fugitive journals, short reviews, and chance footnotes.  They miss important ideas and tend to reinvent the same creaky wheel.  Grammont commented on bigot in a review of Bloch’s French etymological dictionary (I discovered it after my bibliography of English etymology was published, so that the reference is not there).  As follows from the subsequent editions of Bloch’s dictionary, it made no impression on its author or on anybody else.  Grammont proposed that bigot is a shortening of Albigot.   Albegensian heresy flourished at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century in southern France, that is, exactly where and when the word bigot seems to have turned up for the first time.  We still have to understand the semantic history of the Italian words, cited above (were the Italian Catholics bewildered and frightened, rather than disgusted, by such views?), but it may be that we do have the answer to the riddle that has seemed insoluble for such a long time.  If Romance etymologists read this blog do, perhaps they will respond.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

During five and a half years of its existence, this blog has featured the periodical Notes and Queries twice.  Why I am turning to this subject again (now probably for the last time) will become clear at the end of the post.  Notes and Queries appeared on November 3, 1849.  In a series of short notes (naturally, notes) spread over the years 1876-1877, its first editor William John Thoms (1803-1885) told the world how the periodical had become a reality and how almost overnight it had achieved the status of everybody’s favorite.  Twenty-two years later, the journal celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and the editorial board publicized the jubilee in No. 4 of the Ninth Series.  The end of the nineteenth century could look back on many round dates, including the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Goethe’s birthday.  Festivities marked the centenary (British for centennial) of the Royal Institution, the jubilee of the first municipal free public library in the United Kingdom, the appearance of No. 1000 of Blackwood’s Magazine, and many other events that no longer excite or even interest us but whose importance for the culture of the age gone by cannot be overestimated.  Among so many memorable dates, the birthday of Notes and Queries, at that time a weekly, was not lost.

William Thoms

William Thoms was born nine years before Dickens and outlived him by fifteen years.  He witnessed Dickens’s rise to fame, and since hardly any issue of NQ did without some reference to Dickens’s books, it does not come as a surprise that on the advice of “a learned lady” Thoms chose a motto to his periodical from Dombey and Son, a brand-new novel in 1849: “When found, make a note of.”  This was the favorite phrase of Captain Cuttle, a kind-hearted man with an iron hook in place of an amputated right hand.  Correspondents to NQ referred to the captain’s advice innumerable times (times out of number, as they used to say in those days): they were so happy to find something of worthwhile and make a note of it.  The title of the periodical contributed a good deal to its initial popularity, and yet, as Thoms recalled: “One of whom I had the deepest regard, and in whose judgment I had great reliance, protested against it, and wrote to say that he thought the idea on which the paper was founded was so good that he was about to propose to join me in the undertaking, and bring in any capital that might be required, as well as his long experience in journalism, but that the title I had given it would be fatal to its success.”  There is nothing like having devoted friends.

Notes and Queries, which bore the subtitle “A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, etc.,”   was launched as a forum where people could ask and answer question, share ideas, and inform the world about their thoughts on literature, “popular antiquities” (that term was replaced by folklore, Thoms’s coinage that soon became a household word in most European languages), history, numismatics, engineering, and practically everything.  Contributors from all over the British Isles and abroad sent letters to the editor.  Prime ministers, admirals, world famous scholars, country squires pursuing their projects, and hundreds of interested readers, with—as always—many an ambitious whippersnapper eager to see his name in print, were among the correspondents.

In its pages, Walter W. Skeat berated his opponents for their ignorance and their inability to be like him; Frank Chance occasionally brought Skeat down a peg or two; James A. H. Murray asked questions about the words he was editing for the dictionary that later acquired the name OED and warned the respondents not to waste time on conjectures but keep to the point, for he needed facts, and only facts (there was something of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind in this almost supernaturally gifted and superhumanly diligent man); Joseph Wright, the editor of the English Dialect Dictionary, and A. L. Mayhew, the treasurer of the Dialectal Society, wondered whether a certain obscure word was still current in some (any) living dialect; countless people inquired about the authors of familiar quotations or the meaning of a half-obliterated inscription; “old boys,” in whom Latin and Greek were beaten with remarkable success at Eton and Oxford, argued about a line in classical authors, and indeed, there was no subject that did not turn up in NQ.  Some notes and especially queries were a paragraph, even one line, long, but every now and then regular articles were published.  Every full volume ended with an index, which made NQ a doubly valuable source of knowledge.  At least half of the contributors appeared in NQ under pseudonyms and initials.  Mr. Alpha and Mr. Omega were there, along with a gentleman encoded as *** and a person who in a display of sham modesty called himself Zero.  Not even Thoms and the subsequent editors knew the identities of some of them.

I will quote Joseph Knight, the fourth editor of NQ, who “presided” over the jubilee in 1899:

“A staff of brilliant contributors keeps a constant and sometimes overflowing and unmanageable supply of matter, with which I have only so far to deal as to prevent frequent and needless repetition. These contributors consist of erudite and, in a sense, leisured scholars…my only responsibility is that of the peacemaker who tries to prevent discussion passing the bounds of courtesy and employing terms that may rankle, or words that may gall—a task, on the whole lighter than might be imagined.”

Alas, terms that rankle and words that gall were frequent in the pages of NQ, and one often wonders at the abrasive, even virulent statements of some disgruntled busy and leisured scholars.  NQ retained its character into the twentieth century but gradually turned into an ordinary journal devoted to language and literature.  Only the format of the contributions is as it used to be: the articles are still short.  Thoms and his successors published everything they received, except that thy tried to avoid “needless repetition,” and the magazine owed its allure to its omnivorous nature.

So much for the jubilee.  I must now say something about the reason for my jubilation.  When more than twenty years ago I embarked on compiling a bibliography of English etymology, using both scholarly and popular sources, the first magazine I offered to my first volunteer was what Thoms called “dear old Notes and Queries.”  Since that time several people have continued with this labor of love.  I asked them to ignore notes on usage, spelling, place and proper names, pronunciation, the meaning of this or that word in Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the like, but everything that dealt with word origins went into the database.  After some soul searching I also decided to stay away from the origin of idioms, and I am afraid few people realize how many curious proverbs and catch phrases fill the pages of NQ.  Perhaps one day someone will put together a comprehensive index of that material.  Following my volunteers, I have looked through the entire run of Notes and Queries, and the more I read, the more I liked it.  Last week the work of screening this periodical came to an end: there are no more volumes to look through, and I am not sure whether I should rejoice or weep.  The feeling is akin to sending a child into the wide world: the boy is now a man, but you will never see him again.

My database contains over 22,500 titles.  Approximately one third of them are from NQ.  No bibliography has paid so much attention to those notes (only a tiny fraction of them was once noticed by the editors of the German philological journal Anglia).  Both Thoms and Knight mentioned the names of their most dedicated contributors.  I see no reason why I should not do the same.  My first volunteer was Johanna Berg (she is married now, but I only remember her maiden name); she was wonderful.  Yet the one assistant to whom this work owes more than to anybody else is Mr. Treffle Daniels.  I cannot resist the temptation to mention Dickens again and use a Pickwickian phrase.  Tref kept eating his way through the bibliography with “indefatigable assiduity,” and during the last six years his main project has been Notes and Queries.

At one time, Notes and Queries was a great center of intellectual life, a magnet that attracted the brightest minds.  It spawned numerous imitations in Britain and the United States (and we have followed their course too).  I am happy that my team has done justice to the role this periodical played in the history of English etymology.

