Club ‘cudgel’
By Anatoly Liberman
Where there is golf, there are clubs; hence this post. But club is an intriguing word regardless of the association. It surfaced only in Middle English. Since the noun believed to be its etymon, namely klubba, has been attested in Old Icelandic, dictionaries say that club came to English with the Vikings or their descendants. Perhaps it did. In Icelandic, klubba coexists with its synonym klumba, and the opinion prevails that bb developed from mb, which later became mp.