A wary approach to hemlock

Today’s story is about a deadly plant or rather, about its moribund etymology. And yet, when you reach the end, the word’s origin may appear somewhat more transparent, even though the plant will remain as deadly as ever. Hemlock, like dwarf, which I discussed in the post on February 12, 2025, has fallen into the etymological black hole. Today, few people would probably have recognized the very word hemlock if hemlock had not figured so prominently in the execution of Socrates. However, some might recall the 1952 novel Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson. It is amusing to observe how some books and films that once caused sensations, shocked audiences, and were even banned to protect the innocent, now seem harmless. The age of innocence is now behind us, and Socrates has for a long time been recognized as one of the most revered philosophers of all ages. But to return to our turf. Though hemlock is a very old word, dictionaries have little or nothing to say about its origin.

Two main Old English variants of this plant name have come down to us as hymblicæ and hemlic. The b in hymblicæ is, most probably, not an inserted “parasitic” sound, as, for example, in nimble (from Middle English nemel) and fumble (from fummeln), but since its presence does not affect our understanding of the origin of hemlock, it will be left out of discussion. Our concern is the meaning of the root hem– and the suffix –lock, especially now that we know that this -lock goes back to –lic (see the two Old English forms, cited above). As usual, the first step in the search will be for the word’s possible cognates (or congeners, that is, related forms). A fully isolated old word rarely reveals its past.

Judging by the state of the art, hemlock is indeed isolated. However, it does have at least one overlooked cognate. I discussed it in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (2008). In Old High German, hemera “hellebore” is the name of another toxic plant. Though in German, it is also isolated, its cognates outside Germanic, namely, in Slavic and Baltic, have been found. They mean “misfortune; poison; bitterness; chagrin, disgust; fury; pus in a wound; gall; castrated ram; rebellious, evil; to hinder” or are the names of some devilish creatures in folklore—quite an array. The ancient Germanic root of both (!) hemlock and hemera is hem-. In Slavic and Baltic, kem– corresponds to hem- by the First Consonant Shift, so often evoked in this blog (compare what, from hwæt, and Latin quod, that is kwod, the same meaning). The most probable meaning of hemlock and hemera was “poison.”

The second element of hemlock is as obscure as the first. Two more plant names—charlock and kedlock—have the same suffix. Kedlock sometimes functions as a synonym of charlock and sometimes signifies “white mustard.” In both, the ancient suffix is –lick (from –lic). We observe the same suffix in barley, which began its life in English as bærlic. The origin of suffixes is often hard to explain. For example, take changeling and gosling. The roots are transparent (from change– and goose-, the latter with a shortened vowel), but what is –ling? We know that –ling is historically l + ing. But why were those sounds and sound groups chosen for naming diminutive creatures? Our chances of deciphering –lock from –lick aresmall, but at least we have found the oldest form of hemlock.

Another word that throws some light, however dim, on our word is Schierling, the German name for hemlock. The suffix –ling is common in German plant names, especially in the names of various mushrooms. It is a contraction of –l and –ing(a). Apparently, in the past, –ling alternated with –ig in plant names, at least in English. For instance, ivy goes back to īf-ig. Once again, we witness a sound group, whose ancient meaning remains impenetrable. What did –ing and- ig signify? At one time, all suffixes must have meant something. For example, it is gratifying to learn that –ly in adverbs like fully and wholly goes back to a word meaning “like.” (Think of our ineradicable like in sentences like (!) “The room was, like, empty, when I got there.” Is this how people spoke several millennia ago? Then short words shrank even more and became suffixes? Have we relapsed into our linguistic infancy? Very likely.)

Rather probably, hemlock goes back to hem-l-ick, a variant of hem-l-ing or hem-l-ig. In any case, leek, which appears in garlic (from gar– “spear” and leek) has nothing to do with our story. For some reason, the suffix (or rather a sum of two suffixes) -l-ic has been recorded only in Middle English hemlic and cyrlic. Quite early, approximately by the year 700, this suffix had become unproductive, that is, no new nouns were formed with it. When left in the dark, speakers often try to make sense of the words they use and are happy to alter them and thus make them look transparent. The result has nothing to do with true history. For instance, bridegrooms are not grooms (-groom is a replacement of a word meaning “man”), while bridal does not have a seemingly innocuous suffix (as in arrival and acquittal): in the past, it was ealu “ale,” with reference to a feast: bridal first emerged as a noun!

The dead suffix –lic, which must have meant something when it was coined, yielded to –lock, which did not fit this context but provided a semblance of common sense. The same happened in wedlock (in which the ancient suffix –lāc meant “play, sport”). Wedlock, with its –lock, seems to make perfect sense, but providing sense is of course what folk etymology is for. If Walter W. Skeat’s explanation of fetlock from fet-l-ock (with a double suffix) is correct, we have a case, reminiscent of hem-l-ic. Obviously, we still have no idea why the innocent-looking syllable kem– (Germanic hem-) was chosen to name all kinds of deadly things.

In Old English, the plant name hymele “hop” was recorded. It also had a variant with b after m. But this plant and the word seem to have reached Europe from the East, whereas hemlock is a native plant, and it is most probable that it has nothing to do with hop and that its name is also native. To quote Skeat, the first syllable of hemlock meant “something bad,” while the second is a suffix, whose meaning was forgotten even before the settlement of Britain by Germanic tribes. Thus, it seems that we do know something about the etymology of hemlock. Yet it is still reasonable to stay away from the plant.

_{Featured image: poison hemlock, conium maculatum L. Photo by Eric Coombs, Oregon Department of Agriculture, Bugwood.org. Via Wikimedia Commons, CC by 3.0.}