On big and little foxes

This is a story about how the fox got its name. I discussed the word fox ten years ago (see the post for March 23, 2016), but today I have more to say about the subject.

Rudyard Kipling devoted many wonderful pages to elephants, camels, porcupines, and other animals in his Just So Stories but neglected the fox. Yet over the centuries and millennia, no other beast has engaged people’s imagination more than the fox. Wikipedia has an entry on Joel Chandler Harris’s 1880 book about the Br’er Rabbit cycle (Br’er “brother”), but the author of the entry did not mention the readership of that book abroad. Yet it so happened that in 1936 the book was translated into Russian, became immensely popular, and I grew up reading it.

Surprisingly, during my many years of teaching folklore at the University of Minnesota, I don’t remember meeting anyone who knew those tales. It may be different in the south. The fictional Uncle Remus was a slave from Alabama entertaining the owner’s son. This context is revolting, but the tales are wonderful. In the twentieth century, researchers of oral tradition studied African folklore very well, and some sceptics’ idea that Harris fabricated the tales was refuted once and for all. Analogs of those animal tales are known very well, though in Africa, the rabbit’s counterpart turned out to be the antelope.

Br’er Rabbit is a brilliant trickster. His main enemy is Br’er Fox, whom he always outwits. Yet elsewhere in the wide world of folklore, it is the fox that emerges as the prototypical trickster. In the oldest Indo-European languages, the word for “fox” is most often feminine (so, for example, in Greek, Latin, and Slavic, though not in Sanskrit), as opposed to wolf and bear. The same holds for some other language groups. It is unclear why, but Slavic provides a classic example of the situation. Thus, the Russian for “fox” is lisa (stress on the second syllable). The final vowel a marks the feminine gender, and the ending was cut off from this noun, to produce the fox’s masculine counterpart; hence lis, a dead born creation.

Why does the word for “fox” so often belong to the feminine gender? The old hypothesis—that the fox “lacked courage” and for that reason was thought of as a woman—lacks merit. Oral tradition depicts women as dangerous, nearly invincible warriors and certainly not as “the weaker sex.” We also read that great wars were fought on account of women, who either provoked deadly strife or were abducted. As matters stand, we have no answer to the question about why fox ended up as a feminine noun. In one of the Grimms’ tales, we encounter Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox, and Mr. Fox has nine tails.

Be that as it may, the Germanic form for “fox” was indeed feminine. The noun in the text of the fourth-century Gothic Bible (the oldest long text in Germanic) is fauho (au had the value of o in Engl. fox). In English, s was added to the root foh-, the result being fohs, that is, fox. That s marked the masculine gender! For instance, one of the Old Icelandic cognates of the animal name bear (Old English bera) is bersi (that is, ber-s-i). To repeat, once s was added to the old root foh, the fox became a he. (This was a more complicated process than the one in Russian: see above!)

The great protagonist of the German/Dutch/French epic Reineke Fox ~ Reintje (Reinaert) de Vos ~ Roman de Renart is a male, and a very aggressive one. (Note the Dutch form Vos: we will need it below.) In the spirit of medieval romances, he, we presume, is perhaps the queen’s (the lioness’s) lover. The great William Caxton, whose command of Dutch was near-native, wrote a delightful English version of the tale. It was published in 1481, but two Modern English versions of it exist.

There is no grammatical gender in English. Yet the fox may perhaps be categorized as a male, because it has a female counterpart, namely vixen, though in our linguistic intuition, fox and vixen are hardly connected. Also, I think we more often hear about a vixen (if we at all do) as about a cantankerous woman, a shrew, than about an animal. Yet vixen is originally a she-fox. If vixen began with an f, the tenuous tie between it and fox may have been retained.

German Füchsin throws some light on vixen, whose earliest recorded form was fyxen (indeed, an adjective “belonging to a fox,” rather than a noun). The main puzzle is of course why vixen begins with a v. The Dutch for “fox” is vos, and we can see that its v is not accidental. In Dutch, initial f was voiced regularly, but in England this change affected only some dialects in the Southwest. A few of those forms made their way into the dialect that became the foundation of Modern “Standard” English. Hence vat, veneer, vial, and a few more words that could have been expected to begin with an f.

The last (but the main!) question is, naturally, about the origin (etymology) of Gothic fauho, that is, foho. According to most authorities, light comes from words like Russian pukh “a covering of fluffy feathers” (Germanic f regularly corresponds to non-Germanic p: cf. my perennial example, Latin pater versus English father). A congener of pukh is a Sanskrit word meaning “tail”. In light of such cognates the fox emerges as an animal with a bushy tail. Few other suggestions are hardly more convincing.

There is only one point I may add here. Dictionaries usually say that coinages like “fluffy” or “having a long tail” are taboo words. Animals were often given names to deceive their bearers, because if one said (pronounced) wolf or bear, the beast might take the utterance for an invitation and arrive. But why should “fluffy” or “long-tailed” be taboo names? They are mere descriptions. When in Russian the bear is called medved “one knowing honey,” that is indeed a taboo name, but “long-tailed” or “fluffy”? After all, people had to call the fox something! To be sure, fox may not even be an Indo-European word. If so, its origin will remain hidden from us for all times. But such is often the situation with ancient words.

POSTSCRIPT: A QUESTION AND A COMMENT

QUESTION. What is the origin of the German noun Ereignis “event, occurrence”? This word has a bizarre history. The verb ereignen “to put in sight; present before the eyes” goes back to Old High German irougen. The root of the word is ouge “eye” (Modern Gernat Auge). This irougen later became eröugnen and still later ereignen. Today, ereignen looks like a verb related to eigen “one’s own,” but despite this association, the word managed to reteam its old meaning (-nis is a suffix in the noun Ereignis).

COMMENT. Professor Gavin Wraith cited a Hittite noun for “libation” in connection with my discussion of sp-words (see the post “Supper with an Etymologist” for August 12, 2026). I cannot judge whether the connection is valid, but I would not be surprised if here we indeed had another sp-word for sipping, supping, and the like.

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Supper with an etymologist

It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup– and the suffix –er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. People spoke of the morning meal, midday meal, and evening meal. The word for “meal” was mete “meat,” whose ancient meaning “food; meal” is still heard in the idiom meat and drink, the compound sweetmeats “candies, etc.,” and the obsolete greenmeat “fodder.” As far as I can judge, sweetmeats is a dead word in American English (that is, no one even understands it), while greenmeat is so little remembered that even my computer does not recognize it. Be that as it may, supper exists (see the header!) and has been an English word since the thirteenth century. It was borrowed from French, but the root of the French noun is Germanic. This means that at one time the speakers of Old French took over the word sup from their neighbors, while later, those neighbors added a Romance suffix to it! Quite a journey, but such hybrids are not too rare.

Now, what is sup? Never mind sup for “what’s up.” Sup means “to sip,” and it seems to occur only in the context of imbibing alcohol. Yet it is an old “respectable” word with well-known cognates, for instance, Dutch zuipen, German saufen, and Icelandic súpa. Once we begin to wonder where sup– came from, we are sucked into a vortex of similar-sounding verbs. I used and even highlighted suck for a purpose: this verb is part of a sizable group of s-words, referring to liquids. All of them seem to be “obscurely related” to one another, as dictionaries characterize this situation.

Sup is not the same as sip, and neither is a synonym of suck, but the affinity is obvious. Let us first look at sap (from which we have sapling). The word is old and has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (for example, German Saft “juice”). Etymologists, naturally, reconstruct the most ancient form, common to several languages, and come up with the ancient noun sapam or sappam.

However, the sounds refuse to play the expected game, because we also remember Latin sapa “grape juice, boiled until it is thick” (Italian sapa or saba is the continuation of that word), obviously a member of the same family, but it too has p in the root, and it is well-known that Latin p should correspond to Germanic f (as happens in Latin pater versus English father). Another borrowing? Who borrowed what from whom? The most cautions sources admit that the origin of the word is unclear. Indeed, it seems that we have a group of words, either sound-imitative or somehow (how?) reflecting the words’ sense, that is, sound-symbolic. All of them refer to the way we deal with liquids: sip, sap, sup, and sop.

It pays off to have a look at those verbs individually. So far, we have examined only sup. Sip is a late fifteenth-century addition to English. Similar verbs exist elsewhere in Germanic. Etymologists seem to agree that sip, though “allied” to sup, is a weaker version of it. This verdict sounds convincing, because sip and sup do seem to be cognate in at least some way. Can seep throw light on this group? Not really. Old English sipian, along with its lookalikes with a long vowel in the root, have been recorded, but none of them would have become seep. Even if the progenitor of sip were found, we would still remain with the same group of similar-sounding verbs describing the movement of liquids.

There also is sop “a piece of bread dipped in liquid” (and compare milksop “a timid male, a pushover”!), which is universally recognized as a member of the family we are discussing, even though its ultimate origin is as obscure as of that of the verbs we have examined. Sip, seep, sop, sup…. Finally, what about sap “juice”? It has a secure German cognate Saft (the same meaning (f in Saft goes back to p, and final t was added to saf only in the fourteenth century). A good old word, but it is unable to solve our puzzle. We should resign ourselves to the conclusion made above: all the words belonging to the complex s-p with a vowel in the middle in some way imitate the noise made in the process of drinking.

Though we realize that multiplying the words belonging to this group will hardly result in a revelation, perhaps soup is worth mentioning here. Sop, we remember, was borrowed into English from French in the seventeenth century, and the story of soup sounds familiar: Latin suppa, the ancestor of soup, seems to be a word of Germanic origin! I am happy to report that so is soap.

Incidentally, Latin also had the word sapor “taste, flavor,” which (by way of French) ended up as English savor. To repeat: the words describing the “activity” of the mouth tend to depend on the complex sp– not only in Germanic but also outside it. The British scholar John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) was especially interested in such complexes (he called them prosodemes, a rather unfortunate label), but though he has, or at least had, a sizable following at home, he is little known in the US and elsewhere, which is a pity.

Once we become aware of the “mouthy prosodeme” sp-, we are beginning to wonder whether spit, spew, and even speak belong to our story. No doubt, sp- is at least partly sound-imitative, and once it established itself, it acquired a symbolic meaning, and many words, vaguely belonging to the same sphere, came into being. Since people spit and “sup” in the same way all over the world, it is no wonder that we have quite a few verbs sounding alike even in unrelated languages. A supper with an etymologist is rich but leaves you hungry. Sorry!

POSTSCRIPT: A question and a comment

QUESTION. What is known about the etymology of the word core?

The answer is: “Next to nothing.” The word surfaced in the early fifteenth century in the form we still have today. Its earliest recorded sense was also familiar: “the core of an apple”. The word has always been spelled with final e, which indicates that this sound was not mute. The French word for “heart” did not have this e. Core supplanted the dialectal (northern) word colk (the same meaning). But both core and colk also referred to what is today called coke, another dialectal word of unknown origin. One wonders who needed a special little-known word for the core of a fruit! Obviously, we are dealing with a regionalism, a technical term, whose origin we’ll probably never be able to discover. The fact that core sounded somewhat like French cœur “heart” may have contributed to its longevity (mere guessing). The verdict remains: “Of unknown origin,” and it is to be regretted that some dictionaries do not make this verdict sufficiently clear.

A Lover’s Complaint

A correspondent who is very particular about good usage was shocked to read a politician’s phrase less than fulsome information, in which fulsome means “full.” Many people like language history, but no one wants to be part of it. Fulsome did once mean “full,” but then “deteriorated” and stayed mainly as part of the phrase fulsome praise, that is, “excessive and insincere praise.” However, language has always changed under the influence of the uneducated, who don’t care whether what they say is correct or wrong from professors’ point of view. For many years, most of our young people have been reading only pulp fiction and one another’s emails. If troublesome means “full of trouble,” and if the main epithet for all situations is awesome, then fulsome obviously means “quite full.” This change has been going on for decades. Too bad! The same man dislikes the pronunciation gerrymandering with g, as in get. Incidentally Governor Elbridge Gerry did pronounce his last name with hard g. Thus, our “correct” pronunciation is wrong! Now those who have never heard the word mispronounce it, without knowing that Mr. Gerry would have been happy. Inscrutable are the ways of language. What is wrong is correct, and what is correct is wrong.

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The kings of etymological rings

It is amazing how many words Indo-European languages have for “supreme ruler; potentate.” In English, the main one is king. But outside English, a host of others exist. Two of the best-known examples are Latin rex (which also meant “priest”; see a variation on this theme below!) and Hindi raja(h). Rex and raja(h) share an ancient root, but those two venerable titles are rather isolated in their royal splendor. Only Irish ríg belongs with them, even though the same root turns up in some other common words—for instance, English right (its cognates are, among others, Latin rēctus and German recht). English region is also related. According to a plausible explanation, the ancient REX traced out the line for cities (!), regiō “region” being the point reached out in a straight line. This explanation will come as a surprise to many.

Engl. rich also belongs to our story, and so does its German cognate reich (the same meaning). In both German and English, this adjective once meant “powerful, great”; hence “having abundant means.” (Power brings wealth, does it not?) The German noun Reich “empire, realm,” as in Hitler’s infamous Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, returns us to the same root. As regards the names for rulers, we recall the English word basilica “church built on the model of a royal palace,” from Greek. Basileús is still another word for “king.”

Incidentally, the plant name basil goes back to an adjective meaning “royal” (because of its fragrance?), and the name of the fabulous reptile basilisk is a rendition of Greek basilískos. According to Pliny, the name is due to a crown-like spot on the reptile’s head. Since no one has ever seen the creature, we needn’t contest this explanation. By contrast, the lizard basilisk is quite real and in one respect exceptional: it can run on water (hence its other name the Jesus Christ lizard!). The proper name Basil and Slavic Vasily belong here too.

Usually, when the origin of an old Germanic word is discussed, the first form dictionaries cite is Gothic. This is natural, because the Gothic Bible (part of the New Testament) is the earliest long consecutive text we have in any Germanic language. But the Goths did not know the word king! The Gothic for Greek basileús was þiudans (þ has the value of th in Engl. thick). Other Germanic languages retained exact cognates of this noun. For instance, in Old English, it meant “ruler, lord” and even “God.”

Most probably, the Goths had no kings in the sense known later to the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. Þiudans is most often used about Jesus, though some earthly kings are also called thatin their text of the New Testament. It must have been the speakers of West Germanic (to which Old English belongs) that began to use the word kuningaz in the sense familiar to us today (that is, king).

To us king is “a sovereign ruler of the state,” but when this word and its synonyms were coined, the implication must have been approximately “tribal leader,” with the emphasis on tribal. King is, obviously, related to kin. At present, we are no longer aware of this connection. But when fifteen or sixteen centuries ago, people said cyning or still earlier kuningaz (the original form of king, mentioned above), that connection must have been clear to the speakers.

Several words for “kin; people” existed in Germanic. One of them was þeod– ~ þiud (to repeat, þ has the value of th in Engl thick). We can still detect it in the German word Deutsch “German,” originally, “related to the people” (its d goes back to þ). The Goths also had a cognate of English cyn “kin,” but in translating the Greek word for “king” chose its synonym (we cannot decide why).

In any case, the Gothic word for “tribal chief; king” (þiudans) had no analogs among the other Germanic tribes, while cyning sounded almost the same in Old Saxon (kuning; some such form became Modern Dutch koning), Old High German chuning (in German, this word died without issue), and Old Norse konungr. The Germanic forms spread far and wide. Finnish has kunningas, and Russian has kniaz’. The Russian form has changed almost beyond recognition, but it is undoubtedly of Germanic origin. Isn’t it curious that in the Russian phrase Kniaz’ Vasily “Pince Vasily” the first word is Germanic and the second is Greek! Beware of nationalism.

The derivation of king from kin seems obvious, and one wonders why so many researchers tried to find another etymology for this rather transparent word. The difficulty is not in the word but in the concept. The oldest Germanic speakers had no kings in the modern sense of this term. And we have seen that no one followed the Gothic choice (þiudans “king”). The northerners did have a cognate of king, namely konungr (borrowed from their neighbors?), but their main word for the person we would call “king” was dróttinn (drótt meant “the military chief’s bodyguard”). To give another example: those people knew the word Caesar but had no analog for it; hence German Kaiser, a borrowing.