Here is a painting of Captain Edward Cuttle, depicted with Solomon Gill (the dejected maker of navigation instruments) and Solomon’s nephew Walter Gay, who will one day marry Florence Dombey.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

When we deal with the origin of ship and boat (the names of things pertaining to material culture), problems are almost predictable.  Such words may have been borrowed from an unknown language (or from an attested language, but definitive proof of the connection is wanting) or coined in a way we are unable to reconstruct, but wife?  Yet its etymology is no less obscure.  My proposal will add to the existing stock of conjectures, and the future will show whether it has any chance of survival, let alone acceptance.

The few things that can be said about wife without hedging are as follows.  In the past, it was pronounced wif, with the vowel as in Modern Engl. wee.  It meant “woman,” not “female spouse,” as it still does in housewife, midwife, old wives’ tale, German Weib, and Dutch wijf.  Very early, man(n) “person” was added to it, and by a series of phonetic changes wifman became woman.  Old Engl. wif had cognates in German, Dutch, and Frisian.  Old Icelandic wíf (í designates “long i,” the same vowel as in the Old English word) occurred in poetry, but whether it was native in Scandinavian or borrowed from English (a more probable option) is unclear.  In any case, wif was not a common Germanic word, because it did not turn up in Gothic, a Germanic language, recorded in the fourth century CE.  Nor is it a continuation of the main Indo-European word for “woman,” which we detect in gynecology and whose Germanic cognate is the now obsolete Engl. quean (quean is related to queen, but they are different words).

Wife, current in a large but limited area, seems to have been a term endowed with a specialized sense; otherwise, a cognate of Gothic qino “woman” (compare gyne-, above) would have satisfied the speakers.  Equally problematic is the origin of bride, this time a common Germanic word.  In dealing with woman, wife, and bride, we cannot remain in the sphere of “pure etymology,” for we have to investigate the family relations of past epochs and the exact meaning of kin terms.  One word would designate a married woman, another a nubile woman, a third a bride, and so forth.  In such cases manipulating roots and suffixes is insufficient, as the attempts to explain the derivation of wife show with depressing clarity.  Hypotheses on the origin of wife are numerous, and the main obstacle confronting etymologists lies in the sphere of grammar, rather than semantics.  Old Engl. wif (like Modern German Weib) is neuter.  How could a noun meaning “woman” be neuter?  No conjecture on the origin of wife is worth anything unless it can account for its grammatical gender.

This is a picture of a female Weaver, clearly not the ancestor of anybody’s wife or any woman.

But first here is a brief overview of the most popular theories.  One book after another derives wife from the verb weave.  Some people still support this derivation.  However, it is indefensible from a phonetic point of view, and no one has been able to explain why the word for “weaver” should have been neuter.  References to the supposed low status of old weavers are nonsense.  Then there is Gothic (bi)waibjan “surround, encompass; clothe, wrap” (bi- is a prefix).  Its cognates usually mean “swing, sway, vacillate,” as seen in Engl. waver.  Biwaibjan and its congeners gave rise to another well-known etymology of wife.  Allegedly, the sought-for link between wife and clothe was the veil. “Wife,” according to this reconstruction, meant “a veiled bride,” because the veiling of the bride was customary among all Western Indo-Europeans.  However, apart from numerous semantic complications, which I will skip, it remains a puzzle how the line between “bride” and “woman” was crossed (no society, and hence no language, confuses these concepts) and why a female person about to marry, even if veiled, acquired the neuter gender in Germanic.  Other suggestions along the same lines were no more persuasive.  Instead of “veil,” various pieces of a woman’s apparel were named, but the basic idea remained: “from clothes to person”, as in he chases every skirt.  However, there is hardly a single solid example of a word like skirt, apron, or bonnet turning by metonymy into an everyday name for “girl” or “woman.”

As could be expected, some people hoped to find the etymon of wife in a word for the woman’s genitals.  A neuter noun holding out some promise turned up only in Tocharian, which is not good for this etymology, because wife, as noted, had limited currency even in Germanic.  In Tocharian B it sounded kwipe and meant “shame place,” with reference to “penis,” whereas Tocharian A kip meant “mother’s shame body,” so either “vulva” or “womb.”  Secure Tocharian cognates of even Common Germanic words are not too many, and, if the Tocharian noun were related to the protoform of wife, it is almost unimaginable that this word would not have turned up somewhere between Asia Minor and Medieval Germania.  Also, as can be seen, neither kwipe nor kip meant directly “woman’s genitals.”  However, this etymology, like all the previous ones, found a few distinguished supporters.

I will pass by other, even less convincing, conjectures and come to my own proposal.  Discrepancies between the grammatical gender of the word and the sex of the person it designates are not uncommon, and several other examples of neuter nouns for “woman” exist.  Each of them needs a detailed explanation.  Here only one fact should be mentioned.  In all the old Indo-European languages the form of the feminine singular coincided with that of the neuter plural.  This circumstance poses interesting and complicated questions about the origin of the grammatical gender and relations between a group (for which the neuter plural is natural) and an individual woman.  In any case, the path for a collective plural to a singular, either feminine or masculine, has been attested more than once.  An anthologized example is god.  Old Germanic had only the neuter plural (gods).  The masculine noun appeared after Germanic-speakers were converted to Christianity.

Among the Old Scandinavian goddesses, we find Sif.  Her name, derived from Indo-European si-bh, is related to Engl. sib and Latin su-us “one’s own.”  Sif must have been the patroness of family ties.  The only recorded myth in which she plays a visible role, points to fertility, rather than affinity by marriage, but the concepts of family and fertility are close.  I compared Sib and the personal pronoun we.  The protoform of we was wis (with “long i, that is, wees, if spelled in today’s English); -s was an ending.  I think that Old Germanic wibh, the protoform of wife, was wi-bh a formation parallel to sibh.  If I am right, sibh meant “all the people related by marriage,” while wibh referred to a group tracing its origin to the same woman.  It was a word like y’all.  Wibh, as I see it, had to be neuter, because it was the name of a community whose members descended or believed that they had descended from the same woman.  It included both males and females, and in Germanic, when a pronoun like they covered “mixed company,” the form was always neuter (John and Jack needed the masculine they, Betty and Mary would be covered by the feminine they, whereas Jack and Jill required the neuter they).  As time went on, the word meaning “we, descendants of one woman” came to mean “woman.”  Wife emerged as a term of social relations, but the old grammatical gender remained.  The old Indo-European word for “woman” (preserved by Engl. quean) also survived, but it narrowed its sphere of application and came to denote “woman in her biological (child bearing) function.”

Those who have trouble believing that the same word can refer to a group and to an individual should recall Engl. youth “young people” and youth “a young man” or people and a people, let alone one sheep ~ many sheep, whatever the causes of this usage may be.  Apparently, the distinction between a woman’s role as the founder of a clan and her role of a potential mother was not universal, because even in Germanic it was limited to a certain area.  Nor have we retained it: woman serves both purposes equally well, and quean, to the extent that it is still used outside some rural dialects, means “slut.”  Somebody may say that Germanic wib has not been attested in its collective meaning.  Quite so.  If this sense had continued into the literary epoch or lingered in some archaic dialect, my etymology would have been offered in the eighteenth century at the latest.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

The history of boat is no less obscure than the history of ship.  Britain was colonized by Germanic-speakers in the fifth century CE from northern Germany and Denmark.  It is hard to imagine that the invaders, who became known to history as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes and who must have known a good deal about navigation, stopped using boats after they crossed the Channel.  But a cognate of boat has not turned up in any modern dialect spoken on the southern coast of the North Sea.  The unexpected conclusion is that the colonizers did not have this word and therefore did not bring it to their new homeland.  In the continental language we now call Old Saxon (not the ancestor of Old English, even though it is close to it), several words for “a floating vessel,” including skip “ship,” two compounds ending in -skip, and two diminutives, occur. They are still recognizable from their reflexes (continuations) in Modern German and English, but none bears any resemblance to Old Engl. bat (with long a, that is, the vowel we hear in today’s father, Prague, or spa).  That the word was popular is certain, for it later made its way into the Romance languages (French bateau, etc.), German (Boot), and Dutch (boot).

