Word Histories and Mysteries

The Origins of English

The roots of English run deep into the past and reach all around the world. Today English is the first language of over 350 million people all over the globe, and the great diversity of English speakers is matched by the great diversity of English words. This diversity has arisen through a variety of historical processes, and in order to illustrate these processes vividly, this book traces all the twists and turns taken by over four hundred words on their journey into modern English. When we examine the origins of English words, even the words we use everyday, we find that English has drawn its vocabulary from a great variety of sources, and readers can discover in these pages a representative sample of these wide-ranging borrowings. However, English also has a considerable number of words that have been in continuous use for thousands of years, inheritances from the prehistoric ancestor of English spoken many thousands of years ago, Proto-Indo-European.

The Prehistoric Ancestors of English

All around us as we speak, we can observe the kinds of linguistic change that have transformed Proto-Indo-European into English. In this century, most of the inhabitants of the United States speak English, but many regional differences in American speech can be heard easily. Some of these regional differences reflect the different areas of Britain and Ireland from which settlers arrived, but after all these years, it would be difficult to find a dialect back in the old country that sounds exactly the same as an American dialect. Linguistic change is continually at work transforming people’s speech. Occasionally we hear an elderly person use an old-fashioned word or expression, and we have to ask them what it means. I, for example, cherish a vivid memory of hearing my grandfather jokingly use the word moxie and asking him what it meant. Or we find that older people have a slightly different accent. Parental complaints about the incomprehensibility of young people’s slang are a cliché. Over time, the differences that we can hear in our daily lives accumulate and eventually transform a language utterly. I spoke to my grandfather, and he spoke to his grandfather, and he spoke to his grandfather, and that’s halfway to Shakespeare. The results of thousands of years of such change have led to Modern English as we know it today.

The story of English begins far from the shores of the United States, and even far from England. English belongs to the Indo-European family, one of the largest language families, which includes the languages of most of Europe and much of Asia, ranging from Ireland and Iceland to Iran and India. Linguists have demonstrated that such languages as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Albanian, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, and a hundred more are descended from a single language spoken at least six thousand years ago, most probably in the region of the Black Sea. Linguists call this language Proto-Indo-European. We have no written records of this language, and we never will have any, since it must have been spoken long before the invention of writing. Nevertheless, many of the most common words in English are inherited from this prehistoric ancestor.

Proto-Indo-European was notable in that many of its words could be broken down into roots, the minimal meaningful units from which larger words are built. Many roots had the basic shape of consonant-vowel-consonant. For example, the Proto-Indo-European root
w
meaning “woman” was *g en–. (This root is discussed at the note on the word queen.)

As another example, the basic form of the root meaning “bright” or “bright sky” was *dyeu–, which can be seen in the name Zeus, originally the god of the bright sky. From this root, speakers of Proto-Indo-European could also make other words by rearranging the sounds of the root and adding suffixes. The derived noun *deiwos meant “god” (that is, a “sky-dweller”) in Proto-Indo-European. (The w in this word is the consonantal form of the u— notice that the lips are rounded when making both the consonant w and the vowel u.) In English, this noun *deiwos shows up in the first part of the word Tuesday. Most of the words of Indo-European were formed in ways similar to *deiwos, by being derived from roots with suffixes.

The asterisk (*) in front of the roots and words mentioned above indicates that these words are not attested—that is, there is no written document or sound recording in which these words exist as such. Instead, such words are reconstructed, or recovered by linguists through the comparison of words in related languages. Linguists are sure that reconstructed words as *deiwos once existed because of evidence from attested languages, such as Sanskrit devas, Avestan dae¯uuo¯, Latin deus, and Irish día, all meaning “god.” These languages are widely separated in time and space, as well as by cultural differences, so it is unlikely that the similarity between these words for “god” represents borrowing between the languages. Instead, they must have inherited the word from a common source. On the evidence of the different words for “god” above, linguists reconstruct the word *deiwos. All of the other reconstructed forms marked with an asterisk in this book are supported by similar evidence.

The Old English Period

The distant ancestor of English, Proto-Indo-European, broke up into several branches, which are illustrated in the diagram on pages 346–347. The branch in which English developed is called the Germanic branch. The first Germanic tribes speaking early dialects of Old English began to move into Great Britain in the middle of the fifth century of our era. The medieval scholar Bede gives the exact date as A.D. 446, and from around this time we can begin to trace the history of English separately from its Indo-European and Germanic cousins.



Many of the most common words in English today are inherited from Old English and are the direct descendants of ancient ProtoIndo-European terms as well. Such basic words as fire and water, or heart and tooth, have been used continuously over six thousand years in the course of the development of English from Proto-Indo-European. Many Modern English terms relating to religious beliefs, such as bless, Easter, god, and Yule, have their roots in the ancient paganism of the Germanic peoples.