The less known attempts to explain the origin of the word king are ingenious but sometimes fanciful. Konungr (the Scandinavian form) from kven-ungr (kvenna “woman,” ungr “young”)? Or indeed from kin (in its oldest form) but with reference to the king as one specially born, perhaps as a being of divine origin. Or perhaps –ing goes back to the name of an earth god as the progenitor of the human race? Old Norse konr “sexual partner” exists. Does king refer to it? With this word we are returned to the previous hypothesis.

Finally, think of the English word ken “knowledge,” for example, as it is used in the phrase “beyond one’s ken.” German kennen means “to know.” Is it possible that the root of king contains reference to this root and thus has nothing in common with kin? Germanic chiefs were supposed to be also priests and possess arcane knowledge. This etymology has an influential modern supporter. I find his approach unprofitable. A few more exotic conjectures along similar lines are hardly worth mentioning. All this being said, most probably, –ing is the suffix we find in words meaning “descended from,” while the root of king is the same as in kin.

The history of king is instructive in several ways. We have a word with multiple cognates in old texts, we seem to understand what it meant, but its meaning has changed in a subtle way from antiquity to the modern period, because the social milieu behind the word has changed. The king of today is not what the word designated two thousand or even fifteen hundred years ago. I have once referred to the theme “Words and Things” in etymology. The history of king is a good example of how the “thing” refuses to give a definite answer to the question about its earliest meaning of the word. Hence our uncertainty concerning its origin. Yet the simplest etymology is probably correct. Long live simplicity! Long live the king!

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Brothers and sisters

The readers of this blog may have noticed that I usually try to stay away from the oldest words in English, those with ancient Indo-European roots. I do so, because, when it comes to such words, I seldom have any ideas worth sharing, that is, such as cannot be found in easily available sources. (Incidentally, considering the richness of the Internet, this is not always an easy task!) I feel more comfortable with baffle, pebble, and peevish (see the latest two posts about them) and among adzes, heifers, and pimps, all done to death in my etymological dictionary. But perhaps someone among our readers is especially interested in the hoary antiquities? If so, write me a note. In any case, today’s post is about the words brother and sister. Both are very old, really as old as the most ancient hills around us. The question is the same as always: Why do those words mean what they mean to us today? I wish they were sound-imitative, but unfortunately, they are not.

Brother is an especially amazing word, because its multiple cognates have practically the same form, the predictable phonetic differences notwithstanding, all over Indo-European: English brother, Latin frater, Russian brat, and so forth (an extremely rare case). The Indo-European protoform must have begun with bh-. We can state with confidence only one thing: namely, that brothers received their name not because they were the sons of the same parent(s). Rather, they were members of a certain unit, a fraternity, asit were. For instance, the Ancient Greek phrāter belonged to a phrātria, “a brotherhood,” a social, political, and religious group that had nothing to do with kinship. This is not surprising. In the remotest past, males were responsible for hunting and warding off enemies. Being the offspring of the same parents mattered less or not at all. Of course, such was no longer the situation in recorded history and in Greece, where boys did know their fathers, and the word for “brother” in our sense existed (Greek adelphós “from the same womb”; as regards the root of the word, think of Delphi, literally “womb,” the seat of Apollo’s famous temple in a gorge).

Ancient “brothers” must have belonged to a certain group. What group was it millennia ago? If we could discover the answer, the etymology of the word brother would have become clear. According to a very old suggestion, the root of brother is the same as in the verb bear. But brothers did not receive their name because they were the sons of the same parent. That’s the whole point. And reconstructing some root beginning with br– takes us nowhere.

Even the most detailed etymological dictionaries offer only lists of cognates for brother and state flatly: “Origin unknown.” Yet I might mention at least one hypothesis, to illustrate the state of the art. Jost Trier (1894-1970), a German linguist, believed that many words of Indo-European had been coined in the process of weaving, making fences, and so forth. In his time, Trier had an enthusiastic following. A few of his etymologies look plausible; others are fanciful. He reconstructed the ancient root bher “to weave, plait,” which he detected in numerous words, including brother and bride. To be sure, “connecting, binding” is a concept that underlies both kinship and marriage, but as always, it is the details that count. A bird’s eye view of kinship terms rarely pays off. The etymology of both bride and brother is enveloped in total obscurity, and comparing two words of unknown origin in an attempt to kill two evasive birds with one little stone (“pebble”) is a risky endeavor.

Such then is the sad end of the first part of today’s essay. By this time, it must have become clear why I choose to stay away from the depths of Indo-European. As a pearl-diver, I don’t like to come to the surface empty-handed.

Despite numerous disagreements among scholars, the etymology of the word sister seems to be less opaque. Before citing the solution that one can find in all recent dictionaries, I may mention a curious detail. We seem to be wandering in darkness, and yet some ancient kin terms are amusingly transparent. For instance, Old Norse (that is, Old Icelandic) lifri is one of several words for “brother,” and it means “of the same liver.” Also, in Old Icelandic, we find blóði, literally “blood brother,” hlýri “brother, (!) friend,” literally, “of the same cheek.” The already cited Greek adelphós means “of the same womb” (no connection with Adolph, despite its misleading ph at the end: Adolph is a German name meaning “old wolf”), and the Sanskrit word for “brother” had the same inner form. But as we have seen, brother did NOT mean “of the same womb,” and we are at a loss to decipher it.

We can assume that millennia ago, people coined words that were fully transparent to the speakers, but with time those words changed beyond recognition, and we are hard put to reconstruct the original form. Or the association that was once clear to everybody has been lost. The Germanic designations of “sister” are similarly all over the map: Gothic swistar, Old English sweostor, and so forth. (Gothic, it will be remembered, has come down to us in a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek. Later Gothic is all but unknown.)

It is now usually believed that the oldest Indo-European word for “sister” was a compound containing the elements swe- “one’s own” and sōr “woman,” the reference being to the woman of one’s own extended family, in contrast to such terms of kinship as Latin uxor “woman from outside the extended family.” The competing etymology, explaining sister as “being of one’s own blood,” has been rejected or ignored by most specialists in Indo-European kinship terminology.

Old Germanic was full of words designating various family groups. For instance, in the Gothic translation of the New Testament, we find the noun broþrahans. It renders the usual Greek plural of the word for “brother” but presumably meant “those dealing with one another in a brotherly manner.” To us the text in Mark XII: 20 hardly suggests such a nuance (“Now there were seven brethren; and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed”). Be that as it may, the odd-looking suffix has secure counterparts in Icelandic and elsewhere.

To repeat: few words are harder to interpret than the terms of kinship in the languages of the world. The Modern English system is simplicity itself: grandmother, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, in-laws, and so forth, but even we have monsters like cousin twice removed. The old system was intricate and to us mind-boggling. So let us stay with moms and dads and make merry.

Editor’s note: for administrative reasons, The Oxford Etymologist’s column will not appear next week, July 29. The next post will be on August 5.

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A few etymological pebbles

The readers of this blog must have noticed how often I suggest solutions connected with sound imitation. Time and again I say that a certain noun or verb owes its origin to onomatopoeia. In the previous post (July 8, 2026), I used this approach while discussing the verb baffle. Today we’ll encounter a similar situation.

Etymological solutions are often intelligent guessing. Many of our readers will remember that a special branch of linguistics deals with iconicity. It studies the ways in which the form of words in some way mirrors their meaning. Barf-barf, oink-oink, and bonkers (boinkers, as it were) are the most obvious examples of iconicity (the header features a picture of our iconic idol), but iconicity goes far beyond sound imitation. Consider the compounds tip-top, wishy–washy, ping-pong, and phrases like tit for tat. They always begin with short i. Top-tip and washy-wishy are unthinkable, because we instinctively begin the enumeration with something small, and short i as in ping and tip indeed suggests smallness. This is not a law: the adjective big has a “wrong” vowel, but consider the phrase big bang.

When we learn the meaning of the words jerk, jig, and jog, we almost sense that they mean what they are expected to mean. Last week, I tried to show that baffle is a sound-imitating (iconic) word. Now think of another situation. A stone falls into a river, we watch it go down and say “plop.” This is non-controversial, but when we are told that Latin plumber, as in Engl. plumb, has a similar origin (suggested by the great linguist Otto Jespersen), doubts arise. Really, is this possible? Latin plumbum?! Why not? Plop  ~ plum(b) goes a piece of lead. After all, plumbum is a word “of obscure origin.”

Consider the noun pebble, recorded in a great number of forms: popple, pipple, pyppel, and puble, among others. It also resembles bubble, whose imitative origin no one doubts. Is pebble from Old English papol a sound-imitative word, like Jespersen’s plumbum? You throw a small stone into water, and it goes pipley ~ papol ~ pebble ~ pipley. Boulder may be sound-imitative (see the post for February 22, 2017), and so may pebble. The problem is that nothing can be proved once we leave the safe haven of oink-oink and flip–flop. Serious etymologists recognize iconicity but treat it with caution.

The origin of pebble does not interest me too much (though I suspect that the word is indeed sound-imitative). I cited it as an introduction to the story of peevish. This adjective surfaced in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and like, for example, pawky “cunning, shrewd” (of Scandinavian origin?), it was probably slang. The meaning of peevish has changed over the centuries. We cannot decide what exactly the word meant in the early sentences at our disposal. Here is a shortened succession of glosses (from 1400 to 1669) in the original OED: “silly, senseless, foolish; malignant; spiteful.” The 1963 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology lists “spiteful, malignant; perverse, obstinate; querulous, fretful.” Most of those senses are obsolete. The OED online begins with “perverse, obstinate, skittish.”

Apparently, the exact connotations of peevish in those sentences are not quite clear to us (just something bad or unpleasant). Peevish is still “unpleasant” but no longer “repugnant,” because today, people who are peevish are grumpy and fretful, rather than perverse or malignant. This change is called the amelioration of meaning (as opposed to the deterioration).

The OED online gives Latin perversus as the etymon, that is, as the ultimate source of peevish. This may be correct. However, the way from perversus to peevish via Old French is not smooth. The French adjective had two quite audible r’s, while peevish has neither. Ernest Weekley (in his etymological dictionary) also derived peevish from perversus but did not discuss the phonetic details. The adjective perverse emerged in English at almost the same time as did peevish. Was the French adjective borrowed twice, once by the uneducated and some time later by those who could pronounce French, without mutilating it?

There is another suggestion about the etymology of peevish. Walter W. Skeat: “The leading idea seems to be whining, making a plaintive cry,” with reference to the bird name pewet, peewit. From the phonetic point of view, the match is perfect (the bird makes a high-pitched wailing pee-wee sound, from which it received its name and which I find rather disturbing), and indeed, peevish resembles an onomatopoeic word. Yet it is far from clear whether the earliest senses of peevish refer to that whining sound. Skeat’s glosses are “fretful, whimpering.” I agree with the OED: “Origin uncertain.” But I would add Skeat’s hypothesis in a note. It has some merit. It may even be correct.

And now, as promised last week, a short biography of Frank Chance, compiled by Dr. Stephen Goranson. I would be happy if this brilliant nineteenth-century researcher had at last re-emerged in our etymological studies from his undeserved obscurity.

Frank Chance was born at Highgate, the fourth son of Robert Lucas Chance, a Birmingham glass manufacturer. After two years in his father’s factory, he studied chemistry for a year at King’s College, London, and for two further years at Paris and Berlin. He went up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1850, and thence, having taken his B.A. in 1854, to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for his clinical training, graduating as M.B. in 1854. While at Cambridge he gained the Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholarship, and the study of languages became the chief interest of his life. He translated Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, at the author’s request, in 1863, and edited H. H. Bernard’s Commentary on the Book of Job in 1864. A year later he retired from practice. From 1875 to 1884 he was a member of the committee for the Revised Version of the Old Testament. He was a fluent linguist in German, French and Italian, and familiar with several other languages. He married in 1857 Jane Susan Katharine, daughter of James Brewster of Huntingdon, and had one daughter. He died at Nice.

_{Featured image: Image by Brett Sayles via Pexels. Public domain.}

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The level of our expertise: the perplexing verb <em>baffle</em>

Once again, my thanks are to Dr. Goranson. He succeeded in putting together a short biography of Frank Chance, my hero, whom I discovered many years ago (and learned to admire), while working on my bibliography of English etymology. His almost total obscurity today struck me as an incomprehensible slight. Dr. Goranson’s letter will be appended to the post next week. I also received a query from a reader about kayfabe. Alas, though I know something about the etymology of box/boxing (see the post “In and out of the box”), I cannot say the same about kayfabe; not a single publication on this word appears in my database. I should repeat what I have said more than once: my expertise depends on the huge database I have amassed, and when I draw blank, I appear as ignorant as any non-specialist. I know about kayfabe only what anyone can find online.

This post is about a related subject. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. The verb baffle, the subject of today’s post, has been investigated in an exemplary way in dictionaries and in both old and recent publications. Yet the OED’s latest verdict, despite the helpful notes, remains unchanged: “Origin unknown.” If so, let us look at what is known. Can everything be enveloped in impenetrable obscurity, like what you can see in the header, with a man lost in a forest?

Baffle turned up in English texts toward the middle of the sixteenth century, and rather probably, it was coined or borrowed around that time or a hundred year earlier. At that time, its recorded senses were “hoodwink, confound.” Scotch bauchle, which predates baffle, meant “to disgrace,” and it remains unclear whether we are dealing with several senses of the same word or with two different verbs. This detail of its history will indeed remain unknown or at least uncertain forever, though it is more probable that, regardless of the chronology, the same sound complex suggested to speakers several different negative associations.

The earliest English etymologists searched for the Greek originof baffle or tried to isolate the prefix be– in it. In 1766, Samuel Johnson thought of the French origin of this verb but went no further (etymology was in general not his forte). Almost a century later, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s predecessor in the field of English etymology, wrote a paper that contained a well-informed section on baffle (the earliest attestations and Romance cognates or lookalikes) and came to the following conclusion (his spelling is retained): “The origin of the Sc[otch] bauch, bauchle is, I believe, the interjection Fauch! Baw! Pah! Pooh!, Fr[ench] Bah! Pouah!, Spanish] Baf! all of which are representations of the strong exspiration accompanied by a projection of the lips, by which we instinctively defend ourselves against a bad smell, and are consequently in the first instance expressive of physical disgust, and then of contempt. ‘Buffa, the despising blast of the mouth that we call shirping.’ Thomas. A.D. 1548… Hence also Port[uguese] bafo, breath; Prov[encial] O[ld] Spa[nish] bafa, mockery jest; Sp[anish] befar, It[alian] beffare, to jeer; Fr[ench] baffler, to mock. From the notion of mocking to that of frustrating the effort of any one, in which the En[glish] baffle is now used, is an easy transition….” A few more examples follow.

Wedgwood, an excellent observer of speech, ruined his otherwise useful etymological dictionary of English (the above quotation is not from that dictionary) by relying too heavily on the similarity of words from various languages and ignoring sound correspondences. Yet many of his conclusions still stand, and what he said about baffle sounds convincing, as also shown by the opinions of the Romance scholars who dealt with the items Wedgwood mentioned.

In Romance, numerous words beginning with baf have a very wide range of meanings: they denote “to breathe,” “full stomach,” “puff up, bloat,” and so forth. Its “relative” is buff (buffo “comic actor” and its twin buffoon belong here). According to a unanimous agreement, such words are sound-imitative: biff, baff, buff…. Baffle rather obviously belongs here. The best proof of the onomatopoeic origin of the root we are discussing is the existence of Middle High German beffen “to bark.” Beff-beff (older German), gav-gav (Russian), or woof-woof (English)—the result is the same! Dictionaries also cite Dutch baffen, Modern German baffen and bäfzen, alongside Danish bjæffe and Swedish bjebba “to bark.” By the way, Engl. baffy is a kind of golf club, while Scotch baff means “to strike.” In blind-man’s buff, buff means “blow, stroke,” and in Russian, a gun goes pif-paf.

