Tag: Fun Etymology

Hello all! It’s your favourite time of the week again: Fun Ety Time! This week, the word is ‘villain’.

For any francophones out there, the French-looking spelling certainly gives away the origin of this word, no? It’s actually no red herring – ‘villain’ does indeed enter English through Old French and Anglo-Norman (the latter is the variety of Norman French spoken in England after the Norman conquest).

Today, ‘villain’ mostly refers to an antagonist in literature or media, someone criminal or with evil intent, but when we first see ‘villain’ appearing in the early 14th century, its meaning referred more to someone low-born and dishonourable, rather than the more specific meaning it has today.

So how did we get to the low-born dishonorable use in the first place? The Old French word comes from the Latin ‘villanus’, which is a derivation of the word ‘villa’, meaning… well, roughly what you’d expect: a big country house or farm.

In fact, ‘villain’ originally simply referred to someone who lived on a farm. Then, people’s prejudice took the reins and we now only find the pejorative meaning of ‘villain’ in both English and French. This is just one of many examples of a word receiving a more negative or positive meaning due to the social connotations it brings.

That’s it for now, tune in next week for more etymology fun!

A late Tuesday FunEty for you, friends! Today’s word is “disaster”!

This word can refer to any unfortunate or ruinous event, and it’s origins is a bit all over the map (not really, but it does have multiple origins).

Partly, it’s a borrowing from French “desastre”, from Italian “disastro”, which in turn is modelled on an Occitan lexical item. For those of you who are, like i was before this post, somewhat unfamiliar with the Occitan language, it is a Romance language, spoken in southern France, Italy’s Occitan Valleys, Monaco and Spain’s Val d’Aran. Some also consider Catalan to be included. However, the unity of the Occitan language is a bit disputed, and some consider it a macrolanguage, that is, a language with widely varying dialects.

Anyway, back to “disaster”. So, Italian “disastro” can here be split into two: the prefix “dis-“, equivalent to English “mis-“ meaning ill, and “astro” from Latin “astrum”, meaning star. So, disaster could be translated, literally, to “ill-star(red)”.

So what about Occitan? Well, in Old Occitan, we find “desastre”, which is probably from Old Occitan “dezastruc”, which also meant “ill-starred” from late 12th century.

I hope you enjoyed that little trip, I know I did! Now, excuse me while I go read up some more on the Occitan language!

Tuesday! Let’s go, shall we?

Today’s word is “mortgage”. Few of us wish to have one, a non-wish reflected in its etymology!

Coming to English during the 14th century, this word comes from Old French “morgage”, a compound from “mort gage”, ultimately from post-classical Latin mortuum vadium, literally meaning “dead pledge”!

The term stems from the fact that a deal dies when the debt is paid (or, in worst case scenario, when payment fails). In English, it was actually borrowed straight off as “morgage”, the <t> being restored in modern English on the basis of Latin mortuum.

So let those debts die (in the good way, that is), ladies and gents, and see you next week for more Fun Etymology!

I’m obsessed with looking up etymologies, you know, that’s why I’m here every Tuesday! So, I figured it was appropriate that today’s word should be “obsess”!

From Latin “obsessus”, the past participle of “obsidere”, meaning to watch closely, besiege, occupy; stay, remain or abide.

The Latin word can actually be split in two: “ob”, meaning against, and “sedere”, meaning to sit, so the Latin word literally means “sit opposite to”.

When it came to English, around the year 1500, it had come to mean something like “to besiege”, and from around 1530, we get the “ghost” sense of being obsessed by an evil spirit.

The most common meaning today, though, may be the psychological one, that is “I am obsessed with FunEty!”, but that is a late sense of the word that didn’t develop until the 20th century.

Tuesdays! Isn’t it just a great day? I mean, yes, it’s a long way until the weekend, but there’s a new FunEty!

Let’s take a look at something one should never do: today’s word is “ostracise”!

This word shows up in English in the late 16th century, originally coming from Middle French “ostracisme”. The French word came from either Latin “ostracismus” or directly from Greek “ostrakismos”, which in turn cake from the Greek word “ostrakon”, meaning a tile or potsherd. The PIE-root, *ost-, meant bone, which is also the source of Modern German’s “Estrich”, meaning pavement.

Now to the good stuff: how did a Greek word, referring to a tile or potsherd, come to mean something like excluding someone?

Well, the word itself was actually a name of a particular public practice in Ancient Athens! People would gather around and write the name of a person that they thought was dangerous to the state on a potsherd or a tile. If someone’s name showed up one too many times, that person was banished from Athens for a period of 10 years! A couple of centuries later, we thus find the word “ostracise”, with its current meaning, in English!

However, we could have gotten a word more like “petalise” (or something), if the word had been borrowed from the people of Ancient Syracuse instead as a similar practice, though somewhat more lenient with a banishment of only 5 years, was performed there. Instead of writing on tiles or potsherds, though, the people of Syracuse wrote on olive leaves, and the practice was thus called “petalismos”.

The more you know…

See you next week!

It’s (one of) our favourite day(s) again – time for some FunEty!

Today’s word is “genuine”!

As you may have guessed, this word comes to English from the Latin word “genuinus”, meaning native, natural or innate. This Latin form comes from the root “gignere”, meaning to beget or produce, which in turn comes from the PIE root *gene-, meaning to give birth or beget. It may, perhaps, have been influenced by the contrasting form “adulterinus”, meaning spurious.

Coming to English in the sense of natural or not acquired in the 1590s, it isn’t recorded with the meaning of “really proceeding from its reputed source” until the 1660s.