Only the Scandinavian languages, Old Icelandic among them, have what looks like viable cognates of boat, namely beit and bátr (á designated the same “long a”), but both are an embarrassment.  Old Engl. bat could be masculine or feminine (which is strange, for the word was common and supposedly required a stable form), whereas Old Icelandic beit was neuter.  To make matters worse, it occurred only in poetry (and very rarely) and meant “big ocean ship.”  The gender may not be a problem, for another beit “pasture” was neuter too, and if that circumstance played no role in the history of beit “ship,” one can suggest that skip, also a neuter noun, influenced it.  But the meaning is a puzzle.  Bátr, which was masculine, referred only to boats with two or four oars; those with eight oars were called skip.

Most reluctantly, some language historians decided that beit and bátr are not related.  Icelandic had the verb bíta (í should be pronounced like Modern Engl. ee) “to bite.” Some verbs form a group called causative.  Compare sit and set.  In the most general terms, set can be defined “make sit, cause to sit.”  Therefore, set is the causative of sit.  I might have cited lay “to make lie, cause to lie” as the causative of lie, but, considering the suppression of lie by lay in the speech of most Americans and some Britons, will abstain from referring to that pair.  Some such pairs are easy to recognize (for example, sit and set); others have diverged in pronunciation and meaning and do not look like belonging together (thus, drench is the causative of drink).  The causative of bíta was beita, and can be glossed as “to cause to bite.”  First and foremost, it meant “to graze cattle” (“cause them to bite the grass”; English bait is closely related to beita).  One of the figurative senses of beita was “to cruise,” as though “make the wind bite the sail.”  It has been suggested that beit “ship” owes its origin to the verb beita.  Whether this suggestion is valid is anybody’s guess.

If Old Engl. bat is native, its long a must have developed from ai, pronounced like the English letter i (for ai was the only source of long a), and we get the protoform bait.  For this reason, some people thought that Icelandic beit, with its ei also from ai, is a borrowing of the unattested Old Engl. bait, but, as we have seen, reconstructing native Old Engl. bat poses the question about the absence of related forms on the continent.  If, however, the Scandinavians took over bátr rather than the unattested bait from Old English, they must have done so after the diphthong ai yielded long a (á).  The borrowing in the opposite direction cannot explain where the Old Icelandic form bátr appeared in the first place.  At one time, an opinion was advanced that perhaps the word could originate in Frisian, but, more likely, the Frisian name of the boat was also borrowed.  The question remains in limbo.

Whoever coined the troublesome noun and wherever it happened, the combination of the sounds b + vowel + t must have meant something to the ancient wordsmith.  It seems that James A. H. Murray, the OED’s first editor, was not sure even of that, for the entry boat opens with the following astounding parenthesis: “OE. bát (unless it is onomatopoeic)….”  What noise did he think could inspire the coining of boat?  The bat-bat-bat of a hammer?  Most often boats get their names from two sources: either they are called tubs of some sort or an image of a tree is invoked.  When a boat is a dugout, reference to a tree is natural.  On the whole, the “motivation” is believed to be the same for calling a ship a ship and a boat a boat.  Two similar conjectures have been put forward about the etymon of boat.  One (by the Swede Evald Lidén, 1892) looked at the Icelandic noun biti “crossbeam,” the other (by the Dutchman Hendrik Kern, 1898) pointed to Sanskrit bhed “to split, cleave”; it does not seem that Kern was aware of Lidén’s publication.  A third etymology, which related boat to Latin fodio “I dig,” has had almost no supporters.

Biti is akin to bíta, discussed above in connection with its causative beita (a “bit” appears as something “bitten” from the whole), and thereby to beit.  (By the same token, Engl. bit is a cognate of the verb bite.) Yet Lidén’s conjecture is unable to answer every question, for we are more interested in boat and bátr than in beit, which, after all, despite the similarity in sound and meaning can be an entirely different word.  Whatever the relations between biti and beit, the affinity of beit to bátr will make sense only if we agree that the Scandinavians borrowed bátr from their insular neighbors when the English word was still pronounced with the diphthong ai rather than with “long a.”  But, as noted above, the existence of a native protoform of Engl. boat is questionable.  Unsurprisingly, dictionaries, unwilling to take sides, either say that the origin of boat is unknown or, if they accept the biti etymology, do so with a good deal of hedging.

The names of vessels are usually borrowed when there is something special in a ship’s model, but we don’t know what could have made the Anglo-Saxon small boat so interesting to the Scandinavians centuries before the Vikings’ raids (centuries before, because the Old English diphthong ai developed into “long a” at a very remote epoch) or later, after the diphthong had been “smoothed,” to use the terminology of some textbooks.  Or was the English word borrowed twice: once with a diphthong (hence beit) and another time with a monophthong (hence bátr)?  (The fact of borrowing is not a grave problem: consider the later triumphant way of boat into the Romance languages.  The baffling part is the lack of cognates on the continent and phonetics.)  Nor do we know whether the ancient object called “boat” was a dugout; it may have been a sailboat.  Then the association with splitting, carving, and crossbeams would perhaps not have been uppermost in the minds of the speakers.  Surrounded by such darkness and set afloat in a sea of suspicious hypotheses, let us look at the Egyptian sun god, as he is crossing heaven toward us in his primitive but splendid felucca.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

Ingle and inkling

Ingle is usually derived from Celtic.  The Scots form is the same as the English one, while Irish Gaelic has aingeal.  The Celtic word is a borrowing of Latin ignis “fire” (cf. Engl. ignite, ignition).  Therefore, some etymologists derive Engl. ingle directly from the Latin diminutive igniculus; ingle nook gives this derivation some support.  Be that as it may, no path leads from ingle to inkling.

Coleslaw, its origin

Coleslaw came to us from Dutch via American English.  Dutch kool means “cabbage” (cf. German Kohl, known to most as the family name of Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of Germany, 1982-1998), while Dutch sla is the common colloquial form of salade “salad.”  Thus, the etymon is koolsla.  It is unclear why the second element of coleslaw rhymes with haw, paw, raw, rather than with spa.  Words like spa are rare in Modern English; outside baa-baa, blah-blah-blah, bah and their ilk they are exotic borrowings (ah sounds more natural in the unstressed syllables of names like Sarah, Hannah, and so forth, including Monty Python’s Peckinpah).  The change from ah to aw may have been the result of the word’s domestication.  Or do we owe the shape of the vowel to the Midwesterners, in whose speech Shaw is indistinguishable from Shah?

Salad days, its origin

The link from coleslaw to salad needs no justification.  Since the phrase has not been found before Cleopatra, or rather Shakespeare, used it (“My salad days, / When I was green, cold in blood”; Anthony and Cleopatra, 1606), it has been ascribed to him.  Green evokes the idea of spring, youth, and inexperience.  Compare greenhorn (though a young bull’s horns are really green, just as young creatures are really wet behind the ears, or so I understand).  We know who coined the phrase, but we cannot answer the question why Shakespeare used salad, rather than lettuce, in it.  Possibly, he meant not only the color of salad, which, in English at any rate, is the name of a dish, not of a vegetable.  From contemporary literature one can cite the title of Joseph Cronin’s novel The Green Years; however, green has multiple connotations in it. Salad days is a so-called familiar quotation and thus should be avoided, along with all such hackneyed phrases that add a fake air of gentility to one’s speech but in reality betray the speaker’s lazy mind.