What then is “unknown” about baffle? The answer is clear. The same or nearly the same sound complex has been recorded all over Western Europe, more importantly (as far as we are concerned) in French. The unanswerable question is whether baffle is native or borrowed. Similar questions recur again and again, especially with regard to slang, expressive words, and the names of popular tools.

In the sixteenth century, wars never ended in Europe (surprise, surprise!). Mercenaries, native and foreign, were everywhere, and so were prostitutes and vagabonds, following the troops. Despite the unrest, merchants and artisans traveled all over the continent. Foreign words were adopted (and often distorted), sometimes forgotten, and sometimes retained. A few of them survived only in regional speech, others managed to stay and even infiltrated the language of the educated.

Baffle, a word of unquestionably imitative origin (and thus, an expressive word), may be native or borrowed. Seven centuries ago, it probably belonged to the common language of the lower classes. Germanic speakers recognized it as their own (when we speak, we don’t think about the etymology of the words we use!), and so did the speakers of the Romance languages. Baffle and its lookalikes may have been native in both English and French (!), or perhaps they were migratory words (Wanderwörter, as they are called in German), part of international slang (see my blog for August 22, 2012, on ajar and migratory words). It is an important detail of the verb’s history and the only one that is beyond reconstruction. From this (and only from this) point of view is baffle a word of unknown origin.

I believe that verdicts in dictionaries should be more nuanced. (In this case: “Baffle. Sound-imitative. In the early Modern period, similar sound complexes were current all over Western Europe, and it is impossible to decide which words of this type are native and which are borrowed.”) Some words are indeed so obscure that nothing at all is known about their prehistory. Baffle does not belong to this group of etymologically impenetrable words.

_{Featured image: Image by Joe from Pixabay.}

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Seeing red

As I expected, Dr. Goranson did dig up some information about the mysterious F. (Frank?) Adams, celebrated in the previous post (see the comment following it). Yet we still don’t know where this man acquired his vast and accurate knowledge of etymology. He was an amateur, but such a learned one! It is amazing how much nonsense people have written and keep writing about word origins. In this case we are not dealing with a professional linguist, but his observations deserve nothing but praise. By the way, Frank Chance, whom I also mentioned last week, was a medical doctor. My attempts to learn something about him produced almost no results. James A. H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat treated him as their equal!

I also received a letter in connection with my last week’s note on the regional word rowen “aftermath.” Is the tree name rowan “mountain ash” related? No. Rowan was borrowed from Scandinavian. By the way, the tree is famous in Old Scandinavian mythology (it saved the god Thor from drowning) and elsewhere, because of its red berries in winter, and the word rowan may provide a clue to the mysterious curse aroint thee in King Lear and Macbeth. See my post for February 20, 2013. The OED online has no trust in this or any other etymology of the obscure phrase. Yet this derivation of the curse may not be so bad. Finally, a long letter came that I’ll answer next time.

And now back to business. The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English. One of them (in the phrase red gold) I discussed in the essay for October 26, 2022. But first, some notes on the etymology of red may not be out of place.

Word historians encounter two difficulties: either the facts at their disposal are too few, or they are too numerous. This trouble (paucity versus excess) is of course familiar to all researchers. The cognates of red are ubiquitous in the Indo-European world, but the sought-for ancient root emerges in too many forms. The word sometimes ends not only in d/t/th (which is fine) but also in b, f, and s. Also, the vowels alternate rather wildly. Given some finagling, there is of course a possibility to reconstruct a common protoroot, but one wonders whether such a root, valid for the entire language group, existed. It has therefore been suggested that we are dealing not only with a group of related forms but also with a so-called migratory word, a word that travels from language to language and changes its shape along the way. We’ll never know the truth.

To complicate matters, references to the color do not aways match: some of the words, seemingly related to red, mean “light brown.” The history of color words is, in principle, complicated, because at one time, people visualized a spectrum, partly different from ours. Homer’s wine-colored sea is perhaps the most often cited example. Nor is the modern picture of the spectrum quite uniform. For instance, English has to do with the phrases dark blue and light blue, while Slavic uses two different adjectives for them. Likewise, English has a most confusing adjective bleak, not related to black. Though red is the color of fire, its root seems to be the same as in rust.

However, my story today is not about the ancient root of red. While looking through some comments on my old posts, I noticed that the most enthusiastic of them were devoted to idioms and mysterious compounds. Hence a few notes on the word redneck. The first note at my disposal, by Sterling Eisiminger, is from the periodical American Speech 59, 1984, p. 284. The reference is to pellagra. The OED online refers to the same source, so that I’ll reproduce only one sentence: “…in the 1930s pellagra was still common in the southern United States among low-income groups whose diets consisted mainly of pork fat and hominy grits.” Hence perhaps the reference to the skin color of the neck.

But redneck also meant “union member,” especially so in the twenties and the thirties in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana. Here my source is the same periodical, but volume 69, 1994, pp. 106-11(the author of the article is Patrick H. Huber). Though this source is also known to the OED, I will supply a few details, because the OED online is not open access. We read that the origins of redneck “union man” remain uncertain, but that the word dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. It may be an analog of words like cracker (an offensive term for a poor white, etc.) and hillbilly (on hillbilly see my post for March 11, 2026).

The derisive term redneck was also applied to the members of a popular trade union (red, “Communist,” etc.) and, as we are told, with a side shot to the members’ poor, rural-South backgrounds, since so many Kentucky and West Virginia miners were failed farmers and former sharecroppers and agricultural laborers from the outlying rural areas, particularly from the Appalachians.

Especially important is the fact that the term referred not so much to the people’s red sunburned necks as to the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Bandanas, traditionally worn as a form of protection for railroad men, miners, and others, became a badge of honor. Here are the opening lines of the once immensely popular song: “Red Necks, keep them scabs away,/ Red Necks, fight them every day.” The term Redneck became “a badge of working-class solidarity and pride.”

This story does not mean that redneck has “multiple etymologies” (one can often find reference to this phantom). Words, like most rivers, have single sources, though later, tributaries may enrich their content. This probably happened to redneck: first, a literal sense (now forgotten), then figurative accretions. Here is the final statement by the author of the article on redneck: “…the United States labor movement’s adaption of the term redneck speaks powerfully to the fluidity and multiple meanings of language and to how those meanings are socially constructed and interpreted differently by people whose class positions differ.” Red seldom occurs in English idioms. The most interesting of them are to be in the red and to draw a red herring across the path. The curious phrase thin red line originated from the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War on October 25, 1854. However, the original dispatch, as Elizabeth Knowles pointed out, mentioned streak, not line. Red, White and Blue probably needs no comment.

_{Featured image: Little Red Riding Hood c. 1862 by Gustave Doré. Photo by Chris Olszewski. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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<i>Aftermath</i> and its kin

First, two notes in the aftermath of the previous post. 1) My thanks are due to Stephen Goranson, who, as I expected, did find out everything about Thomas Bee, the gentleman, mentioned in last week’s essay on boxing. Mr. Bee discovered the origin of the phrase to box the compass. As usual, I wonder how my old friend Stephen Goranson manages to ferret out all kinds of information, because I also try to do some research along those lines and invariably fail. 2) I am equally grateful to Mr. Gavin Wraith, who asked me why I had not discussed Greek pyx “fist” in connection with box. This connection was noticed long ago. The problem, as James A. H. Murray already knew, is a late attestation of the English word box. As a cognate of box, pyx does not look promising either. Perhaps box indeed originated in university slang (from Greek to English), but this hypothesis is hard to substantiate.

My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape. Thus, aftermath is transparent to an etymologist but not to a modern speaker of English. The component –math goes back to a noun meaning “mowing; crop mown.” This noun still exists in modern British dialects, with the suffix –th being the same as in growth and truth. The correct explanation of –math can be found in all detailed dictionaries of English and online. Usually, the root, followed by –th, is changed beyond recognition, as in birth, filth, and death (here, the roots are easy to see in (to) bear, foul, and die). A synonym of aftermath is British regional yeomath. The prefix yeo– means “additional.” I was probably the first to recognize this prefix in yeoman (see the post for June 17, 2009). The OED online seems to concur.

As I said, for some reason, English words for “aftermath” are usually obscure from the etymological point of view. Such is also the case in Russian. For those who know Russian, consider the dialectal words shutyom, probably meaning “an empty space,” and otava “a place left to rest.” Both nouns are stressed on the second syllable, and the origin of both is opaque to modern speakers. I have mentioned Russian for a reason. One Russian word for “fallow land” may, as I believe, throw light on its English synonym. I made this point in the post for November 9, 2016, and would like to repeat my idea here. English fog is, most probably (and such is the common opinion), of Scandinavian origin, even though it surfaced in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century. But we now know that this chronology is not unusual. The Scandinavian invasion happened in the epoch of the Vikings (King Alfred fought the “Danes”). Yet it took some northern words, which flooded dialects, hundreds of years to emerge in written and printed texts.

Another fog, which can be very broadly glossed as “aftermath,” has been known from books since 1400. No doubt, we are dealing with the same word as fog “mist.” Or perhaps some doubt exists, because the senses seem incompatible? Yet the common denominator of both words is “moisture,” and here one Russian phrase comes in most useful. An unsown field is said to be “under vapor” (pod parom). Fog is, most probably, related to German feucht “wet.” By the way, old etymologists, who liked to trace words to their ancient Indo-European roots, reconstructed the root of fog as bhu, a typical sound-imitative complex (an onomatopoeia for a puff of air). English fog “aftermath” means “under vapor, wet.” Even the best historical linguists cannot know all languages in detail. Not unexpectedly, English, German, and Scandinavian etymologists never came across the Russian phrase pod parom, because otherwise, they would have detected the connection, so obvious to me, long ago and would have used it to substantiate the idea that fog “heavy mist” and fog “aftermath” are indeed two senses of the same noun.

Why, I may repeat, do people keep coining such hard words for “aftermath”? Here is one more example: eddish “aftergrowth, stubble.” The root of this noun seems to mean “again,” as, for instance, in eddy. I would probably have left this gallery of etymological riddles in peace if among my folders I had not discovered one, devoted to the word rowen. Here is a note by a man from Madison, Wisconsin (Notes and Queries, 9/VII, June 8, 1901, p. 453): “Aftermath, or second mowing, was not used by New England farmers in the last century. Rowen was their term, derived, doubtless, from those eastern counties where their forefathers lived. Nor has rowen been yet displaced.” Does anyone among our readers know this word? My computer fails to recognize it.

A lively discussion of rowen preceded that note, but I have brought it to light because of the letter printed on the same page. Its author, Mr. F. Adams, did not only debunk a “ridiculous” derivation of the word, given in a respectable English dictionary, and referred to several foreign dictionaries and scholarly publications: he cited the correct date of the first occurrence of the word in English texts and proposed the etymology that still stands, namely, from a word, related to French regain. It “had filtered into our language through a French dialect, w for hard g being common in the north-east of France.”

Who was F. Adams? He sent numerous excellent letters on word origins to NQ between 1892 and 1903 and does not seem to have contributed to any other periodicals. At that time, an English-speaking specialist in word origins could not wish for better exposure: “everybody” read NQ. The great Walter W. Skeat appeared there hundreds of times. But soon after the First World War, its popularity waned. The journal did not die (it still exists) but became more specialized and less “popular.” In this blog, I have often referred to Frank Chance, an outstanding etymologist, who, like F. Adams, never sought another venue for his ideas in addition to NQ and as a result is now almost forgotten. Those who have read my review of a recent book on Webster Unabridged (April 8, 2026) will see that the otherwise well-informed author called NQ an obscure provincial periodical.

At one time, NQ was a famous outlet, and I hope that Dr. Goranson will enlighten us on the career of F. Adams (what a terrible idea it was and still is to use only the first initials in the signature! In references, I have often seen female authors taken for males and namesakes confused). This is the end of my today’s travel through fields left to rest. Along the way, we have encountered many forgotten words and observed once again how rich the English language is and what problems etymologists face. A good aftermath indeed, if you ask me.

_{Featured image: Fallow land near Dale Farm by Bill Broaden. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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In and out of the box

Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box). I cannot offer a new solution and will support the etymology cautiously given in the OED online. Yet sometimes the way to the truth and chance byways are more exciting than the result, obtained at the end of the search. It will also be fair to mention the paper by the German linguist Hermann Flasdieck in the periodical Anglia (Volume 70,1951-1952, pp. 295-307), the best historical study of the word box in linguistic literature.

The earliest citation of box “to beat, bash, strike” in the OED online goes back to 1390, but we have to wait until 1519 until the next one. Even some time later, the word’s occurrences in print were rare. Apparently, box was not a word one chose to use in books. This fact confirms the origin (see it below), proposed tentatively by the OED’s first editor James A. H. Murray and now accepted with some caution by the revisers of the OED and other sources.

In the United States, boxing, a sport whose land of origin is England, became immensely popular. Those who have read Jack London’s short stories “The Mexican” and “A Piece of Steak” will agree. German tourists must have picked up the word box in America, because they brought it home in the forms boxen and baxen. A great difference exists between the way a word like box sounds in most of England and in the United States. Foreigners living and traveling in America often mistake box, not, and their likes for bucks and nut. German boxen ~ baxen tell us that long ago, the word box sounded in America as it does today.

One wonders whether box (the verb and the noun) has anything to do with its best-known homonym. The history of box, as in Christmas box, may not be entirely clear, but that box already occurred in Old English and is a borrowing from Latin. Nothing in the sport, as we know it, suggests its connection with any receptacle. Theater boxes and box offices return us to containers and throw no light on boxing either.

Along the way, we find the phrase to box a compass “to repeat the points of the compass in order and backwards.” Though also unconnected with boxing, the story is worth telling. Walter W. Skeat referred to the OED, but the OED had nothing to say about the etymology of this phrase. Nor did the 1914 edition of The Century Dictionary. The OED online refers us to the verb box (and that is what the original OED did). My surprise came when I consulted The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). This work seldom deviates from its great model. Yet, surprisingly, it contains a special entry on box the compass: “Probably from Spanish bojar (boxar) ‘sail round’.” Next, we find two examples and the statement that other nautical terms from Spanish also exist in English. Such are allegedly buoyant (which may be from Spanish or Old French!) and capsize (this is Skeat’s suggestion; elsewhere, including the OED online, we find the familiar verdict “of uncertain origin”).

References to authorities in the original OED and in Skeat are rather regular but not generous. In the 1966 dictionary, they never appear. What then was the source of the new entry? Perhaps I can provide the answer (of course, known to the Oxford team but not to the rest of the world, eager for an explanation). In the periodical Notes and Queries XII/1, March 18, 1916, p. 226, H. J. B. Clemens published part of a letter, written in 1836 by Thomas Bee, a native of South Carolina, who was at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1783 to 1789. Here is the relevant part: “You know I had always a smattering of etymology, but never indulged so much in it as since I have become a great reader of Spanish […]. I was principally gratified with the origin of the phrase ‘to box the compass’, which has puzzled me from a boy […]. Boxar (or as it is more modernly written, bojar—with the same pronunciation) signifies circumire, to go round: boxar el mundo, to go round the world; boxar la isla to sail round the island. To box the compass is, therefore, to go round the several divisions from north to south, and from south to north.” I could find no information on H. J. B. Clemens and do not know why he had access to Thomas Bee’s private correspondence. His etymology of the English phrase looks promising.

The 1966 dictionary cites the same two Spanish phrases, which clinches my belief that this note was indeed the source of the entry. Finding the true origin of a difficult word is “a big deal” in the uneventful life of dictionary makers, and the name of an occasional pathfinder should not be forgotten. Obviously, the Spanish verb throws no light on the word box that interests us, but let me repeat my idea that in a convoluted romance, digressions are sometimes more exciting than the main story.

Back to boxing. The Century Dictionary says, “supposed to be of Scandinavian origin”; doubts the relevance of the Scandinavian sources, because baste “to cudgel” and the noun bash “blow” are already known as the legitimate reflexes of those sources; mentions Dutch beuk “a blow” and Middle High German bochen “to strike,” but concludes that the most probable origin should be sought for in box “to place in a box.” The conclusion is not persuasive. The origin of bash is as obscure as the origin of box, and in principle, nothing prevents one etymon (source) from producing two or more reflexes (“offspring”). Reference to box “receptacle” leaves us nowhere. However, German bochen, known to the speakers of Modern German in the form pochen, and Dutch beuk may provide a clue to box.

