Out for lunch

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the word lump and promised to deal with lunch, but in between, following a reader’s request, I turned to east, with the intention to go on in the same vein (north, south, and west). The post on east did not reach my email. If you had the same trouble, search for “Oxford Etymologist: Light from the East.” Blinding rays will be your reward. And now I am returning to lump, that is, lunch. And for those interested in idioms: I am out for, not to, lunch.

Lunch appeared in dictionaries and books toward the end of the sixteenth century and remains “a wordof uncertain origin.” But the attempts to solve the riddle are curious and instructive. They were published in popular periodicals, most often in the indispensable Notes and Queries. As usual, the contributors to the NQ looked through old dictionaries and books, and I found nothing in my database they missed. Below, I’ll tell my story without detailed references, but to repeat: all the information in this post came from fugitive notes in journals between 1851 and 1904 and from various dictionaries.

Lunch rhymes with bunch, punch, hunch “tool,” munch, and crunch. This environment does not augur well: none of the five words has a reputable origin, and a homonym (or another sense?) of lunch “the sound made by the fall of a soft heavy body; fragment” has been recorded. Also, lunch is close to lump—another unpromising connection. Even before we make the first step, we suspect that lunch is perhaps onomatopoeic (sound-imitative). Two riddles complicate our search for the word’s origin. It is not immediately clear how lunch is connected with luncheon and with its other synonym nuncheon “refreshment, originally taken in the afternoon,” now dialectal.

As early as the seventeenth century, John Minsheu (1671) derived lunch from Spanish lonja “slice.” Stephen Skinner (1671), a later etymologist, had the same opinion. Minsheu’s otherwise mysterious explanation: “From the length thereof” makes it clear that he meant a big slice. The OED corroborates this conclusion and gives several citations of lunch “a piece, a thick piece, a hunch or hunk” between 1600 and 1786. Luncheon (in the same sense) occurred in books between 1580 and 1824. A contributor to NQ 1/III, 1851, p. 464, remembered “some verses of the younger Beattie [he meant the son of the Scottish poet James Beattie, 1735-1803], in which he uses the word ‘luncheon’ for the piece of bread placed beside the plate at dinner.” And Laurence Sterne, in his book A Sentimental Journey (1765), recollects how he once cut himself “a hearty lunchen” (sic). This sense of luncheon is now dead.

Later guesses traced lunch (among others) to Swedish luns ~ kluns “lump” (incidentally, clunch and especially cluncheon are common in some parts of England), Welsh llwnc “a gulp,” and especially to Spanish l’once “eleven” (with a definite article), allegedly pronounced as lonche, because that meal was taken at eleven o’clock. The phonetic basis of the Spanish etymology is suspicious (ch in once?). Yet the meaning fits the context. For comparison: the word bever (a homophone of beaver, still current in dialects) was explained to an uncomprehending outsider as “luncheon, a snack taken between meals,” and indeed, it was taken at eleven, even though it could also refer to an evening meal. Bever emerged long before lunch. It goes back to a French word referring to drinking (compare imbibe). As is well-known, English borrowed countless words from French, but why should lunch have a Spanish pedigree? The editor of NQ  4/IV, 1869, 118) summarized his findings so: “Obviously all these terms have sprung from a common but unknown source; and neither [sic] of them, therefore, can be said to be absolutely satisfactory…” He was, in principle, right, though few things are “obvious” in this story. Yet, as we now know, nuncheon is a so-called disguised compound (that is, we no longer recognize its components), from non(e) “noon” and shench “draught, cup” (compare German (ein)schenken “to pour”), a close contemporary of lunch.

Six years later, that is, in 1875, Walter W. Skeat, already an experienced editor of old texts but long before the appearance of the first installment of his etymological dictionary, wrote: “There was not only the term nonechenche for noon-drink, but nonemete for noon-meat, or noon-eating. The Spanish words… are hardly to the point. Mere resemblances prove little, and it is far more likely that luncheon was an extension of the provincial-English lunch, meaning ‘a lump,’ than that our labourers took to talking Spanish. The Spanish word loncha, meaning a slice of meat, not a lump of it, was suggested by Minshew [sic], and rejected by Richardson [the author of a detailed and once influential dictionary], and rightly, in my opinion.” Skeat never changed his opinion.

In 1901, the fascicle of the OED with lunch and luncheon appeared, which made letters about early and late citations redundant. Very cautiously, the OED sided with Skeat but added: “It is curious that the word first appeared as a rendering of the (at the time) like-sounding Sp[anish] lonja.” The plot thickened almost at once. In January 1904, a review of the fascicle appeared in the popular periodical Anthenæum. As usual at that time, the review was anonymous, but perhaps the identity of the reviewer is now known to the OED’s editorial staff.

This is what was said there: “It is noteworthy that the five quotations of ‘lunch’, ‘luncheon’, earlier than 1650, are from a Spanish-English and a French-English dictionary, two translations, and a passage relating to the Netherlands… In Cotgrave’s [French-English] dictionary [1673] we find “Tronson, a truncheon or little trunk, a thick slice, luncheon, or piece cut off’; so that it is probable that the form ‘luncheon’ is due to the old synonymous ‘truncheon’. Either ‘lunch’ is short for ‘luncheon’ from Spanish ‘lonjon’, intensive of ‘lonja’ = slice (of bacon), or ‘luncheon’ is from ‘lonjon’, and ‘lunch’ for ‘lonja’. That ‘lonjon’ = thick slice does not appear in Spanish dictionaries goes for little, as their vocabularies are very incomplete.” I assume that this opinion exercised a decisive influence on later researchers. Ernest Weekley (1921) and The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) supported it without discussion. However, the OED online returned, though cautiously, to the formulation, favored by Henry Bradley, the editor of that fascicle, but expunged the reference to Spanish.

This looks like a wise decision, because no one has ever answered Skeat’s question about why English laborers began to speak Spanish. Spanish did enjoy prestige at the time of Charles II, but lunch does not sound like a high society term. Though it is doomed to remaining “a word of uncertain origin,” some uncertainties are less dangerous than others. Only a few scattered remarks about lunch have appeared in scholarly publications since 1904. A final remark: truncheon “a piece broken off” has disappeared from Modern English, but lunch is all over the place, with luncheon being its formal or solemn relative. So far, so good.

_{Featured image by cottonbro studio via Pexels.}