Sanction “punishment” and “encouragement”

How can two opposite meanings coexist in one word?  Nowadays we mainly hear and see the first sense of sanction(s), but to sanction something still means “to authorize, ratify it.”  The ambiguity already existed in French, from which English borrowed the noun.   There, sanction denoted an authoritative approval of a law and penalty prescribed in an enactment.  French inherited the double meaning from Latin.  The root of the word is sanct- “saint, holy.” In Rome, sanctio referred to an act of establishing something as inviolable under a penalty.  The law was wise and included a mechanism for enforcing it.

Silent b in climb and related matters

I don’t think the loss of b in pronunciation depends on the use of -ing after climb, as Mr. Cowan suggests (if I understand his comment correctly).  Climbing cannot have been more frequent than the finite forms of climb, while lamb, thumb, comb, and others were surely used more often that lambing, thumbing, and combing.  In -mb, with its two voiced labial consonants in succession, b is shed not only in English.  Parallel to this phenomenon is the insertion of parasitic p after m, as in empty, sumpter “packhorse,” and words like Humpty-Dumpty and umpteen.  Another correspondent cited the obsolete verb limn “draw, paint, portray,” pronounced like limb.  Limn sides with damn, condemn, solemn, and others.  Final n did not fare too well even in kiln: in some people’s speech kiln is indistinguishable from kill.

An extreme case of the who / whom confusion

We are accustomed to sentences like: “Everything depends on whom will be elected.”  Instead of allowing the pronoun to serve as the subject of the subordinate clause, it is made to depend on the preposition preceding it.  The confusion of who and whom is at least as old as the hills of America.  By this time many people use whom in all situations.  Yet the following sample (from a letter to the editor) stands out: “‘Equal rights’ is a radical concept.  It means that no matter whom you are or what your gender identity, sexual preferences or religious faith may be, you can participate fully in public life.”  As I know from experience, letters to newspapers are edited for content, but perhaps it is not considered proper to edit them for style.  Conversely, the editor may have seen nothing wrong in “no matter whom you are.”

The subjunctive in British English

I am grateful to Mr. Michael Lamb, who, although he watches with amusement my struggle with linguistic windmills, agreed to comment on the use of if we would have been in power.  It appears that careful speakers across the ocean react to such forms without enthusiasm but without active resentment.  The origin of this subjunctive in present day English cannot be established with certainty.  In popular speech, the form may have led an underground existence for a long time.  Such explosions are always “sudden.”  As a parallel, I may refer to an example from Skeat, who grew up in London, and, according to whom, one barely ever heard kite for Kate in the years of his youth, while in 1899 (the date of the note) one could hardly hear anything else.  His observation is, of course, also valid for our time.  If one has to change trains at eight o’clock, one invariably hears long i in all three words.  This is the ultimate triumph of Cockney phonetics.  If we would have been in power may be a phenomenon of the same type (toyp).  Assuming this to be the case, British English has met its Shakespearean past and American pronunciation (which is more or less the same thing).  With regard to both sounds and forms, Shakespeare may have felt more comfortable in Ohio than in today’s Stratford-on-Avon.  Whether he would have enjoyed life in Ohio is not for us to decide.  One can write sonnets anywhere.

The origin of ship (an answer to a comment)

Here are my reasons for questioning the native origin of ship.   1) We do not know what vessels were called ship when the word came into being.  As evidenced by Old Norse, some cognates of Latin navis existed in Germanic, but they receded into the mythological sphere or at least became archaic.  I assume that ship could not have been coined too early, and I doubt that it designated a primitive dugout.  After all, for dugouts we probably have the word boat (to which the next post will be devoted).  Nor am I convinced that old ships (those that speakers called ships) were covered by skins, as Jost Trier suggested.  He did not refer to any linguistic or archeological data.  Some Mediterranean ships were covered with wickerwork, but none of the Germanic ships known to us bears the slightest resemblance to such vessels.  And if the vessels called ships were meant for navigating seas, they were anything but canoes, kayaks, or pirogues.  2) All the obviously related verbs (Old Icelandic skipa and skipta, to name the two most important ones) mean “organize, arrange,” and the like.  Cautious authors add probably, before glossing them as “cut, carve.”  The only related verbs with the meaning “carve, cut” occur in Latvian and Lithuanian.  One could have expected some such forms closer to home.  The age of the Baltic senses is, naturally, unknown.  The history of make shows how careful one should be in dealing with words of this semantic sphere.  3) I don’t see why those who allegedly coined skip- should have used a different grade of ablaut attested in the related verb (forgetting for the moment about the difference in meaning).  This type of derivation is possible, but it is not the one we would predict.  Compare the origin of spoon.  The earliest spoons were made of wood, and the word for “wooden chip, splinter” is in full view, having the same grade of ablaut as spoon (the meaning developed by a well-known process: from “material” to “a thing made of or from it).”  4) Given the obscurity of the Germanic maritime vocabulary, a paradoxical situation has arisen.  It is more natural to posit borrowing (not necessarily from the mysterious substrate) than a native origin, and those who opt for a Germanic etymology of ship are expected to produce truly convincing arguments to the opposite side.  Two Baltic verbs cannot tip the scale.  5) The latest etymological dictionary of Dutch, to which our correspondent refers, is not the most inspiring reference book I have used in my work.

Where did Germanic-speakers come from?

Unlike Mr. Cowan, scholars are not certain how to answer this question.  The ethnogenesis of hardly any old nation has been ascertained to everybody’s satisfaction.  This is not the place to discuss such a complicated question, but I would like to cite a characteristic example.  The Goths preserved the memory of migrating from Scandinavia (history finds them on the shores of the Black Sea).  A few linguistic features seem to confirm that legend, though this evidence is less impressive than philologists contended a century ago.  Place names also seem to point in the direction of Scandinavia, but archeologists failed to find traces of massive migrations from the north at the time suggested by the Gothic historian Jordanes.  As a result, the riddle remains unsolved.  The prehistory of all Germanic speakers is, obviously, more complicated than that of a single tribe.

Decadent food

“I hear cooking shows use the word decadent to describe their delicious food, but decadent comes from decay.  Ick!”  Ick indeed.  Fortunately, we do not have to remember the origin of the words we use.  The term decadence was coined by the opponents of new art (it was new in the second half of the 19^th century), with its cult of artificial beauty, and later adopted gleefully by the “decadents” themselves.  Ever since that time decadent has been used as a synonym for “sumptuous; luxuriously self-indulgent; meeting the highest aesthetic criteria.”  The New Oxford American Dictionary gives a curious example (at decadence).  “‘French’ connotes richness and decadence, and that’s the idea of this ice-cream.”  In the mind of many, French stands for “depravity,” for which reason they enviously adore it.  Anyway, be grateful that those shows do not call their dishes tantalizing, which would mean that you will see but never be able to touch them (another popular epithet in advertising the wonders of the American cuisine).

Enjoy a truly decadent ice cream, a mountain of cholesterol and beauty (this is what decadence really means).