If we look for the many variants, older forms, and cognates of pochen ~ bochen, we’ll find puchen, puggen, pukken, boka, buka, and (!) Engl. poke (verb). In the present context, it matters little whether poke is borrowed or native. More important is the fact that we are, rather obviously, dealing with sound-imitative verbs (the reference is to the sound heard in striking), like English kick, jab, dab, cuff, bang, boom, bash, Russian bukh (a word reproducing a loud noise, with cognates elsewhere in Slavic), and puk “fart.”

Murray, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, already supposed that box is an onomatopoeia. In all probability, he was right, and one cannot but admire his intuition. “Origin unknown,” so lavishly added to such verbs in dictionaries, is an unhelpful label. The OED online has no citations of box between 1390 and 1519. We may be dealing with two independent coinages: the same verb was perhaps invented or borrowed twice, with about a century and a half between those events. Such words travel widely from language to language, and it is hard to decide whether we see loans or independent coinages.

Such then is a rather probable history of the sound-imitative verb box. Origin unknown? Not quite. Uncertain? Of course! What else could one expect?

Postscript

My thanks are due to the two readers who commented on the previous post on the evils of Spelling Bee.

_{Featured image: By Natalya from Pixabay. Public domain.}

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Spelling bee is back. So am I

Spelling Bee is back. At the end of the marathon, this year’s winner spelled correctly the word bromocriptine, received $50,000 cash, a commemorative medal, $2,000 from Merriam-Webster, $1,000 in flight credit from Delta Air Lines, and $400 of reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica. “Spelling fast is what I do every day,” explained the winner, an eighth-grader from California. As noted, the winning word was bromocriptine. May the youngster never use this medication!

Actually, bromocriptine is not a hard word compared to the other monsters he spelled at a lightning speed: Philepitta, Metohija, hwyl, and Bhubaneswar. Don’t pity my ignorance, but I recognized none of those words, and since some of our readers may not know them either, I’ll provide definitions. Philepitta is a bird name. Metohija is part of Kosovo; the place name is Greek. Hwyl is Welsh for “excitement”; it never occurs outside the Welsh context. (Incidentally, despite all the efforts to save Welsh from extinction, it is still an endangered language.) Finally, Bhubaneswar (not to be confused with Nebuchadnezzar) is a city in India.

The prize winner, as the NYT informed its readers, spelled more than one word every three seconds, and the author of the article mentions some more words used in the competition: oconee bells (a flower name), catometope “a division of crabs,” and Faesulae, the name of an ancient city in Italy. History is good to know. Yet botany and carcinology are rather special branches of scholarship, are they not? I understand: “Crabbed Youth and Age cannot live together,” but I refuse to surrender.

One learns from the article that the world can boast of a spelling community and that seasoned instructors teach young people to compete. Naturally, the world is also full of ambitious parents, ready to pay coaches who specialize in hard words and know how to spell them fast. What a waste, what a tragic waste!

I have been dealing with students most of my life. Among the hundreds of the young people I see at my lectures, I rarely find anyone who is aware of what happened to Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, and Natasha Rostova, or who recognizes the word Decameron, let alone the names Walter Scott and Washington Irving. I suspect that their teachers belong to the same lost generation. But catometope and Philepitta, which sound like cat on my top and Philadelphia pita deserve everybody’s attention, do they not? Child abuse! Parents of the World, unite against it! I said so years ago and will repeat it today. Of course, the winner receives a good sum of money. Money, “the stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer,” as Mowgli put it. The money will be spent, but time never returns. Has this year’s winner, who is of Indian heritage, read The Jungle Book?

In 2026, one of the tough words was quillaia, pronounced “key-eye.” It designates a type of bark that yields a soapy lather, originally a word from the Mapuche language, native to southern Chile. Greece, Chile, Albania, Wales…. What about English words?

Our readers know that for at least a century and a half some of the brightest people in the English-speaking world have fought for reforming English spelling. An English Spelling Society was founded in 1908, but attempts to make conservative and partly irrational English spelling more accessible to learners are decades older. Now that English is used so widely all over the world, those attempts deserve special attention. Such efforts have been very mildly successful only in the United States (thanks to Noah Webster). Our spellcheckers do not solve the problem: before making a mistake, the speller has to learn how to try to spell Peru, kangaroo, rue, grew, through, and rhubarb (add guru for good measure); occurrence and endurance; rally and valley, to say nothing of valet. And don’t forget all those horrors with grey and gray and triplets like crayon, reign, and arraign.

Those are the words whose spelling millions of native English speakers and foreign learners have to cram. Do we need oconee bells to make people’s lives even more miserable? We may ask: will English spelling ever be reformed? I keep hoping against hope. Most of those who will read the examples cited above will probably agree that rue, crew, and through should not only rhyme but also be spelled alike.

All the arguments against the Reform are known, and indeed every change disrupts the status quo by definition and makes someone unhappy. But are we happy now? Spelling has been modified by law in several countries. The most drastic reform took place in Russia after the 1917 revolution, but the project predates 1917: it was only implemented by the Bolsheviks. In our lifetime, spelling has been modified in Germany and less drastically in Iceland. We need someone like Elon Musk to support the idea, and before you can say Jack Robinson, our atrocious spelling will also be reformed. (The article in the NYT is titled “He can spell ‘bromocriptine’ faster than you can say it.”)

I was mildly amused to read that Webster Unabridged and Encyclopedia Britannica support the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A dictionary like Webster Unabridged is not only a great national treasure. It is also a historical museum. It should not be abused for the purposes of an insane competition. The Spelling Bee ruins the brain of the youths who believe that they have achieved something useful and praiseworthy. And as concerns the prize, the winner and $50,000 will soon be parted. I would like to finish my diatribe on a less pathetic note. In the pronunciation of the speakers of American English, at least in the Midwest and in some other parts of the country, latter and ladder, writer and rider are homonyms pairwise. The voicing of t between vowels is a phenomenon well-known to British dialectologists. This is the reason pottage (as in a mess of pottage) became poddage and finally (by rhotacism) porridge, which Goldilocks ate up, knowing nothing about historical phonetics. My students write deep-seeded for deep-seated and futile for feudal. I am so happy they never venture into the spelling beehive.

_{Featured image: A school spelling bee in 2011. Photo by Heather Temske. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Restive people never rest

Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”

Rest “repose” is a Germanic word with cognates among other related languages, that is, for instance, in Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. At one time, it had the form rasta, as still in Gothic, a fourth-century language, known to us from a translation of parts of the New Testament into it. Yet the Gothic word rasta meant “a mile,” not “rest”! One Germanic mile was equal to two Gaul leagues or five kilometers, a bit over three miles, the distance a walker is supposed to cover on foot in an hour. Consequently, in those days, “rest” had a more concrete sense (namely, “a distance after which one rests”) than “relief from activity.” The history of all abstract words in language runs along similar lines.

This first step in searching for the etymology of rest looks convincing. But we may perhaps go the proverbial extra mile, to obtain a deeper solution. In this blog, I have more than once referred to the old German journal Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). It featured many papers about how words developed their meanings in the process of labor activities. Some such conjectures did not stand the test of time, while others have weathered well. One of the most active contributors to that journal was its founder Rudolf Meringer (1859-1931), for whose contributions I have unbounded admiration. Among other things, he suggested (but in a different periodical) that rasta is related to Gothic razn “house.” This was a great idea. One can find guarded positive mentions of it in all dictionaries, but I doubt that caution is needed here. Meringer guessed well.

Those interested in the origin of other Germanic words designating human habitats will find some information in my posts for January 21 and February 4, 2015 (the essays deal with house and home). Among other things, I noted that the grammatical gender of some such words tends to be neuter. Germanic neuter nouns had the same form in the singular and the plural (like Modern English sheep: one sheep ~ many sheep), so that when we deal with Old English hūs (ū designates a long vowel, as in the modern word who), we cannot know whether the reference is to one building or several “houses” linked together, as is the case with the Old Icelandic word hús (here, ú designates a long vowel).

Characteristically, Gothic razn was also neuter, a circumstance hardly ever discussed in the scholarly literature on this word. In any case, razn, which must have been a place for rest, probably consisted of two or even more adjoining structures, rather than being a separate building. Old English ræsn, a word obviously related to razn, meant “plank, beam,” which means that the Old Germanic razn was made of wood. However, a few non-Germanic cognates of razn refer to branches, switches, and the like. Thus, we get a glimpse of the way old houses were constructed, but hardly of why speakers chose the sound complex raz– (from ras-) to designate one type of their habitat.

Perhaps ras– (a verb, not unlike rush and dash) imitated the sound a branch makes when waved through the air? Unless a word is an obvious onomatopoeia, like puff, hush, grunt, and so forth, we never learn why it has the form that has come down to us. But I find some support for my idea in the fact that quite a few non-Germanic cognates of rest refer to “rush (!), attack.” As Henry Cecil Wyld put it in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language: “We might suppose that the primary meaning of the base was ‘movement’, whether into action or away from it, from which latter sense we later got the sense retreat, cessation from action, rest.”

Disregard the inelegant phrasing and note: “into action or away from it”! The related forms of ras-, as they appear in Greek and elsewhere, are treated with caution or even distrust in some dictionaries and as certain in others. I tend to agree with those who trace English rest, German Ruhe, and Dutch rust (they all have the same meaning) to the root erē– ~ rē– and share Wyld’s interpretation of the root (“movement into or AWAY from action”). I would therefore be happy if my sound-imitative treatment of the Germanic root ras– could find some support: swish branches, build a house, and have a rest!

The old word for “house” can still be discerned in English saltern “saltworks” (that is, a place where salt is prepared commercially), from sealtærn; in barn, from berern, a building for storing “bern,” that is, barley; and in ransack, from Scandinavian (rann-saka, “to search a house,” but the “searching” was performed then, as now, for the purpose of plundering.

Restive, though it now means “restless, fidgety,” once meant the opposite, namely, “inactive, inert”! A restive horse refuses to move. The word goes back to the root of the Romance verb having the sense “to remain in the same position,” from Latin restāre “to rest.” Closely related is English arrest. One wonders at the erratic history of this late borrowing, which emerged in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century: “intractable,” then “stubborn,” and finally, “restless, unruly.” The OED presents, as always, a full picture of this history. The most common sense today (that is, “restless”) surfaced in books only in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, in Dickens’s days! And we show surprise when unexpected semantic leaps are said to have occurred in the remotest past. 

An Old Idiom

To set up one’s rest “to make up one’s mind, to pause for rest, to halt.” Robert Nares explained this phrase in his indispensable 1822 book A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, &c. Thought to Require Illustration… From the game of primero, meaning “to stand upon the cards you have in your hand, in the hope that they may win.” Nares explains the rules of the game and gives numerous examples. In 1907, the idiom was still known. The OED has one comparatively recent example.

Postscript

I am sincerely grateful to the readers of this blog who responded to my plea for comments. Indeed, there was a break between August and February. It was caused by personal reasons and had nothing to do with paucity of responses. The rest is of course silence.

_{Featured image: The Long Walk. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Much <i>hubbub</i> about very little

Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 1, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba (in those days, I was told not to exceed one page of text, and of course, there were no illustrations). Numerous comments followed. Some time later (on November 22, 2006), my topic was hullabaloo, and again multiple comments rewarded my modest effort. In those days, a stream of responses established a close tie between my readers and me (hence the now defunct section “Monthly Gleanings”). Though I have no idea why that stream has dried up, today even a single comment makes me happy, for “he who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Perhaps I should stick to the letter H. Anyway, I decided to woo my fickle luck again and will now add hubbub (see the image gracing the title) to that ancient series.

Exclamations, interjections, and war cries are usually hard to trace to their origins. Oops, upsy-daisy, drat, hurrah, hello, hi, and their likes look natural to speakers but not to language historians. Even oh and ah have nontrivial origins, because when people are in pain or are genuinely surprised, they do not emit such genteel “vocalic gestures”: they scream. Hubbub is of course not an interjection, but it makes one think of hullabaloo and other “emotional” H– words denoting noise. We can also remember hoopla and the bird name hoopoo ~ hoopoe.

I usually avoid  discussing nouns, adjectives, and verbs whose detailed and often transparent origin can be found online or in any good dictionary. Yet the amount of information varies from work to work. Though hubbub seems to be a case in point (nothing new, and nothing to write about), this is an illusion. All sources say approximately but not quite the same thing and not enough. Here is the etymological part of the entry hubbub from The Century Dictionary (though this monumental reference work is seldom consulted today, I treat it with great respect): “Formerly also hobub, hooboob, also whoobub (apparently, simulating whopp, hoop); also extended or reduplicated hubbub–boo, hubbleshow, hubble-shubble—words showing imitative variation of a base *hub, probably of interjectional origin, but perhaps in part of hoop, shout.” An asterisk denotes a reconstructed form.

This is all very true. However, there is a hitch in dealing with that entry. Compare the information from the last edition of Walter W. Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1911: “Imitative. Cf. Gaelic ub, interjection of aversion. Formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, reduplication of hoop; and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” (Many years earlier, Skeat suggested that perhaps the source of hubbub was indeed whoop-whoop.) Surprisingly, The Century Dictionary does not mention Gaelic, and Skeat, who begins (!) with Gaelic, uses only the irritating word cf., that is, confer, compare. Old dictionaries often tell us to “compare” different forms. How are we supposed to do it?

The volume of the OED with the letter H appeared in 1901, and the entry on hubbub rather cautiously suggested the Irish (that is, Gaelic) origin of the English word, but the second edition of The Century Dictionary ignored this tip. By contrast, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), derived from the OED, states unhesitatingly: “Of Irish origin .” It then cites a few (irrelevant?) Irish words for disgust and amazement, but the alleged source is supposed to be the battle cry. Can interjections be borrowed? Yes, indeed. The bookish word alas is from Old French. Oh goes back to Latin, via Old French. So does ah, a truly international word. Upsy-daisy is from Dutch.

Hubbub, its history and etymology, attracted a good deal of attention in the nineteenth-century popular press (as usual, in Notes and Queries). The most curious analogy takes us to hubbub,a game like dice, played at one time by some Native Americans. Here is a passage from the book by Henry Spelman Relation of Virginia (1613; I have modernized the spelling): “Drums and trumpets they have none, but when they will gather themselves together, they have a kind of howling or whopub, so differing in sound one from the other as both part (sic) very easily be distinguished.” The earliest example of English hubbub from a text in the OED goes back to 1555.

The ship Pilgrim arrived in America in 1620. By that time, hubbub had become widely known in England. Even Shakespeare used it, though he spelled the word as who-bub. Speelman may have identified the native word with the one he had known at home. But this is unlikely. William Wood in New England’s Prospect (1634) described hubbub as a game resembling dice (“…smiting themselves on the breast and thighs, crying out, Hub, Hub, Hub!”). English hubbub is certainly not from Algonquin, but the coincidence is striking. Similar words have been found in some other languages. For instance, in 1904, a report from Egypt mentioned habub “a dust storm of considerable extent.” Hubbub is, most certainly, an onomatopoeia that could have originated almost anywhere at any time. The question is whether the English word is native or borrowed and, if borrowed, then from where.

Thanks to the excellent research of two scholars, David Greene and Alan Bliss, we know a good deal about the history of hubbub. The seemingly plausible suggestion that hubbub is from French, rather than from Irish, should be discarded. But surprisingly, the Irish form is from English! The source of hubbub must have been the Middle English adverb abo “above,” pronounced as aboo. This pronunciation has been recorded even in some archaic eighteenth-century British dialects. The etymon of hubbub seems to have been some war cries like Irish ub! ub! ubub!

But this reconstruction leaves out the origin of initial h in hubbub. Though the history of this h is unclear, we should note that the earliest form of hubbub, recorded by the OED, has the spelling whobub. Similar spellings were common in the sixteenth century and some time later. As Alan Bliss explained, the story may or even must have begun with fubbub, whose f became voiceless hw (as in the pronunciation of those who say what, which, why with voiceless hw) and later h. Details would take us too far afield. All we have to know is that, most probably, hubbub originated in Early English, was taken over by the Irish, and later returned to English. Not unexpectedly, the word changed its pronunciation more than once along the way. To us this itinerary is full of gaps, and we are left wondering why in the sixteenth century the word was reborrowed into Early Modern English. However, something about this itinerary has been traced with a good deal of certainty, so that hubbub is not “a word of unknown origin,” which is good. Thus, after all, our ado (hubbub) was not about nothing.

