Category: Fun Etymology

Aaaand it’s Tuesday again! I’ll admit, I enjoy doing your FunEty every week, it is such an interesting way to learn more stuff! I hope that you agree!

Let’s talk “alcohol”! This word came to English during the early 15th century as “alcofol”, meaning any very fine powder! This word comes from Latin alcohol, meaning the powdered ore of antimony, ‫but‬ ultimately derived from Arabic ‫اَلْكُحْل‬‎ “al-kuhl” which was the metallic powder used to darken the eyelids! “Al-“ is the definite article “the” in Arabic and “kuhl” comes from the Arabic word “kahala”, meaning to stain or paint.

By the late 17th century, alcohol was used in English to mean the pure spirit of anything, including liquids, but we have to wait all the way until 1753 before it is first recorded to mean the intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor, which was then extended to meaning the intoxicating element in fermented liquors!

Goodness, that’s quite a trip! Join us next time when we look a bit closer at the word liquor, which doesn’t always (or at least didn’t always) refer to alcoholic drinks. Welcome back!

It’s Tuesday! Again! Where does the time go? You may or may not have noticed that the HLC website was down earlier today but don’t fret! It’s up and running again, working as smoothly as ever, though we went a bit berserk when we realised that it was down.

Speaking of berserk, it’s our word of the day!

This word, though you might think it an early arrival to the English language (I mean, Vikings were around quite early on) actually wasn’t introduced in English until the mid-19th century, by the legendary Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott who used the word “berserkar”, reportedly believing that it came from Old Norse “berr”, meaning bare or naked, and “serkr”, meaning shirt.

Scott thus seems to have believed that it meant something like “warrior who fights without armour” though, while that may or may not be true, the word is more likely to hail from Old Norse “berserkr”, meaning a raging warrior of superhuman strength.

This Old Norse word is ultimately a compounded form of Proto-Germanic *ber-, meaning bear, and “serkr”, thus literally meaning “a warrior clothed in bear skin” (and perhaps insinuating the power of a bear, though that’s conjecture on our part).

Welcome back next week!

Hey, so remember last Tuesday when we said that we’re gonna talk about something that, if you’re unlucky, comes to you at night today?

Well, so we are: today’s word is… nightmare!

A compounded word from Old English ‘niht’, meaning as we learned last week “night”, and mære, meaning “incubus”. It is cognate with Middle Dutch nachtmare, German Nachtmahr.

In fact, from the late 13th century to the mid 16th, the word nightmare did refer to an incubus, or an evil female spirit who afflicts sleepers with a feeling of suffocation. Around mid-16th century, the meaning shifted from incubus to the suffocating feeling that it causes but the meaning of “bad dream” is first recorded as late as in 1829 and the meaning of “very bad experience” is first recorded in 1831!

Welcome back to yet another Fun Etymology Tuesday (or as I’ve simple started calling them: FunEtys)!

Today, we go into the depths of darkness… today’s word is night!

From Old English niht, pronounced [nixt] ([x] is the sound found in Scottish “loch”), West Saxon neaht, Anglian næht, neht. This word means simply “night” or “darkness” from Proto-Germanic *nahts, from PIE *nekwt-, also meaning “night”. The PIE root is also source of Greek nuks “a night”, Latin nox, Old Irish nochd, Sanskrit naktam “at night, Lithuanian naktis “night,” Old Church Slavonic nosti, Russian noch’, Welsh henoid “tonight”).

In English, the modern vowel indicates that the word came from the oblique cases of Old English and the -gh- spelling is actually due to a Middle English scribal habit: before -t, hard H, that is [x] here, often came to be represented by scribes as gh (though the no-longer-used letter yogh (ȝ) could also be used)!

That’s all for our little “time-related” theme! Next week, join us for something that, if you’re unlucky, comes to you at night…..

See you then!

Ladies and gents! We did promise to keep it up and up we shall keep it!

Today is Tuesday and it’s time for another Fun Etymology! Today’s word is “evening”!