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

I decided to stay at sea for at least two more weeks.  The history of the word frigate is expected to comfort Germanic scholars, who may not know that, regardless of the language, the names of ships invariably give etymologists grief.  In English, frigate is from French, and in French it is from Italian, so that the question is: Where did Italian fregata come from?   Naturally, nobody knows.  Although the literature on fregata is not extensive (no comparison with what one finds about the derivation of Engl. ship or boat), the conjectures have been rather numerous.  Dictionaries prefer to say as little as possible on the subject (some even ignore this word) and usually end the discussion with the statement that the sought-for etymology has not been found.  My exposition depends on a long array of dictionaries and two papers.  One (by Henry and Renée Kahane, 1965-66) is easily recoverable because the title appears in my bibliography, but I ran into the other one only this past summer, and I suspect that not all specialists know it (Vittore Pisani in Romania. Scritti offerti a Francesco Piccolo…., 1962).  The Kahanes may not have had enough time to notice their immediate predecessor.  Celebratory volumes (so-called Festschriften) and those in memoriam appear in a steady stream; it is no easy matter to discover both the diamonds and the paste hidden in them.  Seeing that the title of Pisani’s article contains no hint of the words it explores, someone interested in the history of fregata will find the relevant section only by paging through the entire miscellany.  I do this type of work routinely.  However, even this method does not guarantee success, for who can open every book and every journal in creation?  Unfortunately, complete bibliographies do not exist, and when they appear, they are outdated.

Attempts to derive fregata from Arabic (harraqat, plural of harraqa “fire ship”; my transliteration is simplified) and Greek (aphtaktos “without deck”) can probably be discounted; fregata seems to be a word with a Romance root.  Since fregata ends in -ata, it looks like an adaptation of some participle that at one time followed the feminine noun navis “ship,” for example, navis fabricata “a made, constructed ship.”  The path from fabricata to fregata cannot be recovered, and this hypothesis has been abandoned, though, apart from being offered by an outstanding scholar, it finds support in Italian bastimento “ship, vessel,” from bastonare “beat” (bastone is “stick”; cf. Engl. baton, going back to a French congener of bastone, and bastinado “beating with a stick,” from Spanish), and we immediately recollect Engl. ship and its Germanic kin, often traced to some verb for cutting and carving.   Equally hopeless is the proposed form (navis) virgata “boat equipped with a lateen-yard” (lateen is a triangular “Latin” sail, called this because of its use in the Mediterranean; virga is akin to French vergue “plank supporting the sail”).  Italian fregare (from fricare, as in Engl. friction) means “rub,” and the verbal noun fregata means “rubbing,” but what does or did a frigate rub?  Obviously another false track.  Fregata sounds almost like regatta.  However, this similarity again leads us nowhere, for fregata and regatta, the latter of Venetian origin, are entirely different things.   According to still another suggestion, frigates were used for saving shipwrecked people and were initially called naufragata “boat useful in shipwrecks” (compare Italian naufrago and French naufraugé “a shipwrecked person”).  The form naufragata has not been recorded, and if it ever existed, why should the first element have been lost?

Since 1350, the year in which the word fregata first surfaced in Boccaccio’s Decameron, it has designated many different types of vessels.  It was at first a boat towed by the admiral’s galley, then a navigium exploratorium (a spy-boat, rather than an explorer, if I understand this Latin term correctly), still later a small warship, a three-mast merchant ship, and now, to quote various English dictionaries, “a U.S. warship of approximately 5,000 to 7,000 tons, intermediate between a cruiser and destroyer, used primarily for escort duty,” “large type of fast sailing ship used in war before introduction of steam; next in size to ships of the line, carrying about 25 to 50 guns; corresponding in type and function to modern cruiser,” “a fast naval vessel of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, generally having a lofty ship rig and heavily armed on one or two decks; any of various types of modern naval vessels ranging in size from a destroyer escort to a cruiser, frequently armed with guided missiles and used for aircraft carrier escort duty, shore bombardment, and miscellaneous combat functions,” and so forth.  Like the baby of the infamous ad, the frigate has come a long way.  The forms of the word also varied but remained close to its source: fragata (Venice), fargada (Spain), frugatte (Germany; in Germany only fahaden looks exotic; the modern form is Fregatte), fraguate (Marseille, France; Modern French frégate).  In English and German books the word appeared more than two centuries after the Decameron.  The OED records forms beginning with fre- and fri-.

The Kahanes favored the derivation of fregata from falca “the raised edge of a boat” (remember “having a lofty ship rig”?).  In their opinion, navis in-falc-ata yielded navis infargata “boat with a raised edge”; hence fargata and fregata.  The change from fargata to fregata is easy (it would be a trivial case of metathesis), but we find r for l in the root only in Genoese farca and rg only in French fargue “a plank in a covering board called plank-sheer”; however, nothing points to the fact that Boccaccio’s form, the earliest known to us, had been influenced by Genoese, let alone French, usage.  Pisani’s starting point was Italian dialectal fragu “coast, sea shore.”  He suggested that a small vessel known in the 14^th century as fregata had developed from the phrase nave de fragata “ship for coast-wise traffic.”  Allegedly, original frigates (small vessels) were used for all kinds of operations close to the shore.  In Old Italian the term nave littoraria, with the meaning Pisani reconstructed for fregata, existed.  Of all the etymologies we have seen so far, his is probably the most realistic, even though “boat towed by the admiral’s galley” is not exactly what he would have needed for his reconstruction.  As always, there is little hope for finding the evidence that will clinch the argument.  It may sometimes be easier to win a sea battle that to find the origin of a sea term.

On an entirely different note, I see that the OED has frigger “a small glass ornament or testing sample.”  The first citation is dated 1923 (from a book on glass making), and the word’s origin is unknown.  The Italian verb fregiare means “to decorate” (this sense is obsolete); “to ornament, embellish.”  Is it possible that frigger was brought as slang from Italy and transformed in England into an obscenity with an innocent sense?  As Skeat once said, when one begins to guess, on usually guesses wildly.

The Russian author Goncharov, the author of the deservedly famous novel Oblomov, accompanied Admiral Putyatin (or Putiatin) to Japan on board the frigate Pallada and wrote a book about the voyage and the negotiations (1858).  Below you will see a picture of this ship: no missiles yet, just a profusion of sails.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

The comments on the previous post (the ethnogenesis of the “Germans” and the native origin of the word ship, as opposed to the idea that it is a borrowing) deserve a detailed answer, and I’ll give it in this month’s “gleanings,” two weeks from today.  At the moment I will proceed with the “rings.”

Alongside Old Icelandic skip “ship,” we find the verb skipa “arrange; assign.”  It is tempting to suggest that the unattested meaning of this verb was either “arrange things on a ship; prepare a ship for a voyage; make it secure and shipshape” or even “board a ship, travel by ship,” because the connection between skip and skipa can hardly be doubted.  However, not improbably, the earliest meaning of ship was simply “thing made, artifact,” rather than “vessel,” with skipa reminding us of that sense.  Dictionaries do not say much about the relations between skip and skipa but, as cross-references indicate, assume that the two are connected.  We are apt to derive the sense of skipa from that of skip ~ ship; yet perhaps skipa supplies us with a clue to the lost meaning of ship.