P.S. Thank you for the comment on sorrow. The alleged tie between the Hittite and the Germanic words is curious, but of course, its existence cannot be demonstrated, unless both forms are sound-imitative.

_{Featured image: Photo by Joe Van. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.}

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Sit thee down, sorrow!

It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from. No fear: sorrow is native—only joy is borrowed. The word that interests us is Common Germanic. Its cognates have been attested in all the Old Germanic languages: in the fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament, in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Icelandic. Outside Germanic, even in the ancient Tocharian language, an apparently related noun turned up, though there it means “disease.”

Words designating abstract concepts usually have concrete foundations. For example, sad goes back to the idea of “sated; weary.” Dutch zat and German satt still refer to a full stomach (among other things), and Latin satis (as in the root of the English borrowings satiated and satisfaction) means “enough.” Sad “melancholy, unhappy,” it appears, has a most prosaic foundation. Attempts to find a similar concrete foundation of sorrow have been less than fully satisfactory, to use the polite jargon of disgruntled etymologists.

However, one thing is almost certain: sorrow is related to neither sore nor sorry, while those two words are indeed related to each other. Yet for centuries, sorrow, sore, and sorry have formed a union and influenced one another. It is quite natural that speakers looked upon such similar-sounding words referring to similar concepts as related. To repeat, the sense of sorrow developed from “physical pain” to “grief.”

The origin of many ancient names of diseases and physical defects is obscure for an important reason. People were afraid to pronounce frightening words. The situation is familiar: talk of the devil and he will come. For instance, someone will say wolf (cry wolf, as it were) or bear, and the beast, which of course knows its name, will hear it, take it for an invitation, and arrive. That is why Germanic has bear, that is, “a brown one,” rather than some continuation of ursus, and Russian has medved, literally, “someone searching for and knowing honey.” For the same reason, the etymology of ache is almost impenetrable. Taboo names were meant to be undecipherable, and they often remain such to us. (By the way, from an etymological point of view, ill is one of the most obscure English words.)

I have mentioned taboo for a reason. Among some rather secure Slavic and Lithuanian cognates of sorrow (Tocharian has already been mentioned) we find a few words meaning “disease, sickness” and “to be sick, ill.” The most problematic forms related to sorrow are those beginning with sw-. Among the Old Highs German words, the verb sworgen turns up. Where is the initial sw– from? The w after s is not accidental here. Also, a secure Albanian cognate once began with sw-, and the first syllable of a rather probable Sanskrit cognate was sū-.

It is rather likely that also the Old Germanic root of sorrow once began with sw– and later lost w under the influence of its “twin” word sorrow. The group sw– is often sound–imitative and sound-symbolic. Consider the following list of Modern English words beginning with sw– (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in writing): swab “mop” (15), swagger (16; swag also exists), swank (19), swarm (Old English), swarm “climb” (16), swash (16), sway (16), sweep (14), swell (Old English), swift (Old English), swig (17), swill (Old English), swindle (18), swing (partly Old English), swipe (19), swirl (18), swish (18), switch (16), swither “to hesitate” (16), swoon (13), and swoop (16).

I realize that reading word lists is not the most entertaining occupation in the world. But I needed a background for my hypothesis. I suggest that sorrow or rather Old English sorg ~ sorh and its Germanic cognates, all of which sounded almost the same, were “emotional” sw-words. It is hard to tell what this sw– alluded to (perhaps sometimes to the loss of balance and erratic movement: consider swing, sway, swipe, and the rest). Above, I did not mention swamp, a late word in English (17). It has always meant “low-lying wet ground,” and swamps are not good to walk in.

Later, sorrow, Sorge, and their likes influenced sworg-, all of which survived but lost none of their emotional impact. Etymologies of this type cannot be proved: they are not theorems. But considering that dictionaries are happy with the statement “ultimate origin unknown,” I see no harm in offering my hypothesis. If I am right, taboo probably played no role in the history of sorrow, but emotion did: it shaped its origin, and chance modified its ultimate form.

As is well-known, people are afraid of two things: of venturing to say something new and of repeating something so trivial that it needs no proof. Above, I committed both sins. English etymological dictionaries do not begin their story of sorrow with sw-. Yet in other sources, matter-of-fact references to sw– in this context are common. Among other places, I found them in the earlier editions of the main German etymological dictionary and in the writings of the great French scholar Antoine Meillet. Thus, I said something that is new (no one has explained the variation s- ~ sw-) but not earth-shattering. If some historical linguists decide to comment on my reconstruction, the first thing for them to do will be to reread F. O. Lindeman’s paper in Indogermanische Forschungen 98, 1993, 48-54, and the chapter “Sorga” in the 1957 book by Heinrich Götz Leitwörter des Minnesangs (pp. 93-105). The absence of comments will give me much sorrow.

In the meantime, I’ll mention a novel titled Frau Sorge (that is, “Lady Sorrow”) by Hermann Sudermann. Today, few people have heard of it. Yet the epoch described in that book is worth remembering. At one time, I read many such sad books, including John Greenwood’s novel The True History of a Little Ragamuffin. Maxim Gorky read and admired it in his youth.

A few remarks on sorry may not be out of place here. Its Old English form was sārig “pained at heart,” as defined by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (thus, with a long vowel in the root). Later, that is, in Middle English, ā changed to ō (it did so in all words: hence stān to stōn and stone) and was shortened before the “heavy suffix” -ig. This is when sorry began to interact with sorrow.

The title of today’s essay is from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I preferred it to the trodden-to-death more in sorrow than in anger. Familiar quotations with sorrow are numerous. I will finish this post with my favorite lines by Shelley: “The desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/ The devotion to something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.”

Postscript. My thanks are to Martin Smith for citing German bergen “to protect” in connection with the post on burg (April 1, 2026) and to Ian Richie, who cited the place from Rob Roy, to which I referred in the post for April 15, 2026. See the comments following those posts.  

NOTE. For scheduling reasons, the next post will appear two weeks from today.

_{Featured image: La Mélancolie by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s

About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder. It is frustrating that the origin of hog is unknown. The word surfaced in Middle English, and it would seem that a relatively recent monosyllabic animal name (and hog always had only one syllable) need not give language historians too much trouble. But this is not the case, as the history of dog (Old English) and hog (Middle English) shows. All we can know for certain is that twelve and six, and three centuries ago, people coined words, motivated by the same impulses as today. They have always produced monosyllables like big, dig, gig, bog, gag, smug, and lug, and most of them were “emotional,” that is, sound-imitative or sound symbolic. Hogs grunt. Is the word hog onomatopoeic? Do swine “say” hog-hog or pig-pig? Perhaps. In any case, their Dutch siblings “say” big-big!

Why then is the hedgehog called hedgehog? The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) explains: “So named from frequenting hedgerows and its pig-like snout.” I assume that the corresponding page in the OED online has not yet been edited, because the same formulation appears there. Or perhaps there is nothing to edit in this statement. Perhaps. Hedgehogs may be attached to hedges, but it is amazing that such an inconspicuous feature was chosen for naming the familiar rodent. Isn’t our solution too good to be true?

Hedgehogs don’t live in America, and every time I discuss the Grimms’ tale “The Hare and the Hedgehog” with my students (I often teach German folklore), I have to describe the protagonist’s way of life. I also very much admire the end of the tale, the storyteller’s advice: “If you are a hedgehog, always marry a hedgehog.” I have seen many young people who disregarded this advice and paid dearly for it.

What are the most conspicuous features of the hedgehog? A hedgehog, if attacked, rolls itself into a prickly ball (what a wonderful way of hedging against enemies!), but other than that, it is easily domesticated and is great fun to have at home in summer except that you cannot pet a hedgehog. Also, like mongooses, hedgehogs attack and devour snakes.

In my opinion, the name hedgehog does not do justice to the creature’s behavior and shape. It is also unclear why English replaced the ancient word for “hedgehog” with a new (dialectal?) one. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian have retained the Indo-European name (such is German Igel; the Slavic name is also related to it). Be that as it may, since the hedgehog’s projecting mouth and nose do resemble a snout, prickly hog (this is what the creature is called in numerous Dutch dialects) would be a more accurate name than hedgehog.

Let us now leave hogs to their devices and look at the noun hedge. This word has a dramatic history. The Old English for hedge was hegg. I will not go into phonetic niceties and will only say that hegg is related to haga “enclosure, yard.” Hegge yielded hedge, and haga became haw, as in hawthorn, which is also familiar from the last name Hawthorn. Yet haga is also recognizable, because we know the place name The Hague, Den Haag (see is image in the header). The name of the capital of the Netherlands has retained its ancient form and even its definite article. Last week, we looked at burg and its likes, and I noted that town is akin to Icelandic tún “enclosure.” This is what town meant (consider Modern German Zaun “fence”), exactly like Den Haag.

The most dramatic part in the history of the root we now see in hedge and haw concerns the Old English word hagosteald “bachelor; warrior.” Its counterparts elsewhere in Germanic displayed several meanings: “king,” “retainer,” “servant,” “peasant,” “widower”—a partly incompatible medley of senses. But only at first sight. Among other things, the original “enclosure” was the feudal lord’s residence. In those days and much later, the eldest son inherited his father’s property. His brothers, those who aspired to a career, had little choice and usually became soldiers, or, to use the feudal term, retainers (the same situation with the younger brothers continued into the nineteenth century). Those retainers were, of course, bachelors, and as far as language is concerned, the step from “bachelor,” to “widower” (a male without a wife) must have been short. In Modern German, Hagestolz (now obsolete or facetious) still means “bachelor”; stolz “proud” is a product of folk etymology.

It is amazing how words change their meanings and attain secondary senses, which oust the original sense. From “king’s retainer” to “bachelor”! But incompatible senses also coexist in modern languages and give us no trouble. This, for example, happened to English bachelor. Its Old French source meant “young man aspiring to knighthood,” while Medieval Latin baccalārius referred to a laborer on an estate (baccalāria “area of ploughland”). Though our BA’s don’t aspire to knighthood, getting a college degree is an important step to the proverbial room at the top. And we, the readers of this blog—well, we have made a long way from a piece of enclosed land to the heights of historical semantics. In our journey, we passed by hogs and hedgehogs, visited The Hague, and almost attained a BA. (Yet I keep wondering whether hedgehogs have anything to do with hedges.)

To Our Readers

My sincere thanks to the two readers who have researched some obscure words and asked me about their origin. My resources are good but limited. I have an excellent etymological database and a huge collection of books on word origins. If they provide me with no answers, I give up. This is especially true with regards to the non-Indo-European languages. Alas, all etymologists are in the same position. They know only what little they know.

From My Collection of Useless and Evil Proverbs

It is amazing how many proverbial phrases people have invented to demean women! Here is an Early English gem in its original spelling: “…by the common prouerbe, a woman will wepe for pitie to see a gosling goe barefoote.” John Heywood, a sixteenth-century playwright, is mainly remembered today for his collection of proverbs. He knew the saying quoted above, and it was familiar to English readers of Notes and Queries as late as 1891. Walter Scott seems to have made one of his characters use this saying in Rob Roy (so I have read but did not check). As usual, we have no information about the date and the author of this saying, but the ugly “sentiment” is familiar. The Russian saying “A woman’s tears are water” is still current. What a shame!

_{Featured image: Charlemagne at Court, illuminated manuscript. Public domain via Picryl.}

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<i>Unabridged</i>: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words

Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis. This volume of nearly 400 pages has the subtitle: “The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary.” Below, I will summarize my impressions of Fatsis’s book. Perhaps Unabridged in the title also refers to the volume’s scope, because it presents a broad picture of British and American lexicography for more than two centuries.

Fatsis has been a passionate word lover since early age, so his foray into the history and practice of dictionary making was not a whim. He approached his project in the best way possible: he got himself hired as a lexicographer-in-training, spent several years with Webster, wrote numerous definitions, spoke to dozens of specialists in the United States and at Oxford, and finally produced this book about dictionaries and dictionary making—not only about Webster’s Unabridged. Rarely does he say something that gives away his insufficient mastery of the subject. Thus, on p. 71, he calls Notes and Queries an obscure British journal. In fact, it was for years one of the most popular weeklies in the English-speaking world, and it still exists. The OED has always been fully aware of it. But this is just faultfinding. Fatsis did become an expert.

I am surprised that we never met. For years we attended the same biennial conferences of The Dictionary Society of North America, talked to and made friends with the same people, and listened to the same presentations. Better late than never. Now we’ll meet virtually in this blog. The book, which in addition to the indispensable introductory remarks, acknowledgments, endnotes (excellent endnotes), bibliography, and an index, contains thirteen chapters. Among other things, they are devoted to the history of Webster’s dictionary. Who were the two Merriam brothers? Their names are now indelibly tied to Noah Webster’s. We do know such hybrids, Schubert-Liszt and Verdi-Liszt, for example. What stands behind the symbiosis? In this case, the story is worth reading. 

Two main questions about dictionaries recur again and again. How many words should be included? And how should they be defined? How, for example, do you define in, as, so, oh, weather, be, and thousands of others? And does anyone need such definitions? New words flood language (any language) at all times. When we study the past, we depend on written records, because only such as are extant. But even a dictionary of Old English, which deals with a closed corpus, is incredibly difficult to put together. Though a living language grows every minute, most of us need not worry about this circumstance. We know what we know, and if some word is new to us, we may either disregard it or look it up. But lexicographers have to anticipate everybody’s questions, and when we do look up a word (for its meaning, spelling, pronunciation, use, or origin), we expect it to be there. Hence this endless, self-defeating chase for the words coined the day before yesterday, yesterday, or five minutes ago. Hundreds of them are stillborn. For an online dictionary space is not a problem, but paper editions cannot be allowed to weigh a ton.

Fatsis believes that modern dictionaries should be all-inclusive: if a word exists or once had, in the poet’s words, its singing minute, get hold of it and rejoice. Also, volatile slang, obscenities, and ethnic slurs? Well, yes. This book is by far not the first one about dictionaries and their problems. Webster’s Third had the audacity to include the F-word and the seemingly innocuous ain’t (my spellchecker still underlines ain’t in red). Today the storm that followed the publication of that dictionary is hard to imagine. The unpronounceable F-word? My goodness! This is the most frequent word (plus its derivatives) hundreds of people use actively. Even our elected representatives constantly feel f-ed up by their f-in’ opponents and share their hurt feelings with the public. Why should dictionaries be guardians of good manners? Actually, they often (and nowadays, even regularly) do play this role, by explaining how certain words are used, where they may or should be avoided, and so forth.

What I missed in this book is a broad discussion of dictionary inclusion and culture. A great dictionary, a monument erected for all times, does feature all the words it can net, but this feast is partly wasted. The vocabulary of our young people is tragically small. Even the books by Mark Twain and Jack London (whom our American children and grandchildren seldom read, if at all), to say nothing of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackery, are full of words they don’t understand and don’t care to learn. Dictionaries are getting richer and richer, while individual vocabularies have dwindled like Balzac’s la peau du chagrin (my favorite phrase, which, much to my chagrin, no student I have met so far was able to understand).

More harping on the same note! Fatsis did not mention Spelling Bee, this institutionalized torture chamber, but devoted an enthusiastic chapter to the Word of the Year. What passions, what spirited discussions about a moth that will die an hour later! And all that from the people who call themselves linguists. That says something about the level of modern linguistics. Fatsis, as I said, takes the liveliest interest in such contests. He is a man of liberal views, investigates at great length the history of the adjective woke, likes the new use of pronouns, and many other things that are not to my taste. But I am a highbrow, while he would probably be proud to call himself a lowbrow (no offence meant, and I hope no offence taken). I would prefer chapters on pronunciation and etymology in dictionaries. Both subjects are barely mentioned in the book.