Here’s the twist to today’s FunEty, though: rather than the origin outlined above, an alternative etymology has been suggested! In this origin-story, it is suggested that the Latin root is actually “genu”, meaning knee, from a supposed ancient custom of acknowledging paternity of a babe by the father placing the child on his knee!

That’s it for today! See you next week!

Time for some FunEty!

Today’s word is “palace”. From Old French “palais”, meaning a palace or court, this word entered the English language around the early 13th century and used to refer to the official residence of an emperor, king, archbishop, and so on. Eventually, around the late 14th century, it had undergone semantic broadening and had come to mean something like a splendid dwelling place.

The Old French word, though, hails from Medieval Latin “palacium”, also meaning simply a palace, a word which is also the ancestor of Spanish “palacio” and Italian “palazzo”. However, the Latin word also comes from somewhere, in this case from the Latin word “palatium”, also “Mons Palatinus”, meaning the Palatine hill!

Why this specific hill, you wonder? Well, you see, the Palatine Hill was one of the seven hills of Ancient Rome, upon which we, if we were to travel back in time, would find the residence of one Augustus Caesar! A bit later in time, we might instead find the splendid residence of emperor Nero so this hill has certainly had some splendid palaces in its time!

And it doesn’t even end there! The name of the Palatine Hill may be traced back to the word “palus”, meaning something like stake but likely on the notion of enclosure. Another guess, though, is that it derives from Etruscan and is connected with the name Pales, an italic goddess of shepherds and cattle.

That’s it for today! See you next week!

Another Tuesday comes our way – and with it comes another FunEty!

But first: We here at the HLC are thrilled to say that our readership is steadily growing – and we recently passed 200 likes here on FB! So, to all our followers, old and new, thank you for joining us on this trip, we hope that you’re enjoying it as much as we are! And – as per usual – if there’s anything you want to read about that we haven’t talked about yet, let us know!

But enough of that, you came here for FunEty! Today’s word is “hazard”.

It’s quite clear that this word was borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman “asard”, Middle French “hasard” or “hasart”, but before that, the etymology is a bit unclear.

It is possible that it was borrowed from the Spanish word “azar”, meaning an unfortunate card or throw at dice, which in turn is said to be from Arabic “as-zahr”, from “al-zahr”, meaning the (al-) die (-zahr). The problem with that, though, is that (1) our first attestations of Spanish “azar” is actually later than the first attestations of the French word and (2) the word is not attested in Classical Arabic, from which it was supposedly borrowed.

That’s tricky. Regarding the second issue, some scholars (Klein for example) have suggested the Arabic word “yasara”, meaning “he played at dice”, as the origin of Spanish “azar”, arguing that Arabic -s- regularly becomes Spanish -z-. The -d was, it is also argued, added when the word had been borrowed by French, through confusion with the native French suffix -ard. The first may perhaps be explained by loss of historical material (though, really, we don’t know).

The sense of the word also evolved in French, coming to mean “chances in gambling”, and then later “chances in life”. The sense of chance of loss or harm, or a risk of some kind, is first recorded in English during the 1540s.

A bit earlier than that, around 1500, we also see the emergence of this noun as a transitive verb (that is, a verb that takes an object).

So there you have it: an ultimately fairly unclear etymology, I’m afraid, but that’s the way of historical linguistics!

Join us again next week, friends!

And so, another Tuesday has come our way and with it comes another Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “clue”. While it’s ultimate origin is fairly straightforward – it being a native Germanic word – this little noun has undergone a rather interesting semantic shift.

You see, “clue”, meaning anything that guides or directs you in an intricate case, is actually a special use of a revised spelling of “clew”, meaning a ball of thread or yarn! The sense shift is originally seen in reference to the clew of thread given by Ariadne, the daughter of king Minos of Crete, to Theseus to use as a guide out of the Labyrinth in Greek mythology. Around 1620, the meaning of the word had adopted the figurative sense of “that which points the way”, without regard to labyrinths.

But what about the spelling? How did -ew(e) become -ue? Well, here, you can see some real French influence – you see, some words borrowed from French were spelt -ew in Middle English, but -ue or -eu in French. Eventually, this spelling spread and came to influence native forms too: you also see it in words like “hue” and “true”. In our case, the spelling “clue” is first attested around the mid-15th century.

A final side note: the sense that “clue” may indicate something which a bewildered person does not have is a late sense of the word and didn’t really occur until ca. 1948.

That’s it for today’s FunEty – now you have a clue! (Sorry, couldn’t resist).

Don’t forget to join us on Thursday when we welcome our very first guest blogger here at the HLC! See you then!

It’s Tuesday again! You know what that means!

Today’s word is “sandwich” and it’s a little different from the stories we usually tell here. No “it comes from PIE …” today! Instead, this word is actually said to come from an English title: the Earl of Sandwich. Specifically, it’s said that a ”sandwich” is named after the 4th Earl, John Montagu (1718-1792), an inveterate gambler. Why mention gambling? Well, supposedly, good old John once spent twenty-four hours (!) at the gaming-table, forgoing proper meals and instead had slices of cold beef placed between slices of toast, thus “creating” the sandwich! This account is given by Grosley in his book “Londres”, from 1770, in which he speaks of the word as recently coming into use (according to the OED – we have unfortunately not been able to access the original source).

As for the family name “Sandwich”, it is from Old English Sandwicæ (meaning literally “sandy harbour”), and is a place-name, referring to the historic town Sandwich in the county of Kent in south-east England.

So next time you grab a sandwich, spare a moment to thank the gambling Earl, and don’t forget to join us next week for another Fun Etymology Tuesday!