Here are some facts.  Icelandic skipa also occurred with the sense “to man” (the king would recruit, select soldiers for a military campaign, and the verb I italicized above is my gloss of skipa.)  The noun skipan (or skipun), also in Old Icelandic, meant “arrangement” and “the manning of a ship.”  Skipa upp, in which upp corresponds to Engl. up, rather unexpectedly, referred to the unloading of a cargo.  The meaning of Engl. up shows that this adverb can designate an action fully completed (as in eat up, read up, and finish up, for example).  As The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology says: “The use of up, adv[erb] to express complete consumption was prob[ably adopted from Scand[inavian] (e.g. O[ld] N[orse] drekka upp drink up.”  But the use of up in look up (a word), put up (at a hotel; with a difficulty), and hurry up, among many others, shows how versatile this short word is.  Icelandic skipa upp may have meant “make final arrangements in dealing with a ship that has come to port,” hence “unload.”  It is therefore not improbable that Germanic had the word skip- meaning “a well-arranged, well-outfitted thing” that interacted with a near homonym from Greek (“beaker”), on which see the previous post, and acquired the familiar sense (“ship”) later.  Or the extant sense of ship may be the product of the narrowing of meaning: from “thing in good order” to “vessel ready for use.”  It is hard to decide.  Compare Engl. train (from French): first it meant “tarrying, delay; thing that drags or trails,” then “sequence or series,” and only then “a line of carriages.” The sense “means of transportation” does not have to be the original one in any of our designations of a vehicle.

The most interesting “ring” Germanic skip(an) left in a neighboring language is French équiper, which returned to English as equip.  Such double voyages, as Ernst Weekley called them (from Germanic to Romance and back to English), are common.  The Old French source of équiper meant “to embark; board a ship.”  Apparently, Old French retained the sense of the verb not extant anywhere in Germanic.  This is a common case in semantics.  However, the history of the French verb poses problems of its own.  Old English had scipian “to travel by water, navigate,” so that Old French may have taken over its meaning from a word close to Icelandic skipa and modified it slightly.  Besides that, Old French eschiper existed side by side with esquiper, and their relations are not quite clear.  The main puzzle is that today’s equip has nothing to do with ships or the idea of putting to sea.  As noted, équiper first meant “embark.”  Its modern meaning “to fit out” does not predate the sixteenth century.  Medieval Latin had eschipare “to man a vessel”, and it has been suggested that we are dealing with two similar-sounding but different verbs.  This is possible but rather unlikely.  Still stranger is the difference in meaning between equipment “furnishings” and equipage, which did at one time mean “equipment” and only later developed the senses “train of attendants; carriage and horses.”  To the extent that equipage still exists as a living English word, it means only “an elegantly equipped carriage.”  Why and how did horses come in?  Weekley’s guess is astute but unverifiable: perhaps, he says, equipage fell under the influence of Latin equus “horse.”

To complicate the picture (should I say “muddy the waters?”), Icelandic also had the verb skipta (read pt as ft) “to share; divide; change; exchange,” a cognate of Engl. shift, from Old Engl. sciftan “arrange, change; alter the position”; the sense arrange has gone out of use.  Obviously, the Germanic protoform, something like skipatjan, had the familiar root skip-, with the suffix -at and the ending -jan.  Wherever we look, we encounter the meanings “arrange, ordain, determine, fit out; change” and the like.  Nothing points to things destined specifically for sea travel, made of wood, or carved.

A few more “rings” are in order.  Skiff came to English from French esquif, where it turned up at the end of the fifteenth century, a borrowing of Italian schifo, itself a borrowing from Langobardian, an extinct West Germanic language that left numerous traces in northern Italian dialects (compare Lombardy, Italian Lombardia), thus, another double voyage.  Skiff sounds almost like German Schiff “ship.”  Then there is skipper, a loan from either Low (that is, northern) German or Middle Dutch (Dutch seamanship was famous: -ship in seamanship is different from ship being discussed here).  Old French also had eskipre.  It no longer exists in the modern language.  Unlike skipper, Engl. skip (as in skipping rope, skip a page, and skip a grade) is not akin to ship.  That verb surfaced in English only in the thirteenth century, so that it is probably of Scandinavian origin, like most Middle English words beginning with sk.  The adjective shipshape makes excellent sense, but it would never have been coined if it did not sound so clever and did not convey the idea of things done perfectly on board a ship.

The butterfly skipper got its name for the quick, darting movements it makes.  Although the verb skip, as pointed out above, is not related to any of the ship words, looking at a beautiful butterfly, especially now that he summer is over, will do no one any harm.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

We are in deep waters here.  A first puzzle is that ship has exact cognates in Frisian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Gothic, but nowhere outside Germanic.  The ancient Indo-Europeans called their floating vessel something else, and we know what they called it.  The modern echo of that word can be seen in Latin navis (from whose root we have navigation; and remember Captain Nemo’s Nautilus “little ship” and the Argonauts?), as well as in several other languages.  So why ship?

Strangely, this problem is not isolated.  Numerous maritime words, including sea, sail, boat, and many others also lack cognates outside Germanic.  More than one flimsy bridge has been drawn between ship, sea, etc. and words in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, but they can seldom carry the weight of doubts and counterarguments.  Even if some of those doubts are exaggerated, the proposed cognates never mean “ship” or “sea”; at best, they refer to some concepts that are supposed to be close.  So to paraphrase the question asked above: What prevented the speakers of Old Germanic from using a congener of the word navis?  The most natural answer seems to be that they did not use it because they did not know it and they did not know it because they once lived far from the sea and did not need ships.  Allegedly, they coined or learned the word only when they migrated to the shores of the great ocean.  If before that they sustained themselves by hunting, agriculture, and cattle breeding, they might use primitive boats but not sailing ships.  This is a classic situation in which the interests of linguists and archeologists meet.  Usually archeologists expect illuminating answers from linguists, while linguists rely on the conclusions of archeologists, without realizing that neither group is able to give even a near definitive answer.

The idea of Germanic tribes’ early migration northward met with fierce resistance.  Some of the opposition was fed by impure politics, some by pure linguistics.  The originator of the idea that the homeland of the modern “Germans” (a common generic term for Germanic-speakers) should be sought more to the south was the Berlin linguist Sigmund Feist, who offended the nationalists by the suggestion that their ancestors had not always lived where they did in the light of history.  Since the time for discussing such questions was bad (the Weimar Republic) and since Feist had the ill luck of being a Jew, his adversaries overpowered him without much effort.  Feist was ostracized, expelled from a prestigious board, and later, after Hitler came to power, targeted by the new laws.  Later he escaped to the Netherlands, where he died, a physical wreck and an outcast.  His friends tried to find an academic post for him in the United States, but he was over 65, and no American university offered him a safe haven.  Although after the war the origin of the Germanic maritime vocabulary again attracted a good deal of attention and the tone of the discussion became considerably less raucous, opinions are still divided.  With regard to ship, some people think that the word is native, while others try to derive it from a foreign source.

The easiest solution would be to suggest that when the speakers of Germanic arrived in their present habitat (assuming that they had migrated to it from the south), they learned the word ship (pronounced approximately as skip) from the people they conquered.  The submerged languages of the vanquished are called substrates.  Within the framework of the migration theory, this conjecture sounds reasonable (Feist was one of its proponents), but since the lost language is unknown (even its influence on Germanic is hypothetical), we cannot go further.  Other scholars tried to find a Greek or Latin word of which ship could have been a borrowing.  The oldest boats probably looked like canoes or kayaks, or pirogues and were hollowed out trees.  Hence the idea to treat ship as an alteration of Greek skaphos “digging; hull.”  It is unclear whether the two senses of the Greek word belong together, but, in any case, neither the vowel nor the consonant match those of ship.  Another “Classical” idea connects ship with Latin scyphus “beaker” (from Greek).  The Old High German cognate of Engl. ship does mean both “ship” and “beaker.” The semantic connection is natural, as Engl. vessel shows. In other languages, too, one word covers “ship” and “receptacle.”  But Germanic has ship, not shif (German Schiff is the product of a later sound change: compare Engl. open and German offen, Engl. leap and German laufen “run,” among many others).  Otherwise, this etymology would have been perfect.  To save it, Vittore Pisani, an eminent Italian scholar, pointed out that in conversational Latin p often changed to f.  In his opinion, the Germanic word was a borrowing of that popular form.  Evidently, the more undocumented steps reconstruction entails, the worse.  Pisani’s idea is not bad but less than fully convincing.