Glossaries and dictionaries have existed for millennia, but the Internet and AI killed their print versions. Such is the way of all flesh. Though even today people sometimes ride horses in towns, usually they drive cars. The OED and Merriam Webster have survived so far by resorting to websites and ads of all kinds and thus attracting funding, but even they have gone online. All print editions have succumbed to the spirit of our virtual epoch. Do you still remember Funk and Wagnalls, the glorious Random House, and the many editions of Heritage Dictionary? Gone, all gone, and with them hundreds of lexicographers were, to use the impolite British phrase, made redundant. In his recent interview with the Pennsylvania Gazette, Fatsis said (in connection with print books and newspapers): “The New York Times is thriving in part because of its growth of its games and recipes offerings.” Hear, hear!

My conclusion? A fine book. Read it from cover to cover. Some chapters are truly excellent, the best one being about the late collector Madeline Kripke. The last two chapters are also excellent. And here is the opening sentence of the Introduction: “I fell in love with the dictionaries on my eleventh birthday. My big present that day in 1974 was Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Second college edition, Deluxe Color edition), published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio).” Nothing is better than remaining true to one’s first love, especially when it is reciprocated.

_{Featured image: Image from page 450 of “The California horticulturalist and floral magazine” (1870). Public domain via The Internet Archive on Flickr.}

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An etymological ham<i>burg</i>er

My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.

English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.

The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!

The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.

Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”

What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.

The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~  u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.

It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?

As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.

_{Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Endless trouble with <i>breeches</i>

The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches? In the best books on the history of English, I could not find a satisfactory answer, but this complication is minor. The real problem is the origin of the word. (I cannot do this without an impotent jab of AI, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. I asked the computer about the short vowel in breeches, and AI supplied me with several lines of nonsense.)

The names of articles of clothing are often troublesome to an etymologist, partly because they tend to travel from land to land with the objects they designate, so that, for example, specialists in English etymology are called upon to deal with the history of Greek, Latin, Celtic, or Slavic words (to name just a few of the possible sources) and offer opinions about the data they know imperfectly or not at all.

As long as we stay with breeches, consider some other names for “loose-fitting garments for the loins and legs” (dictionary definitions of the most common words are a joy to read): pants (shortening of pantaloons; Italian), trousers (French), jeans (also Romance), knickerbockers (from a proper name), and in connection with proper names, bloomers may be mentioned. Probably, most people remember the origin of Levi’s.

Breeches and its cognates have traveled over half of the world for centuries, and over time, a mountain of linguistic literature dealing with the word has accrued. This word certainly originated in the singular (that is, breech was meant). It occurred in all the Old Germanic languages, except Gothic. We know Gothic only from a fourth-century translation of the Gospels (the original was in Greek), but the characters mentioned in the New Testament did not wear trousers (or breeches). The forms of the word in the recorded Germanic languages are so similar that all of them either go back to the same ancient native protoform or were borrowed from the same foreign source. That form or source must have sounded as brōk (ō designates a long vowel, approximately as in Modern English awe; as far as we can judge, that brōk rhymed with Modern English hawk).

And here’s the rub. If the word was native (Germanic), why did people call that article of clothing brōk? (Such is of course the perennial question of all etymology: only onomatopoetic, sound–imitative words, like ga-ga and croak, are transparent.) As regards brōk, we know only one thing for sure. The old noun was singular (that is, breech). To give a relatively late example, in a thirteenth-century German romance, the youth’s mother sews such a brōk (German bruoch) for him as part of a one-piece hunting outfit.

Since the Germanic word refuses to reveal its origin, historical linguists looked at the evidence in other languages and, naturally, noticed Celtic brāca (a similar meaning), along with its less common doublet bracca. The once powerful Celts were close neighbors of the “Teutons,” as Germanic-speaking tribes were referred to in the past (the German form is die Germanen). Germanic and Celtic share numerous words, and sometimes such words occur only in those two language groups. They may designate natural phenomena (shadow belongs here), tribal property (the most interesting term in this group is town), social relations(here the history of free and oath is worthy of notice), and so forth. The most spectacular borrowing from Celtic into Germanic is perhaps iron: apparently, it was the Celts who taught their Germanic neighbors how to deal with iron.

Even when a word has been recorded only in Germanic and Celtic (that is, without cognates elsewhere: in Greek, Latin, Slavic, and so forth), we cannot be sure who borrowed from whom or whether speakers of both language groups borrowed their word from a third source about which we have no information. The recorded Celtic forms that interest us are braca and bracca. Whence the long consonant in bracca? This cc is usually called emphatic, but what was so emotional about a rather trivial piece of clothing? Or did the word once have n in the root (branca?), so that nc became cc? To repeat: who borrowed from whom? Or was there a third source from which the Celts and the “Germanen” borrowed both the piece of clothing and its name? Incidentally, the oldest (unrecorded) Celtic form is also controversial.

Elmar Seebold, the most recent editor of Fridrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary of German, wrote a detailed entry on Bruch and pointed out that the Germanic word has a less opaque history than the Celtic one, because it may be related to the verb break, while the Celtic word has no cognates. But the relation of breech to break is uncertain, and I could not verify the Old English and Old Icelandic names of the body parts Seebold cites. Where then are we? In a sadly familiar place: the hunt was exciting, but the target escaped us. Breech is a very old Germanic and Celtic word, whose ultimate origin has not been found. The etymologist, as I have noted more than once, is a lonely hunter.

Recently, I cited a proverb advising us not to eat cherries with great men. Such adages seem to have bookish origins: they are insipid and too long, even bombastic. In one’s breeches (synonym: in one’s buttons) “perfectly fit” was recorded in several parts of England a century and a half ago and sounds like a genuine “folk creation.” Probably the same holds for the phrase to wear the breeches “to usurp the authority of the husband.” A medieval equivalent of this phrase existed in Italy, and in the nineteenth century it occurred in French and Dutch. Incidentally, in medieval Iceland, the husband was allowed to divorce his wife if she wore breeches. A look at breeches in the OED is also revealing. Other than that, stay in your breeches.

_{Featured image: Christ with his disciples, A.N. Mironov. C-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows

This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy. This is also what the entry in the OED online says. The entry has not yet been updated, but as regards etymology, there may not be anything to update. Though the word is rather old, the dates of its first occurrence in print vary. In a source for 2008,1893 is mentioned. The extremely detailed entry in Wikipedia gives 1892. Webster’s dictionary online pushes the date to the 1880s but gives no references. Those details matter little: apparently, the word became rather well-known toward the end of the nineteenth century, which means that it was coined earlier. We have no way of knowing how much earlier.

From an etymological point of view, hillbilly does not look more exciting than, for example, blackboard. A blackboard is indeed a black board, but think of blackmail, blacksmith, greyhound, blueprint, greenhorn, and redneck. Is their origin fully transparent? Greyhound is particularly tricky (even though the dog is grey!). Hillbilly may also contain a secret, among other reasons, because compounds and collocations with rhyming components (like claptrap, hobnob, hodgepodge, and Georgie Porgie) are almost too good to be true, that is, their origin may not be as transparent as it seems. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde wrote a tale titled The Sphinx without a Secret. You never can tell.

Surprisingly, an alternate etymology of hillbilly has been offered. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a well-known passage from an old column in the New York Times: “Protestants who came of Appalachian stock were called ‘hillbillies’ and the term connoted ignorance, poverty, vile habits and, in general, low lifers perfectly at home in a pig pen.” Jack Morgan published a short note on the subject in the journal Comments on Etymology (22/8, 1993, p. 22). He was intrigued by the emphasis on Protestant and cited another researcher, in whose opinion the word hillbilly goes back to the emigrants’ preoccupation with their hero “King Billy” (that is, William of Orange), so that they became known as Billy-boys of the hill country. This is a very unlikely source of hillbilly (to put it mildly).  

The historians who stress the North English/Scottish ancestry of the original settlers “of Appalachian stock” failed to find a probable source of the word in Scotland (that is, no appropriate etymon ofhillbilly exists in Scots). Most likely, the word hillbilly is an American coinage, though this fact does not exclude a non-Appalachian “ancestor.” The authors of the article published in the journal American Speech 83, 2008, p. 215, say: “… prior to [!] the word’s chief association with mountaineers in Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks, hillbilly was also generally used in the American language to refer to residents of hill country, especially those in the backwoods districts, in the lower Midwest and Deep South” (emphasis added). To conclude, anyone from hill country was a hillbilly! (Those interested in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the discussion of this book will find a lot of information on the Internet.)

I’ll now cite a curious German parallel to hillbilly. German Hillebille is a wooden hardboard that served as a primitive signaling device, chiefly in the Graz mountains. People struck it in case of fire and on many other occasions. The etymology of this word is unknown, because neither component of Hillebille means anything in German. Only some dialectal Dutch cognates of hille– seem to contain allusions to romping and other precipitous movements. Between 1894 and 1898, a spate of publications appeared in the local, now little-remembered, but at one time well-read German periodicals describing the device, but almost nothing was then or later said about the word’s origin (the few suggestions I found are not worth discussing). The German Wikipedia describes the device, gives a picture of it, and points out that no connection exists between the German and the American noun. (In America, this connection would not have occurred to anyone, because outside Germany, Hillebille is a word people do not know, while I ran into it more or less by chance.)

Indeed, the similarity is, most probably, coincidental, except that both might be “emotional formations.” English hillbilly is a humorous coinage, even if it surfaced as an offensive sobriquet, while the German noun is rather obviously sound-imitative. Nothing points to the fact that German immigrants brought this word to the Appalachians and produced a German-English pun, that is, turned Hillebille into Hill Billy. Only the coincidence is curious. Thus, we have come full circle: Hillbilly emerged unscathed (a “Billy” from the hills), while the German near-homonym remains unexplained and unrelated to its English twin.

Stalled in the mountains, we will progress to the ocean with our Americana. Chapter 53 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is titled “The Gam.” Those who have read the book will remember that it opens with a page bearing the title “Etymology.” Therefore, they won’t be surprised that the author supplied us with the following explanation toward the end of that chapter: “GAM. Noun—A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.” A good professional definition, even though not containing an explanation of origins.

The OED online features this odd word but cannot offer a decisive etymology. Indeed, such a monosyllabic word might come from all kinds of sources. Erich Maria Remarque even wrote a novel about a woman named Gam (certainly, not his best book). Once again, I have nothing to offer, except for an uninspiring lookalike. Russian gam (pronounced like English gum) means “great noise; ruckus.” The word is probably sound-imitative (onomatopoeic). Could English gam also once refer to a noisy gathering? To conclude, we ended up with two obscure, possibly sound-imitative, words, whose origin should have been clear, but the solution escaped us. As usual, I am turning to our readers’ expertise. Perhaps someone knows more about Hillebille and gam than I do. If so, kindly send us your comments.

_{Featured image: Photo by Ken Jacobsen. Public domain via Pexels.}

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Hobnobbing with a hillbilly

It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure. Urban dwellers are urbane and genteel, while dwellers in villages are villains. Right? To be sure, those are the most extreme traces of the medieval (feudal) attitude toward the populace, but our more modern vocabulary is neither more tolerant nor gentler.

A look at some of the better-known synonyms for hillbilly is worth an effort. One such word is hayseed, a late sixteenth-century metaphor, now, at least in the US, mainly remembered as meaning “comical rustic.” (Rustics, except in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, are comical by definition, aren’t they?) Now, what is wrong with the inconspicuous, tiny hayseeds, “grass seeds obtained from hay,” as dictionaries very properly inform us. Yet a hayseed is also one of the names for a country bumpkin. The suffix –kin in bumpkin is Dutch (as in mannikin, napkin, Wilkins, and the unforgettable bare bodkin), so that the entire noun bumpkin is probably also of Dutch origin. It seems to mean “a little tree” (implying a blockhead?).

Wood has not fared well in our metaphors. For instance, Russian dubina “a big wooden stick” (stress on the second syllable; the word more or less rhymes with English farina) means “idiot.” The root bump– in bumpkin ends in an excrescent sound (that is, a sound added without etymological justification: see the post for last week) and means “wood,” as do English beam and German Baum. The implication seems to be clear, because wood is neither gentle nor genteel. A wooden smile will hardly meet with a sweet response. Nor is a wooden gait graceful. However, a bumpkin does not have to be a country dweller. Oliver Goldsmith introduced a rather endearing spoiled brat and trickster Tony Lumkin in his play She Stoops to Conquer. The name, modeled on bumpkin, became proverbial. Tony was not a “hayseed.”

Back to the countryside, where one is expected to meet numerous hicks and rubes. Surprisingly, hick is Hick, a doublet of Rick (Richard), just as Hob is a doublet of Rob, and Hodger of Roger. The union of h and r has a long and interesting history, but it is anybody’s guess why just Hick became a synonym for bumpkin. We may also ask why our genteel restroom is called john and sometimes jenny, while Shakespeare’s contemporaries used a jake for the same purpose. Words from names are countless, and you need a historical linguist, rather than any Tom, Dick, and Harry, to explain their origin. Modesty prevents me from discussing dick, but Richard arrived at Dick by way of its rhyming partner Rick (who, as we have seen, is also Hick). Hick is as good a synonym for “country bumkin” as any other.

More words like bumkin? Take joskin. It sometimes seems that any name, supposedly or really common, might acquire the sense “hayseed.” Yet most peasants were never called Hick! The same holds for Rube, briefly mentioned above. Rube is short for Reuben. According to the story known from the Old Testament, Reuben came to a sad end, but to repeat, Reuben/Rube was never among the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and especially in the countryside. Why then are hicks also called rubes? Just to commemorate a man cursed by his father and to transfer the guilt to an uncultivated villager? Incidentally, some of the names mentioned above are rather recent, a fact that complicates our story even more.

The stock of names for hayseeds and their ilk is almost inexhaustible. Louts and lubbers (the latter as in landlubber) join this motley, nondescript company. Lout is supposedly related to a verb meaning “to bend” (by way of “clown”?). No one takes this derivation seriously, but every dictionary mentions it with a question mark. Lubber is also problematic. Its Old French lookalike does mean “swindler,” but though Middle English may have borrowed such a word from French, more likely, lobur ~ lobeor ~ lobre was part of the Common European slang of the lower classes and criminals (such words existed; this jargon or argot, is called Gaunersprache and Rotwelsch in German).

Another etymology traces lubber to Middle Dutch lobben “clown” (again clown!) with reference to words for “lump.” More probably, the French, Dutch, and English nouns are indeed part of thieves’ (wandering traders’, strollers’) late medieval jargon, used in several parts of Europe. The very word slang may have a similar origin. See the post for September 28, 2016 (“The origin of the word ‘slang’ is known”) and the comments.

The king of hayseeds is probably the hillbilly. The etymology of hillbilly is of course clear, isn’t it? By no means! To this subject the entire next post will be devoted.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Last week, I mentioned William Bates, the author of an excellent essay on the origin of limerick in Notes and Queries, and expressed my regret that I could not find any information about him. As usual, my colleague Dr. Stephen Goranson came to the rescue. This circumstance did not surprise me. Over the years, I have often witnessed his uncanny ability to ferret out all kinds of well-hidden information. This time, he sent me an obituary of Dr. Bates (1821-1884) from the Birmingham Daily Post, an important regional newspaper. Willian Bates, a surgeon, was also well-known in the world of art and literature. The short obituary made a special mention of his contributions to Notes and Queries. A century and a half ago, permanent association with NQ might make one famous or at least distinguished. Those were days! I may add that my database of English etymology features fifteen contributions by William Bates to word origins. No doubt, he also wrote on other subjects. Incidentally, I, too, searched for William Bates and found two celebrities called this, but not the one unearthed by Stephen Goranson.

2. I have a rich database of obscure proverbs and idioms. Here is one of them: “Those that eat cherries with great persons shall have their eyes sprinkled out with stones.” Its analogues have been recorded in German, Romanian, and in a famous medieval Dutch poem. Such an elaborately picturesque and seemingly usleless proverb! Does anyone know its source? Perhaps Dr. Wolfgang Mieder, our great specialist in this area, will enlighten us. Anyway, enjoy a peaceful image of eating cherries below.