From Old English æfnung, meaning “the coming of evening, sunset, time around sunset” from æfnian “become evening, grow toward evening” from æfen “evening”. Originally, evening was a synonym of the noun “even”, also from æfen, which had lost its final -n somewhere around the 13th century and show up around the year 1200 as, you guessed it, “eve”! Now, “eve” referred specifically the time between sunset and darkness but has, of course, become superseded by evening nowadays while “Eve” has undergone a semantic narrowing, meaning that it now refers only to very specific evenings (Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, etc.).

You might notice something lacking in our etymology! If you did, we’re sorry! We would love to go further back than Old English but, as a matter of fact, we can’t! We know that this word comes from a Common Germanic base as we find cognates in most Germanic languages (Swedish “afton”, German “Abend”, Dutch “avond”, etc.) but the Proto-Germanic word itself remains elusive (though several hypothesis have been studied throughout the years).

As you know by now, that sometimes happens in historical research: things become lost to us. So, the next time you consider throwing out that book on current language use in your native language (or even just a really bad fictional tale – hey, we’ll take what we can get!), just think of the poor linguist 500 years or more from now, pulling their hair while trying to figure out that little odd thing that the English/German/Faroese/Indian/etc. language did in the 21st century and maybe think again. (Though, of course, this might never be a problem simply because languages are significantly more documented nowadays). But still!

Welcome back next week when we take a look at the darkest of times…… We’re referring to the word “night” of course! See you then!

Philosophical question: Is the Fun Etymology on time if it’s still technically Tuesday for one-fourth of the HLC? Or is it not?

Speaking of time, though, today’s word is ‘noon’.

It’s an iconic, evocative word. You don’t have to be American to recognize the tension of a duel at high noon: the streets tensely still, a saloon door creaking, and a tumbleweed rolling by as the sun blazes down from directly over the worn Stetsons of two coiled gunfighters. And you don’t have to be a hobbit to appreciate a quiet little midday nuncheon.

In English, short, everyday words like this tend to be part of the language’s core Germanic heritage, but in a surprising twist, this one isn’t. ‘Noon’ ultimately comes from the Latin word ‘nonus’ meaning…’ninth’. ¿Dice qué?

The term ‘non’ was borrowed back in Old English (hence its native-seeming skin) from the Latin phrase ‘nona hora’, meaning the ninth hour of daylight. In both Latin and Old English, the term referred to the hour of 3:00 PM, an important canonical prayer hour (called nones).

Beginning around the 12th century, the sense started to shift towards its current meaning of 12:00 PM. There are several hypotheses for why the meaning changed. It could have been the unreliability of timekeeping in the medieval period, or it could have been due to the dramatic seasonal differences in daylight hours in Northern Europe. It may even have been driven by food in some way: religious fasts traditionally ended at nones, so the time may have inched earlier to end the fasting earlier, or it may have come out of a secular societal shift in the timing of the midday meal. Whatever the reason, it became the ‘noon’ we know by the 14th century.

Whoever said monosyllabic words were boring?

Running a bit late today, ladies and gents! We’re blaming the fact that our little writing-mouse has managed to catch a cold and was, to be quite honest, napping.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday, isn’t it? You know what that means, it’s time for another Fun Etymology! Today’s word is “morning”!

“Morning” actually consists of two elements. Can you think of what they might be?

Well, one of them is the suffix -ing. So the other must be simple “morn”. You might not recognise that as an actual word nowadays but it used to be! Or a contraction of one anyway: the Middle English word “morwen” from the Old English, Mercian dialect to be specific, dative case of “margen” (dative “morgne”), meaning morning, forenoon or sunrise.

This Old English word comes from Proto-Germanic *murgana, meaning simply “morning”, from PIE *merk-, possibly from the root *mer-, meaning, interestingly enough, “to blink” or “twinkle”.

The Proto-Germanic form, it turns out, got around quite a bit and we thus find Old Saxon “morgan”, Old Frisian “morgen”, Dutch “morgen”, German “morgen”, Swedish “morgon”, and so on. Remember what forms that share an origin are called? Cognates, right? Then you might be interested to know that, looking at the PIE form, we may find yet another cognate to English “morning”: the Lithuanian word mirgėti, meaning “to blink”! Didn’t expect that? Well, like we’ve said before, words may change their meaning significantly and words that appear unrelated may sometimes show us that they have a distant relative or two.