An early guess connected ship with the cognates of the verb shave, that is, “scratch, scrape” (“scratch” was one of its early meanings).  Given this derivation, ship, as expected, would end up going back to “hollowed out tree.”  One can still find this etymology in some dictionaries and books, though it is certainly wrong (here is one of the rare cases when an etymologist can risk saying certainly).  Vowels in Old Germanic words alternated according to rather rigid rules, as they still do in write—wrote, find—found, get—got, run—ran, and so forth.  When nouns were formed from the roots of such verbs, they obeyed the same rules.  The verb shave (which is related to shape: compare Latin scabere, also “scratch, scrape”) belongs to a class in which a, that is, “short a,” alternated with “long o.”  It follows that skip, which has short i, is out of the game, as long as shape and shave are concerned.  For this reason, another root has been proposed, the one seen in Latin scipio “staff; stick”; Slavic chepiti (stress on the second syllable) “to split” belongs here too.  Once again a ship emerged as something built or made of wood (or, according to another suggestion, covered with hides).  I have already said that when a linguistically feasible cognate of ship turns up, its senses have only indirect ties with the meaning “floating vessel.”

I think that in this case a borrowing is more realistic than the derivation from some word for “stick” or “split,” even though primitive boats were indeed hollowed out trees (beams).  My preference will not tip the scale in the long argument; nor is it meant to do that.  Henry Cecil Wyld, to whose etymologies in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language I often refer with approval and even with admiration, gave the well-known cognates and concluded: “…origin & further connexions entirely doubtful.”  Some other dictionaries avoid revealing this miserable truth to their users and confine themselves to enumerating related forms, as if lists of similar-sounding congeners endowed with the same meaning provided a clue to the origin.  But etymologists’ vision is limited, and we should view their inefficient tricks with condescension.  They cannot be told to shape up or ship out.

The title of this post promised “rings.”  Wait for them until next Wednesday.  For now enjoy a fragment of the famous Bayeux tapestry (the second half of the eleventh century), commemorating William’s conquest of England in 1066.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

As usual, many thanks to those who commented on the summer posts and asked questions.  The topics covered below show some variety.

Script, Old and New

One of our most faithful correspondents writes: “According to the Wall Street Journal, Indiana now outlawed teaching script in schools, so the kids can concentrate on their typing.”  He was saddened by the news, and so was I.  He asked me about non-cursive writing in old times, especially in the days of Chaucer.  Here is a brief answer.  The oldest form of the Latin script was the so-called scriptura capitalis.  It features analogs of our capital (upper-case) letters.  In the third and the fourth century CE, simpler characters, more round and meant only for manuscripts, developed from the scriptura capitalis; the script was called scriptura uncialis, and some of its letters resemble our small (lower-case) ones. The appearance of the new script was connected with the use of parchment (before that, people wrote on papyrus, wax tablets, and so forth).  But even earlier the less elaborate cursive letters came into being.  They were meant for everyday correspondence and for all situations in which one needed speed and low cost rather than elegance.  As time went on, the scriptura uncialis began to look like the cursive: this was the semiuncialis.  It later partly merged with some forms of the cursive and became minusculis, which was not too different from our small letters.  This is the script used in most of Old Germanic texts.  But it had several varieties, two of which were especially important: insular (insularis) and continental (mainly Carolingian).  Beginning with the eleventh century, under the influence of the French, the Carolingian script became prevalent in England, and this is the script that Chaucer used.

The Word cranberry

The names of berries pose an often-discussed problem: compare raspberry, huckleberry, and whortleberry, in which an obscure element precedes berry.  Even when the first element is clear, it sometimes looks odd: Why strawberry?  And gooseberry may not owe its origin to goose.  Similar problems characterize the names of berries in some other languages.  Professor R.W.W. Taylor (Department of Mathematics, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester NY) commented on a short discussion of cranberry in my book Word Origins…and referred to cranesbill ~ geranium (the root of geranium is geran-, from the Greek word for “crane”), whose fruit  is shaped like a crane’s bill.  Turning to cranberry, he wrote: “…it would seem that in this case the name has been applied based on the characteristic structure of the flower blossom, which consists of four reflexed petals surrounding a long projecting cluster of stamens.”   This is a familiar idea, and it may be true, but some caution is needed.  Dictionaries inform us that cranberry is a fairly recent word, adapted from German.  The earlier names of this berry began with fen- and marsh-, so here we are dealing with German, rather than English, etymology.  In German and in the Scandinavian languages, including Old Norse, the first part was unquestionably the bird’s name.  Even so, it might be another case of folk etymology.  Dictionaries are evasive. They prefer to say nothing about the etymology of cranberry and sometimes go so far as to state that the word’s origin is obscure.  The Scandinavian cognate of crane is tran (with a troublesome alternation of initial consonants).  This is what an authoritative etymological dictionary of Danish says about tranebær: “Adapted from German Kranichbeere, with a folk etymological alteration (under the influence of Kranich “crane”) of German dialectal kran(s)beer “lingonberry.”  (Lingon goes back to lyng “heather.”)  The Old English and Middle High German forms cited in the entry look suspicious, but the allusion in the name seems to be to twisting, as in Engl. crank, with reference to the clump of berries characterizing the plant.  I am not saying that this etymology reflects the ultimate truth, but the reserve our best lexicographers show on the derivation of cranberry should be taken seriously.

The Origin of gobsmacked “greatly astonished”

This word, little known in the United States, spread to everyday British English from the north, and, if I am not mistaken, its form is transparent.  Gob means “mouth,” so that gobsmacked amounts to “hit on the mouth.”  Hence its slangy sense “amazed.”

Golf and Ian Steen

Mr. Walter Turner writes in connection with my query about the length of the niblick in Jan Steen’s picture (it accompanied the post on golf): “I looked around to see what had been written about the Jan Steen painting but found nothing about the boy’s stick.  Maybe removing some varnish would reveal how the lower end looks.  I tried lightening it up [the result appeared in the attachment posted below], and you will see the stick extends further down than the original image shows.  The ball on the floor might well be part of the things spilled from the basket down there.  However, it is not unlike whatever that is in the little girl’s basket.  [A postscript]: I think the boy had been using the stick, perhaps his father’s golf club, indeed, to chase his big red hoop, which got knocked out of shape in the process.”

USAGE

The student are back

Those who remember my quixotic war against constructions like when a student comes, I never make them wait, with its generic they, will enjoy the sequel (also from a letter to the editor): “As an educator, I will meet with your student before and after school for tutoring.  I’ll even invite them to come eat lunch with me as we work on a difficult assignment.”  I think of that student with joy and hope they are grateful.

Shakespeare on Both Sides of the Atlantic

A British MP (Liberal Democrat) said: “I can’t say we’d be as pure if we would have been one of the two governing parties.”  Here we witness correct Shakespearean grammar, which has survived in American English.  This variety of the subjunctive is ubiquitous in the United States.  But Standard British usage seems to require if we were or if we had been, depending on the circumstances.  I asked a British colleague what he thought of the construction.  He answered that he often hears it and that it annoys him.  I know that many people across the ocean read this blog.  Their comments on if we would have been would be greatly appreciated.