_{Featured image: A group of farmers harvesting paddy in Bangladesh. Photo by Zaheed Sarwer Khan. CC-BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A tortuous journey: the word <i>pamphlet</i>

In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon. The word surfaced in writing in 1415, and only two things are clear about its origin: pamphlet did not carry political overtones when it was coined, and it must have had a foreign source (or, because of its spelling with ph, was at least understood to be a loan from Latin or Greek).

It is astounding how often and how passionately scholars and amateurs at one time discussed the origin of pamphlet in the popular press. The main vehicle was, as usual, Notes and Queries, but no old etymological dictionary missed the word. The OED online presents a clear picture of the history of the word and supports a well-argued etymology, which was first offered in 1874 by the great French philologist Gaston Paris in Revue Critique, for September 26, 1874, p. 107. The full OED volume with the letter P appeared in 1909.

These are the main old hypotheses about the derivation of pamphlet. Perhaps the etymon is the French phrase par un filet “(held together) by a thread,” with reference to a single occurrence of the word written as paunflet (as though panflet, with u inserted) and an additional reference to French brochure “brochure” (brocher “to stitch together”; see a picture of a relatively old brochure in the heading). This etymon has been offered and rejected many times, because pamphlets contained a page or two, without a cover, and did not have to be connected by means of a thread.

Another suggested source was papyrus, and I might have passed it by as devoid of interest if it had not been defended by Frank Chance, a talented philologist. In some form this hypothesis can already be found in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 etymological dictionary of English. Chance believed that in a word like papyrus the consonant m might easily be inserted (another insertion!). He cited a few analogs of this phenomenon but not English empty: this adjective goes back to ǣmtig. Also,sumpter “packhorse” developed from Old French som(m)etier; in it the entire group mp is excrescent (that is, added without etymological justification). The Old Dutch noun pampier meant “paper.” Frank Chace believed that pampinus and papyrus “got mixed up.” There is a cruel law of etymology: the more complicated the proposed derivation, the greater the certainty that it is wrong. Not without regret, I have to dismiss Chance’s hypothesis as unrealistic.

A somewhat similar guess was offered in 1889 by Richard Stephen Charnock, a good folklorist but a totally unreliable word historian: “…from Spanish papeléta, diminutive of papél paper from which, with an infixed m, pamphlets might have been formed.” Why the infix, and why Spanish?

Naturally, Walter W. Skeat did not stay away from this discussion either. He reconstructed the date when papyrus probably turned up in English texts and came to the conclusion “that the word must be French, with a Greek root.” And here the Greek historian named Pamphila appeared on the scene (she was discovered long before Skeat in this context). Pamphila lived in the first century CE and enjoyed great popularity. Her multiple works are, it appears, lost. As far as our word is concerned, the posited way must have been from the author’s name to a common noun. The process is common. For instance, we may say that travelers take a Baedeker when they go abroad. Yet in the latest edition of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Skeat wrote: “Etymology quite uncertain. We find French pamphile, the knave of clubs, from the Greek name Pamphilus. Similarly, I should suppose that there was a French form *pamphilet [the asterisk denotes here and below a reconstructed form] or Late Latinpamphilētus, coined from Latin Pamphila….” At the end of the entry, he added a noncommittal reference to Gaston Paris.

Pamphlets were erotic (“amatory”) tracts, and as early as 1344, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and a great bibliophile, recollected in his book Philoliblon (“The Love of Books”) that the youths of his generation had cared more for fat palfreys than for leanpanfletos (sic). In those days, students were advised to stay away from pamphlets! Surely, the learned Pamphila need not interest us in this context. Such was also the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s main predecessor in the area of English etymology. Another Pamphila, responsible for the manufacture of silk, enjoys renown. She cannot be the heroine of our tale either.

The most detailed summary of older views on the history of the word pamphlet will be found in an article by William Bates (Notes and Queries 3/V, 1864, 187-169; see also NQ 3/IV, 1864, 325). I am sorry that I could not find any information about this extremely knowledgeable man.

The second edition of The Century Dictionary summarized some of the attempts to explain the derivation of pamphlet and listed four main hypotheses: 1) from a supposed Old French *paum-fueillet (as though “a leaf of paper held in the hand”), 2) from a supposed Medieval Latin *pagina filata “a threaded (sewed) leaf,” 3) from a supposed use of French par un filet “by a thread,” and 4) from a supposed Old French *pamfilet, Medieval Latin *pamfiletus, resting upon a name Pamphilus or Pamphila, of Greek origin. And here is the corollary at the end of the entry: “The last conjecture is plausible (compare the like personal origin of donet, a grammar, from the name Donatus, and of French calepin, a notebook, from the name Calepinus), but historic proofs are lacking.” My reference to Baedeker is less exotic. Yet I tend to agree with the conclusion by the Century Dictionary.

These are the reasons for my uncertainty. It is usually believed that pamphlet emerged in French, made its way into English, and was later retranslated by French. Perhaps so. I can only add that though words from names and titles are fine, no one, not even the knave of clubs, was called Pamphlet! It is understood that –et in pamphlet is a French suffix. English, –let (as in rivulet, bracelet, and their likes) seems to have emerged in English a century and a half later than the word that interests us. It seems that in 1415, no one in England would have divided pamphlet into pamph-let, but the new noun may have sounded vulgar. Sound groups like pump, pomp, pimp are sound-imitative (the German noun Pumpf means “a fart”). Perhaps this circumstance contributed to the word’s popularity among students. And as for the sound f after m in pamphlet, compare English humph, with its exotic spelling ph!

POSTSCRIPT

1. After the reemergence of this blog, two of our readers expressed their joy that THE OXOFORD ETYMOLOGIST is back on track. I am deeply grateful for their comments.

2. In connection with my derivation of yeoman, a reader reminded us of the British river yeo and suggested that the earliest yeomen might be recruited from that area. I could find no evidence of this connection, while the existence of another word with yeo– (which I mentioned) and of the Dutch cognate of yeo– seem to point in another direction.

3. In commenting on the history of limerick (see the previous post), Stephen Goranson pointed out that during the Civil War in the US, the phrase come to Limerick meant “get to the point, come to terms,” in connection with the Treaty of Limerick (1691). This is a most welcome reference. Search the Internet for THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.

_{Featured image: Pamphlet, “Adieux de madame la duchesse de Polignac aux francois,” 1789. Photo by Eliasdo, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Bob Turvey, a student of limericks

I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.). The first book was sponsored by The Mad Duck Coalition, about which I know nothing and am not certain whether it should be featured among the publishers. This, however, matters little, because what really matters is the author’s career and achievement. Last week, I promised to write about his books and am happy to be able to keep my promise.

The author’s career is certainly worthy of mention. Bob Turvey has a doctorate from Cambridge University. As a research chemist he worked in many countries and now lives in Bristol, England. He devoted forty years to studying the history of limericks, spared no money on buying old and recondite books, and never stopped learning more and more about his subject. Probably no one in the world knows half as much about limericks as he does, and therefore, I first envisaged a limerick in his honor, composed in my best Bristol fashion. “A limerick, new, for Bob Turvey?! / Indeed, but it went topsy-turvy. / Neither reason nor rhyme. / I am not in my prime, / Though still unabashedly vervy.” Too bad! I mean the self-effacing admission, but at least this is the first occurrence of the adjective vervy in English. Does the OED take note of blogs?

The earlier of the aforementioned volumes contain the history of eighteen famous limericks. By the way, according to Turvey, here is the most often translated limerick ever: “There was an old man of Boolong/ Who frightened the birds with his song/ It wasn’t the words/ Which astonished the birds/ But the horrible dooble-ontong.” This masterpiece is now almost forgotten, or perhaps it has fallen into temporary desuetude. One wonders what there is to study, while dealing with this or any limerick. Many, many things. First of all, the references. For example, what is and where is Boolong? Is it Boulogne? And why is French entendre pronounced in this ridiculous way? It turned out that such was indeed the way people pronounced the French group –endre when, for example, Dickens and Thackeray were active. No, it did not “turn out”: the fact had to be discovered and documented.

And who composed the limerick? We are not delving into the epoch of Homer or even Shakespeare: no limerick predates the nineteenth century. But popular limericks are almost folklore, and finding their authors is like chasing the author of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (By the way, as Jack Zipes has shown, this tale did probably have an individual author!) And here I am coming to one of the main points of my report.

The first printed version of nearly all limericks appeared in students’ magazines at Oxford/Cambridge or in newspapers. Bob Turvey sifted through tens of thousands of pages in British, American, Canadian, and Australian magazines and newspapers, many of which can now (fortunately) be found online, and sometimes (!) he ran into what seemed to be the first occurrence of the printed text. (I know only too well this labor of love, though in hunting for articles and long-forgotten notes on etymology I limited myself to journals and popular magazines. I realized that I would drown in newspapers, with their word columns and answers to the readers’ queries, and stayed away from this inexhaustible source.) But even the seemingly secure result may not be final. Thus, the author of the Boolong limerick remains undiscovered, though at least two viable candidates have emerged as such.

Is this labor worth the trouble? To my mind, certainly. To give an example from another area. Recently, a piece of music has emerged, with the notes written by Chopin. The piece has been known for years, and yet the discovery was hailed as a great sensation. And quite rightly so: Chopin’s own hand! Limericks are a noticeable part of the culture of the English-speaking world, and their history deserves the attention of those who care for culture. Unfortunately, “history” is made up of tiny details. Only later may they be assembled to produce an impressive whole. Bob Turvey collected countless fragments, and the mosaic he produced is impressive. I should add that he is often satisfied with negative results: he might not be able to find the exact date and the sought-for author, but always succeeded in rejecting fanciful hypotheses. Once again I see a parallel to my work. Sifting through numerous hypotheses of a word’s origin, I often manage to get rid of silly or fanciful conjectures but fail to discover the truth. Such is the way of all reconstruction, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Note my reference above to the culture of the English-speaking world. Limericks can also be produced in other languages, but only English speakers compose them by the hundreds. Bob Turvey noted how hard it often is for foreigners to understand the funniest limericks. He ascribed this fact to the specific English sense of humor, but his examples feature the people whose knowledge of English is inadequate for detecting a pun or a hidden reference. Though the English (French, Jewish) sense of humor certainly exists, we still don’t know why Edward Lear’s 1846 The Book of Nonsense was such a success. Limericks, though not called limericks, existed before him.

As noted, Turvey’s second volume is titled Why Are Limericks Called Limericks? But the book is also about when and who. The earliest mention the word limerick Bob Turvey dug up goes back to 1879, that is, at least a decade earlier than what one could find in old dictionaries. Now 1879 is also the date given in the OED online. Rather probably, limericks were called limericks because they were sung between verses of a song whose chorus included the name Limerick and typically invited the listener “to come to Limerick.” Why come to Limerick? The question remains open. For comfort, you will see a view of that town in the heading of this post. Anyone with a better derivation of the word limerick is welcome to contest this hypothesis. Limerick is certainly not a “corrupted” form of Learick.

You expected a sensation and received a reasonable hypothesis. That’s because the author of the books discussed above bases his conclusions on facts and is not interested in sensations. He is a true scholar.

POSTSCRIPT

I have recently received two questions. Since I am not sure when I’ll be able to post the next issue of my traditional gleanings, I’ll answer both right now. 1) Some people believe that the idiom chock a block is a loan from Turkish, in which an identical word means the same. This conjecture looks unconvincing, because their proponents are unable to show how the Turkish idiom reached English. In chock a block, the word chock is the same as in chockfull. 2) Another correspondent cited a Polish word, whose Russian cognate is diuzhii “strong,” and asked me whether I know it. Yes, I do. It is a cognate of English doughty and German tüchtig, whose origin has been explained quite well.

_{Featured image: King John’s Castle in Limerick by Eric the Fish. CC-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Labor and luck in etymology

The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey. He spent forty years researching the subject, and I’ll devote a special post to his work, but at the moment, I can offer only “point counter point”: this short essay is about how worthwhile conclusions come as a reward for an unpredictable encounter or chance knowledge. All the examples are from my own experience, and I have written about them in the past, but they will perhaps make a stronger impression when collected in one place.

An especially enigmatic English word (enigmatic with regard to its origin) is yeoman, which surfaced in written texts in roughly the middle of the thirteenth century (obviously, it existed in speech some time before it was recorded). The riddle is yeo-. The etymology, half-heartedly (?) supported by the revised OED (the entry was touched up last in 2025), traces yeo– to young. I assume that my hypothesis is more realistic, because, for phonetic reasons, yeo- cannot be traced to young.

Now back to coincidence and luck. In my research, I look through numerous books, on the off-chance that they may contain some information I need. In an obscure book on Dutch linguistics, I came across a detailed discussion of the English dialectal noun yeomath “a second-year crop of grass,” which, predictably, the OED also records, and the entry contains a sagacious guess about yeo– that provides a good but not final clue to this enigmatic sound group. Young grass? No, the prefix means “additional.” With regard to the details, see the post for June 17, 2009. A yeoman was, quite probably, understood as an “added man.” In nearly seven years since 2009, neither Wikipedia nor etymonline (both are sensitive to new hypotheses) has commented on my suggestion, and I decided to repeat it here. I also contributed an essay on yeoman to an excellent Festschrift, but alas, the scholarly climate has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. Such volumes, honoring retired and still active philologists, are now so numerous that even specialists have a hard time following them.

Watch one more attack on grassroots. English fog means “thick mist,” but in dialects, fog also refers to “second-year crop.” This time, it was a different kind of luck that provided a clue to the riddle. How can “fog” and “grass” be connected? By an accident of birth, my native language is Russian, and I know the Russian words par “steam, vapor” and par “field left under steam/vapor.” Both have the root meaning “to become damp, moist.” Fog, with its final g, is almost certainly a word of Scandinavian origin (English words, like sedge. ridge, bridge, and so forth, end an affricate). Related to this fog is, quite probably, German feucht “damp.” The same semantic thread connects Russian par¹ and par² as the two English nouns. If I did not know Russian, this analogy would never have occurred to me.

Another reward for knowing Russian may not impress too many of our readers, because that key word is Icelandic, rather than English. Yet the case is curious. Icelandic glenna refers to all kinds of open spaces, from “a ray of sunshine” and “a deceptive move in wrestling” to “a clearing in the forest” and “perineum” (hear, hear!). It also means “joke” and all kinds of trickery. Given enough ingenuity, semantic bridges can be built between any two concepts, but still, “joke” and “perineum”?

I decided to look up Russian shutka “joke” in etymological dictionaries and discovered that its Bulgarian cognate means “vagina.” This sense left Bulgarian researchers nonplused. But Icelandic glenna explains everything. We remember “perineum,” don’t we? In the past, shutka referred to a quick motion, leap (with the legs spread wide!), and the like. Henceanytype of opening. The sought for connection becomes clear when we look at all the old senses of shutka and the word’s related forms. But who knows Icelandic, Russian, and Bulgarian?

Until roughly the 1870s, most specialists in comparative philology were Germans. As we have seen, to connect glenna and shutka, an inquisitive linguist should be aware of the relevant Russian and Icelandic words and “accidentally” note the otherwise hidden connection. Too bad, I have never studied Welsh, Ewe, and Japanese. What precious associations must be left fallow in them, as far as I am concerned! A few historical linguists of old, Jacob Grimm and Antoine Meillet among them, knew many languages. Today, their peers are rare. To exacerbate the situation, famous polyglots, those who can talk glibly in thirty or more languages, are seldom endowed with great analytic abilities. As St. Exupéry’s Fox remarked sadly, nothing in the world is perfect.

My most amusing discovery, which I have celebrated more than once in my publications, concerns the origin of the noun pimp. See also the post for June 7, 2007. The word did not interest me, but while reading an old dialectal dictionary, I ran into the entry “pimp ‘faggot’.” I was surprised by the proximity of two infamous nouns with sexual connotations and discovered that the origin of pimp is “contested.” It is “contested,” because older English etymologists did not know the German word Pimpf, while German scholars had no idea of English pimps. Pimpf refers to a youth and specifically, to a member of the youth organization under Hitler. Like Engl. pimp and pimple, it has a root meaning “to swell” (faggots, that is, bundles of sticks, are, it follows, big pimps!).