Welcome back next week!

Ah, Tuesday. Wonderful, amazing Tuesday.

Why is it wonderful? Well, it sure isn’t because of the Scandinavian weather, but because it’s time for another fun Etymology!!

Speaking of time, we’ve been working a bit of a theme here and today is no different! Today’s word is “hour”.

Originally meaning “divine office prescribed for each of the seven canonical hours; the daily service at the canonical hours”, the word comes to English from Old French “ore”, meaning “one-twelfth of a day”, from Latin “hora”, meaning “an hour” or, a bit more poetically “time of year, season”. The Latin word itself comes from Greek hōra, which was used to indicate any limited time within a year, month, or day, and comes from PIE *yor-a-, from the root *yer-, meaning, of course, year.

Now, that’s some trip! But, you might remember that we promised you a treat last week? “Minute”, we said, is very similar in many Germanic languages, yet “hour”, we teased, is not.

And that’s indeed true. In the Scandinavian languages, the word for hour is “ti(m)me”, from Old Norse “timi”, which you could properly guess would simply be “time” in English.

That was the easy one: in German, the word for “hour” is “stunde”. Can you find an English equivalent? Maybe not? Well, there is one: stound! This word comes from Proto-Germanic *stundō, meaning “point in time, hour” from PIE *stā, meaning “to stand”. Aside from English, this word is found in the Scandinavian languages as “stund”, meaning “a short while, a short period of time”.

So, while there are different words for “hour” in the Germanic languages, it is often the case that we find parallel words with a somewhat altered meaning in the other Germanic languages. These words are cognates, meaning simply that they share an origin, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they mean the same thing today. Do you know of any interesting cognates that you want to share with us? Please do and let us all learn a bit more, and welcome back next week for more Fun Etymology!

Friends!

Today is Tuesday! Again! Gosh, where does the time go?! Speaking of, in today’s Fun Etymology Tuesday, we’ll continue to look a bit closer at time – particularly, we’ll trace the time measurement ‘minute’ throughout.. well, time.

So, ‘minute’ means the sixtieth part of an hour and it came to English from Old French ‘minut’ or directly from Latin ‘minuta’, meaning minute or short note, during the late 14th century. The Medieval Latin form, in turn, comes from Latin minuta, an inflected version of minutus, meaning little or small, which hails from the PIE root *mei-, meaning small.

Oh, if you remember last week, we had the secunda pars minuta? Well, the minute is the minuta prima, meaning ‘first small part’, a term first used by a mathematician to describe one-sixtieth of a circle.

What’s interesting to note among these time measurement is the close similarity in many PIE-languages: minute (English), minut (Swedish), minuut (Dutch), minute (French), minuto (Italian), minat (Hindi), minút (Frisian)… you get the drift?

Next week, though, we’ll introduce you to yet another concept of time, one which is significantly different in some of the Germanic languages.. Tune in then and listen (read) to the tale of the hour (or should we say ‘timme’ or ‘Stunde’?)!

See you next week!

We’re sneaking this in at the last second, but it’s Tuesday—time for Fun Etymology!

Speaking of, for our second etymology of the year, our word is: ‘second.’

You can play second fiddle, be someone’s second in a duel, or second the motion. All these connotations stem from the sequential idea that the second is the one after the first. Our modern meaning tightly marries ‘second’ to the number 2, but the Latin root ‘secundus’ more broadly means “following, next in time or order”, itself coming from PIE *sekw-, “to follow”.

So why do we say there are 60 seconds in a minute? We borrowed this meaning from Old French ‘seconde’, which comes from Medieval Latin ‘secunda’, a shortened version of ‘secunda pars minuta’ meaning roughly “second diminished part”. (‘Secunda’ here is, of course, just a form of ‘secundus’.) Here’s the logic: the first time you divide an hour by sixty, you get minutes (the ‘prime minute’, the first little part). The second time you divide an hour by sixty, you get seconds (the second little part).

Can you believe this is our second Fun Etymology of 2019? Can you believe this is our second year at the HLC?! Those diminutive parts of an hour sure fly by, don’t they?