On Slang

It is common knowledge that until not too long ago slang was synonymous with vulgar speech inadmissible in polite society.  Yet a few additional quotations may be of some interest to our readers. All four of them are from Thackeray, a writer extremely sensitive to what we today call slang.  “She was amused by his talk, which was simple, straightforward, rather humorous, and keen, and interspersed with the homely expressions of a style which is sometimes called slang.”  “…this amiable gentleman of course began to abuse the people whom he had injured, and broke out in a volley of slang against the unoffending couple.”  “There is the unmistakable look of slang and bad habits about this Mr. Bloundell.”  “The way in which that Pinckney talks slang is quite disgusting.  I hate chaff in a woman.”

How much has changed since the middle of the nineteenth century!  British English is returning to its Shakespearean roots, and slang has become a respectable way of expression, though sometimes rather irritating, because there is so much of it.  (Decades ago, an old American lady said to me in response to some remark of mine: “This is not a kind of speech to use when addressing a woman.”)

Elisabeth Mary Wright

Last time we did not want to turn a regular post into a picture gallery and gave portraits of only Joseph Wright and Walter W. Skeat.  Wright’s wife certainly deserves the same honor.  The photo of her, as she was in 1923, appears on the frontispiece of volume 2 of her biography of Joseph Wright.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

From time to time I mention the unsung heroes of English etymology, but only once have I devoted a post to such a hero (Frank Chance), though I regularly sing praises to Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary.  Today I would like to speak about Joseph Wright (1855-1930).  He was not an etymologist in the strict sense of this term, but no article on the origin of English words can do without consulting The English Dialect Dictionary he edited.  This multivolume masterpiece contains thousands of local words, whose existence reveals unsuspected and unexpected ties between the words all of us know and their “provincial” kin.  Wright first attempted to offer tentative etymologies in his entries, but then, most wisely, gave up this practice.  The descent of the words with which he dealt is often so obscure that guesses would have done the users only harm.  Sometimes the source of a rural word is evidently French or Scandinavian, but in most cases no clue suggests itself.  Those who are in the habit of looking up origins in our “thick” dictionaries may have noticed how often the etymological comments there run no further than “dialectal” or “slang,” as though such references meant anything. English contains thousands of words about whose origin absolutely nothing is known, because many of them came from the creative brain of an imaginative person now dead for centuries, or the coinage was triggered by a sound symbolic impulse or a joke (word creation and humor is a most promising topic). Too bad, we are usually unable to reconstruct the evanescent processes that resulted in the birth of a word, short-lived and geographically restricted or durable and used in several counties.

The life of Joseph Wright should serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to understand the meaning of the phrase self-made man.  A Yorkshire lad (born as the seventh son of a wool weaver), who became fully literate by the age of fifteen, ended up as an Oxford professor of comparative philology, the author of exemplary textbooks of Greek, Gothic, Old and Middle High German, Old and Middle English.  But, as noted, his main achievement was The English Dialect Dictionary (it ends with a book-length supplement on English dialect grammar), a mammoth enterprise, which he, not a rich man, partly financed and which he considered to be his main contribution to linguistics.  He married his former student ([Elizabeth] Mary Lea, 1863-1958), who later co-authored his books on the history of English, though, according to her own statement, she was mainly responsible for collecting data.  In 1932, that is, soon after her husband’s death, she brought out a two-volume book titled The Life of Joseph Wright, 720 pages in all, supplied with a splendid index.  Not only is this book valuable because it is based on the author’s unique knowledge of the subject but also because Mary Wright quoted numerous documents and letters in it.  Even the slightly hagiographic tone of the exposition does not spoil it.  In her book Rustic Speech and Folklore, she also recounts their walks and scholarly pursuits in Yorkshire.  For Joseph Wright, Standard English was a foreign language, and after a stroke he tended to relapse more and more into the dialect of his childhood and youth.  But even much earlier his little son used to tease him when he heard his father pronounce a word like Puck with the vowel of put. Mary Wright reported that the last word of her dying husband was dictionary.  One need not concoct a pseudo-psychological story around this episode.  Joseph Wright was not only aware of Mary’s compiling his biography but he also helped her do the work, and dictionary was his “last will and testament.”  His mind was unaffected by the pneumonia that carried him away, and he wanted to remind his wife that the production of the dictionary should be described as the defining event of his life.

Wright’s career was brilliant, but his life was far from unclouded.  The son and the daughter the couple had died in childhood, and the son’s death was particularly tragic: apparently, he was stung by an insect that had fed on poison, and blood poisoning killed him in a matter of hours.  When he was born, his elder sister, also quite small at the time, called her brother “boy,” and that is why he was known to everybody not as Willie but as Boy.  The girl died of pneumonia several years later.  They never overcame the grief, even though they continued to work with the same dedication.  But living children are more meaningful than dead languages.  Mary Wright did not mention the event that could not have brought unmitigated joy to Joseph.  As a young man, he went to Heidelberg, studied there, learned German very well indeed, and returned home.  Back in England, he wrote the first ever grammar of an English dialect and was invited to teach at Oxford, where the main figure in linguistics was the great Max Müller, a man universally admired at the peak of his career and universally mocked during the last years of his life and after his death.  Both verdicts were unjust.  Wright’s position was that of a lecturer, but later he was promoted to deputy professor.  Finally, Oxford instituted a chair of comparative philology.  At that time, advertisements for such positions could be seen in England more rarely than a blue moon.  There were two contenders: Joseph Wright and Henry Sweet (the latter is the prototype of Henry Higgins).  When Wright applied for deputy professorship, Sweet wrote a warm recommendation letter for him.  Now they were rivals.  The chair went to Wright.  Sweet felt terribly insulted and did not forgive the world for its treatment of him.  As a man of ideas, he was better qualified for the job than Wright’; yet the outcome had two beneficial consequences for scholarship: Sweet, in order to sustain himself, continued to produce his excellent books (published by Oxford University Press!), while Wright may never have completed his dictionary without getting the position.  To think of the choice Oxford had: Joseph Wright or Henry Sweet!  Anyone in present day academia may remember the last search in which he or she participated.

Not everybody knows that we owe the existence of the English Dialect Society to the indefatigable Walter W. Skeat, who did a great lot of editing for it and participated in its meetings in different towns.  His support for Wright’s work was vital.  Today everybody extols the dictionary, but at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century no one was in a hurry to back it up with grants.  At all times, people send good wishes much more readily than checks (cheques).  The dictionary opens with the following dedication:

“To the Rev. Professor W.W. Skeat, Litt.D. D.C.L., Founder and President of the English Dialect Society, Editor of ‘Chaucer’, ‘Piers Plowman’, and ‘The Bruce’, the unwearied Worker in the varied Field of English Scholarship, to whose patient industry and contagious enthusiasm in connexion with laborious task of accumulating dialect material the possibility of compiling an adequate Dictionary of English Dialects is mainly due.”

Skeat wrote in his testimonial: “After the work had… been at a standstill for at least a couple of years (if I remember rightly), I was so fortunate as to discover in Dr. Wright the only man capable of undertaking the task.”  And now a longer quotation from the biography:

“In the autumn of 1899 Professor (now Sir) Israel Gollancz was raising money for a portrait of Professor Skeat, ‘and also to found a University Prize—a Skeat University Prize for English’.  In a letter thanking Joseph Wright for ‘a generous subscription’ he said, Nov. 27, 1899: ‘S. has done so much for English.  Perhaps he never did a better thing than when he got you to edit the Dialect Dictionary.  He could not have imagined, however, that it would be so glorious an achievement.  God bless you for it!’” (p. 415).

The picture of Joseph Wright in his native Thackley graces the frontispiece of volumes 1 of The Life of Joseph Wright.  The portrait of Skeat is, I think, the one for which Gollancz was raising money in 1899.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the