Finally, galoot “an awkward fellow.” Like pimp, it revealed its history to me by chance. An article on Italian seafaring terms made me aware of the Italian noun galeotto “galley slave; scoundrel.” The rest was plain sailing. My etymology, proposed first in the post for July 23, 2008, has had some recognition, but alas, Webster and the OED keep saying “origin unknown.” I am patient. Everything comes to him who waits, and I hope that the tie I suggested will one day gain wider recognition.

Luck? To be sure. But to quote Tchaikovsky, inspiration never visits the lazy.

_{Featured image: Yeomen of the Guard, in procession to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for the annual service of the Order of the Garter. Philip Allfrey, CC-by-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Your Indo-European beard

It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name. This rule works for foot, partly for eye and ear, and also for heart (even though the heart isn’t typically open to direct observation), but it breaks down for finger, toe, and leg. In any case, beards cannot easily be hidden, even with our passion for masks. Moreover, through millennia, beards have played a role far in excess of their importance, and beard is indeed a very old word. A beard used to manifest virility and strength in an almost mystical way. We remember the story of Samson: once deprived of his beard, he became a weakling and had to wait until the hair grew again on his chin, to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The earliest example of clean-shaven in The Oxford English Dictionary (OED online) goes back to 1863 (in a poem by Longfellow!), while beardless was usually applied to boy and young man.

Five years ago, I discussed, among other things, the origin of the idiom to go to Jericho, roughly synonymous with to go to hell. Judging by what turns up on the Internet, today, the origin of the phrase is known to those who are interested in etymology, but Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) claimed that he could not find any explanation for it and referred to the Old Testament (2 Sam. X. 5 and 1 Chron. X. 5). He appears to have been the first to explain the phrase.

The story runs as follows: after the death of the king of the Ammonites, David sent his envoys to Hanun, the son of the deceased king, to comfort him. But Hanun’s counselors suspected treason, seized the envoys, had half of their beards cut off, and sent the men back. This incautious move resulted in a protracted war and the defeat of the Ammonites. When David’s envoys, deeply humiliated and almost beardless, returned home, David advised them to “tarry at Jericho till their beards were grown.” In their present shape, they were “emasculated” and could not be seen in public.

Reference to the absence of a beard is familiar from various sources. Thus, Njál, the protagonist of the most famous Icelandic saga, was wise and virile but had almost no hair on his chin, and this defect became an object of obscene jokes. By contrast, the great Scandinavian god Thor (Þórr) did have a huge beard. More about the Scandinavians will be said below.

English beard has a few immediately recognizable cognates in Germanic, such as Dutch baard and German Bart. The Slavic and Baltic words sound nearly the same. Latin barba, despite some inconsistency in the correspondence between the final consonants, seems to belong here too. But barbarian does not. Barbarian was a Greek coinage (the Greek name for beard is quite different) and referred to foreigners and their incomprehensible babbling. Those people did say something (barabara), but who could understand them, and who cared? Perhaps it should be added that the Old Celtic name for the poet (bard) has nothing to do with beards either.

As usual, a list of cognates may not tell us anything about the ultimate origin of the word (in this case, beard), and as happens so often, we find ourselves in a linguistic desert. It is not for nothing that while discussing beard, our best dictionaries list several related forms and stop. There was indeed the Old Icelandic noun barð “edge, verge, rim” (ð has the value of th in English the), but whether it is cognate with beard is unclear. It may be: the affinity between “beard” and “edge” is obvious. If so, the association that gave rise to the coining of beard stops being obscure. (Though Icelandic barð “beard” also existed, it might be a later loan from German.)

The only other Germanic name of the beard occurred just in Icelandic, and its cognates continue into Modern Scandinavian. The word was skegg, related to Old English sceacga “rough hair or wool.” Its modern reflex shag still exists, but most will remember only the adjective shaggy, related to Old English sceaga “thicket of underwood and small trees; coppice, copse,” almost a doublet of sceacga, cited above.” (In my experience, no one recognizes the word coppice, and even the spellchecker does not know copse; hence my long gloss.) We have seen that in some societies, a beardless man was not really considered to be a true male, and in light of this fact we are not surprised to find that Old Icelandic skeggi meant “man” (boys of course waited for the time when they became men). Yet the famous Romans (as far as we can judge by the extant statues) were beardless, while the Greeks had sizable beards. No custom is or was universal.

Coppice and copse are almost dead words in Modern English, and the same holds for shaw “thicket,” the modern reflex of sceacga, though still common in dialects and place names. The word owes its fame to George Bernard Shaw. No need to feel surprised at the existence of such a surname: don’t all of us know the family name Wood?

One of the curiosities of English is the verb beard “to oppose,” remembered, if at all, only from the idiom “to beard the lion in his den.” Is the implication “to face the enemy (beard to beard)” or “to catch the opponent by the beard”? An example of this phrase also occurs in the Authorized Version of the Bible, and again in connection with David. Beards, it appears, were famous, but they had to be cut and trimmed. Thorr was an obvious exception (but in the figurine that has come down to us, his beard merges with his male organ and emphasizes his potency, which is fair: an ancient thunder god was responsible for fertility). Having paid reference to shaggy males, let us also remember barbers. Today, a barber more often cuts hair than trims beards, but the etymology of barber is obvious. The Barber of Seville immortalized the profession. Long live Beaumarchais and Rossini!

_{Featured image: the Florida Grand Opera presents The Barber of Seville. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A handful of remarks on hinting and hunting

Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together. My pair of distinguished guests is hint and hunt. They look very much alike and, in a way, their meanings are not incompatible: both presuppose the existence of a searched-for target. One wonders whether they aren’t even variants of the same verb or at least related.

It is the third time that I am returning to the origin of English hunt. See especially the post for February 12, 2020, and the comments. There will be some overlap between that essay and the one I am offering today, but now that several years have passed, I think I have partly solved the riddle (for myself) and decided to return to that intractable word.

Like some older authors, I suspect that hint and hunt are related. They even resemble non-identical twins. Mark Twain wrote a little-remembered but very funny tale “The Siamese Twins.” In the final sentence, it informs the reader that the ages of the brothers were respectively fifty-one and fifty-three. The author apologized for not mentioning this fact earlier. I decided to avoid his mistake and to make things clear right away. Hunt (the verb) has been known since the days of Old English, that is, for more than twelve centuries. By contrast, hint (the noun) first surfaced in texts by Shakespeare.

Though hint is a relatively recent word without a respectable pedigree, it looks like it belongs with hunt and hand (we use the hand for seizing things; hence an association with hunting). As expected, opinions on their relationship differ. Hunt is a typical English verb for “chasing game.” It lacks obvious cognates, but in many other languages, words meaning “hunt” are also obscure. For example, German has jagen, about whose origin nothing definite is known either.

There may be a good reason for this seemingly unexpected opaqueness—unexpected, because hunting is such a common and seemingly transparent occupation. For millennia, hunting sustained early communities, and people’s survival depended on the success of the chase. Danger lurked everywhere: the hunter might get lost, killed by his prey, or return empty-handed. Words designating such situations often fell victim to taboo, just as, for example, many animal names did. Call the bear by its name, and it will come and destroy you. But if you speak about the bear as a honey-lover (that is what they do in Russian) or the brown one (that is the case in Germanic: from a historical point of view, bear means “brown”), the beast will be duped and stay away. (Talk of the Devil, and he will appear! Right?) The same practice prevailed for the names of several wild animals, body parts, and diseases. (My apology: taboo was also made much of in the earlier post.)

Common words were distorted, and today we usually have no way of guessing what the original form was. Yet we sometimes know the idea behind the euphemism: for example, not the Devil but the Evil One (or Flibbertigibbet, for variety’s sake); not the bear, but the honey-eater or the brown one. The main Latin verb meaning “to hunt” was vēnārī, related to Venus. The idea must have been “to do something with a will, full of desire.” (A digression: the most often hunted animal was the deer, so much so that Tier, the German cognate of deer, means simply “animal.” Deer is a Germanic word, but those who have read the anthologized opening chapter in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe know that it was the Anglo-Saxons who killed deer, while the meat went to the table of the French barons. Hence venison, related to the Latin verb, cited above.)

The same seems to hold for Russian okhota (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic; stress on the second syllable): the root khot– means “to wish, desire.” The English verb hunt should probably be “deciphered” as “to catch, seize.” Perhaps, it was a vague taboo word, like its Latin and Slavic synonyms. If hint really appeared so late, it cannot be related to hunt, which, though devoid of relatives (and thus “local”), was already old even in Old English.

Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. Hint, first recorded as a noun, meant “opportunity; slight indication or suggestion”; thus, just a dab, as it were. It was a mere reshaping (or an alternate form) of the now obsolete old verb hent “get, receive”! The desired time bridge has thus been restored. We can proceed with our chase, and while looking around, we notice the already mentioned hand, a Common Germanic word again (!) of uncertain origin, to quote some dictionaries (elsewhere in Indo-European, this extremity has quite different names.)

Could hand also be a taboo word for something like manus (manus is Latin for “hand”)? Indeed, it could. As just noted, the names of body parts are often products of taboo. Hand is an instrument of catching, grasping, “handling” things. It is an ideal member of our ill-assorted family. The scholarly literature on hunt and especially hand is huge, and many (but not all) language historians defend the ideas mentioned above. The bridge exists. Though it rests on unsafe supports, it may sustain the construction rather well.

The final actor in our drama is the Gothic verb fra-hinþan “to take captive” (fra– is a prefix; þ has the value of English th in thin). Gothic, a Germanic language (now dead), was recorded in the fourth century. Some of the Old Germanic words, related to –hinþan, mean “to reach” and “booty.” Though –hinþan and hand have often been compared, þ and d don’t match, and a reliable reconstruction depends on exact sound correspondences. Once such correspondences fail, etymologists are in trouble. However, here we seem to be dealing with a “special” taboo word, and it would be unrealistic to expect great precision in the coining of its forms. Obviously, I am pleading for special dispensation.

As usual, I refuse to press my point, but I also refuse to concede defeat. It sems that a special taboo word with the sense “grasp, seize, catch,” sharing the root hent/hint ~ hunt ~ hand did exist in Germanic, and its reflexes are still discernible today. Hinþan was a strong verb (that is, a verb, whose root vowels alternated by ablaut, as, for instance, in English bind ~ bound or run ~ ran). The nouns, related to it, were like English bend and band. If this conclusion deserves credence, hint (from hent), hunt, and hand are modern reflexes of that ancient taboo word. Let me repeat that numerous researchers think so, but the most cautious critics prefer to sit on the fence. This is fine. The fence is as good a support as any other.

_{Featured image via Pixabay.}

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An etymological knockout

We know that in English words beginning with kn– and gn– the first letter is mute. Even in English spelling, which is full of the most bizarre rules, this one causes surprise. But no less puzzling is the rule’s historical basis. At one time, know, knock, gnaw, and their likes were pronounced as they still are in related Germanic languages, that is, with k– and g- in the onset. What happened to those k- and g- sounds? The groups are hardly tongue twisters and give no one trouble in the middle of acne, acknowledge, magnet, and ignite. To be sure, in acne and their likes, k/g and n belong to different syllables, but one sometimes hears canoeing, pronounced as c’noeing, and the first consonant survives. Nor is the group kn endangered in the coda, as in taken and spoken. (Yet King Knut has become Canute: don’t expect justice from language!)

According to the evidence of contemporary observers, the destruction of k and g before n happened about five centuries ago, that is, shortly before and in Shakespeare’s time. Why did it? True, sounds undergo modification in the process of speech. For instance, most people pronounce a group like his shoes as hishshooz (this process is called assimilation), but kn– and gn– are word-initial groups, and no neighbors threaten k- and g-. As a most general rule, the cause of a systemic sound change is another major sound change. Obviously, this is not the case with initial kn– and gn– in English: no previous event triggered the loss of k and g before n.

A few analogs of the change in English have been found in German Bavarian dialects, but nothing even remotely resembling the loss of k and g before n has happened elsewhere in Germanic. In the remote past, many words began with hl– and hn-. Thus, listen and neck were at one time hlysta and hnecca, but h is a perishable sound, and “dropping” it causes little surprise. By contrast, k and g are sturdy. Our best books on the history of English describe in detail the loss of k and g before n but are silent on the causes.

Nor can I offer an airtight argument about why that process occurred, but I decided to look at the origin of the affected words and risk putting forward a hypothesis. Though knee and know have secure Indo-European cognates, most other items on the list are limited to Germanic. As usual, cognates shed little light on the prehistory of the words that interest us unless their senses diverge radically. In this case, they do not. Here are two instances. Knack: perhaps borrowed from Low German or Dutch; of imitative origin, because knack “sharp blow” exists, and in English (knack), we may be dealing with the same word. (German Knacks means “crack.”) Likewise, knapsack was taken over from the same sources, with knap perhaps being related to German knappen “to snap, crush”; thus, knap is a doublet of snap and snatch, both possibly sound-imitative.

The latest (cautious and conservative) German etymological dictionary says bluntly that kn– is a sound-symbolic group denoting pressure. The statement looks correct, but it is doomed to remain guesswork: since many words with initial kn– refer to pressure, we conclude that such is the nature of this group. The vicious circle in this reasoning (begging the question) is obvious. We are on safer ground with knell: all over Germanic, knell-, knoll-, and their look-alikes and synonyms are probably indeed sound-imitative.  

Knot and knit perhaps make us think of some increase in size. Both evoke clear visual images and are thus in some way “expressive.” Knob and its near-synonym knub (both mean “a small lump”) align themselves rather easily with the rest of kn-words. The same holds for knop “a round protuberance.” The idea that Germanic kn– is expressive (whether sound-imitative or sound symbolic) is old, and I hope the suggestion I am about to advance has some merit. Couldn’t the semantics of kn-words, their constant use under emphasis, contribute to the simplification of kn-?

Every sound change has a cause, but none is necessary. The same words retained their initial kn– in Frisian, Dutch, and Scandinavian. Languages and dialects go their different ways. It is the system’s business to ignore and suppress or make use of the stimulus. The same is true of every change. For instance, some societies resolve crises peacefully, while others are famous for continual revolutions.

If my guess has any merit, it follows that once the group kn– lost its k, the non-symbolic knife (or is it sound-symbolic?!), knee, and know remained in isolation and followed suit under the pressure of the system. It would be interesting to observe whether they were indeed the last to succumb. But we cannot relive the past in such detail, and our spelling makes us blind to the change: we still write kn-, long after its loss of k. Kn- probably did not become n– as an instantaneous act: more likely, it went through the stage of initial hn-, and some kn- ~ hn– doublets indeed existed in Old Norse.

The English gn– group is tiny: gnarled, gnash, gnat, gnaw, and a few bookish loan words: gneiss “a kind of rock,” gnome “a legendary creature,” gnosis (as recognizable in agnostic), and gnu “an African quadruped.” Gnarled is a misbegotten word, whose cognates begin with kn-. German Knorren means “knot, gnarl.” In any case, gnarled is from the historical point of view another kn-word. For the verb gnaw (Old Icelandic gnaga, German nagen) an ancient Indo-European root has been reconstructed, because similar words occur outside Germanic, but more probably, we are again dealing with a sound-imitative verb, and the same is true of gnash. It is curious that Old Icelandic gnat meant “noise.” The same is true of many Scandinavian words beginning with gn-.

Incidentally, n- in the verb neigh goes back to Old English hn-, and we witness a curious set of variants: Old Icelandic gneggja, Modern Icelandic hneggja, and Swedish gnägga versus Swedish regional knäja. This unexpected variation perhaps confirms my guess that however English kn– may have lost its k, it went through the stage hn-. At present, English has retained initial h before a consonant only in the speech of those who distinguish between witch and which, but hn-, hl, and hr– are the norm in Modern Icelandic.

If some students of the history of English sounds happen to read this blog, it would be interesting to know their opinion about my hypothesis. Here it is in a nutshell: English words with kn– and gn– lost their k/g under emphasis, because nearly all of them had a strong expressive character.

Editor’s Note: We’re taking next week off, but Anatoly will be back the following week with a new post!

_{Featured image: Image by Birgit from Pixabay.}

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