Category: Fun Etymology

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!

We’ve come to yet another Tuesday and, as always (though a bit late), here’s your Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “wine”!

In Old English, we find the word “win”, from Proto-Germanic *winam, an early borrowing of Latin “vinum”, from PIE *woin-o, which is related to Greek “oinos”, as well as the Armenian, Hittite, non-Indo-European Georgian and West Semitic (Arabic “wain”, Hebrew yayin).

Because all of these languages appear to share this word, some scholars have suggested that it may have been borrowed from a Mediterranean language that has since been lost to us. Others, however, suggest that the immediate origin for the Greek, Latin, and Albanian word is primitive Armenian *woiniyo (Armenian gini). However, that explanation does not quite cover why the word shows up in many Indo-European languages and, ultimately, like so many things in historical linguistics, the origin of “wine” remains somewhat obscure.

See you next week!

Time for some Tuesday fun!

Today’s word is “whiskey”! Coming to English around 1715, this name of an alcoholic beverage made from either malt (in Scotland and Ireland) or corn or rye (US), comes from the Gaelic word “uisge beatha”, literally meaning the water of life! The Gaelic word comes from Old Irish “uisce”, meaning “water”, from a compounded form of the PIE root *ud-skio-, a suffixed Form of the root *wed, meaning water or wet, and “bethu”, meaning life, from a suffixed form of the PIE root *gwei-, meaning to live.

The Gaelic is probably also a loan, this time from Medieval Latin’s “aqua vitae”, a name applied to intoxicating drinks since early 14th century.

There’s some spelling variation in the modern English word (in Scotch “whisky” and in Irish and American it’s “whiskey”), but that’s a 19th century innovation. Before that though, whiskey could be spelt in a good number of ways: in 1580, we find the spelling “iskie bae” and as late as 1706, we find the rather interesting variant: “usquebea”! How about that for spelling variation?

See you next week!

And we’re back, with yet another Fun Etymology! Today’s word is “spirits” (in the alcoholic sense of the word).

The word itself comes from Anglo-French spirit, Old French espirit, from Latin spiritus, meaning a breathing (both respiration and of the wind, breath and breath of god. From this Latin root, we also get spirit (meaning the soul or a ghost), of course, which is related with a bunch of other sayings (like being in “high spirit”). The Latin root is related to Latin spirare, meaning “to breathe”, perhaps from PIE *(s)peis-, meaning “to blow” (which, btw, is the source of Old Church Slavonic pisto, meaning to play on the flute).

So, how did we get from breathing to liquor? Well, from the late 14th century, this word started to be used in alchemy, meaning a “volatile substance” or “distillate”, and from c. 1500 as “substance capable of uniting the fixer and the volatile elements of the philosopher’s stone”. Sound kinda Harry Potter-y right? Anyway, this led to spirits meaning a “volatile substance”, a meaning that became semantically narrowed to “strong alcoholic liquor” by the 1670s.

A pretty long trip from it’s “original” meaning and it’s modern, wouldn’t you say?

Welcome back next week!

FunEty-time!

Today’s word is “liquor”. Coming to English during the Middle English period from Old French licor, from Latin liquorem (in nominative form becoming liquor), which originally came from the word liquere, this little word is an excellent example of a semantic language change known as “semantic narrowing”.
You see, the Latin form liquorem could indicate a liquid, liquor, wine or even the sea! The older Latin form liquere simply meant “be fluid, liquid” so it didn’t necessarily indicate something containing alcohol. The narrowed sense caught on quickly though, and roughly 100 years (c1300) after the word itself was first recorded, the narrowed meaning of some fermented or distilled drink shows up. By the 18th century, the broader sense that the word originally had appears to have become obsolete and we’re left with a much more limited meaning. Such language changes are quite common in languages as they evolve, and we’ll definitely see more of them in coming FunEties, but in the meantime, enjoy the fact that “As long as liquor is in him” was a Middle English expression, “as long as he is alive”.

Welcome back next week!