A great deal of Old English vocabulary has not survived into Modern English, however. Much of the vocabulary of Modern English is borrowed from other languages, many of which also happen to be Indo-European languages. Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages have been the most important sources of new words grafted onto the stock of Old English. After many centuries of borrowing, English now contains words that have originated in, or at least passed through, most of the major branches of Indo-European. In this way, English has been lucky enough to reacquire many of the Proto-Indo-European roots that it had previously lost during the course of its development. For an example, see fire.

The earliest major source of these “non-English” English words is Old Norse, and specifically the dialect of the Danes who began to make permanent settlements in the northern half of England in the middle of the ninth century of our era. The Old Norse word for settlement was byr, and this is continued in the Modern English word bylaw. Another Old Norse contribution to legal vocabulary is outlaw. The Danes who settled in England fought intermittently with the English, even gaining control of theEnglish throne for a few years, and during the long interaction between Old English and Old Norse, almost one thousand words of Norse origin entered the English language. These are found in all areas of culture and include such common items of vocabulary as fellow and window. In fact, the fellowship between the two languages even led to the replacement of some of the most basic, everyday Old English words by their Old Norse equivalents. The verb take (see numb in this book) and the pronoun they offer interesting cases of such borrowing.

The Middle English Period

The conquest of England by the Normans in 1066 is traditionally used to separate the Old English Period from the Middle English period, even though features characteristic of Middle English began to appear in Old English texts before this date. There were already several dialects of Old English, and in Middle English dialectal developments increased. Standard Modern English today contains a mixture of elements from these Middle English dialects. Bury, kale, and raid provide examples of such mixture.

The Middle English period was also marked by increasing borrowing from French, and such borrowing has continued since this period into modern times. The earliest French words borrowed into English often aren’t immediately apparent as French. They may not sound French anymore, unlike more recent borrowings such as nonchalant or chagrin. In words borrowed from French at an early date, English sometimes preserves sounds that have since disappeared from the word in French in the intervening centuries. The ch sound of chase (see catch) is an example of an English word preserving such sounds, since ch in French chasser is now pronounced like English sh. However, French words that have been in English for only a few centuries, such as envelope, sometimes hesitate between Anglicizing pronunciations on the one hand and pronunciations that attempt to approximate the French sounds on the other.

The Normans who conquered England spoke a dialect of French different from that used in Paris, and a dialect of French called Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French based on their speech, with an admixture of other elements, became the second language of England for a while. Especially characteristic of Anglo-Norman was the preservation of the Latin consonant c before the vowel a. In the French of Paris, however, c before a had developed into ch. Many of the earlier borrowings from French into English were from Anglo-Norman, but later it sometimes happened that the same word was borrowed again in a form closer to the standard Parisian form. This has led to a certain number of doublets (words derived from the same historical source by different routes of transmission) in English, such as chattel and cattle (see cattle). French has also made a notable contribution to English vocabulary describing the good things in life, with words such as banquet, beef, and victual that tellingly illustrate the relationship between the culture of the ascendant Anglo-Norman aristocracy and that of rest of the population, which spoke English.

Other Languages That Have Influenced English

Widespread direct borrowing from Latin has also characterized the history of English, from the Old English period onwards. In medieval times, Latin was the preeminent language of religion, scholarship, and government in western Europe. Dirge, hearse, patter, and short shrift find their origins in the Medieval Latin of the Church. In more recent centuries, thousands of scientific terms of Greek and Latin origin have poured into the dictionary. Some scientific and medical words of Latin origin with unexpected etymologies include oscillate and testis.

Since the medieval period onward, Arabic has also made a substantial contribution to the vocabulary of English. Words of Arabic origin include alcohol, average, racket, and zero. Many other languages began to add to the wealth of English words as British mercantile interests stretched around the world and the British Empire began to emerge. Borrowings from Dutch are especially numerous and include such words as bumpkin, pickle, walrus, and yacht. British ships brought ketchup, tea, and typhoon back from China. Recently the word tea has been imported again in the form of its doublet chai. Irish and Scottish Gaelic have given English such words as galore, slogan, and spree. As another example of the varied sources of English words, we may recall a borrowing from Romany (the language of the Gypsies), pal. And we must not forget the many loanwords from Yiddish found in American English, such as glitch.

However, borrowing is not the only process that has brought new words into the dictionary. Many linguistic processes like clipping (shortening or abbreviation) have made new words out of old, such as cute from acute or za from pizza. Avoidance of taboo words has led to the appearance of newer, less offensive-sounding words, such as donkey. The glossary at the end of this book will help readers explore more of these processes in depth.

All of the processes outlined above have been working together over thousands of years to give us the English words that we use today. If you open the dictionary, you will find that we know the history of most of these words quite well. But still a certain number remain mysteries. Often it is the most recent words that remain the most obscure, such as gremlin. Legions of scholars pore over old newspapers, dime store novels, and photographs of nineteenth-century cityscapes and billboards, searching for the attestation that will clear up the remaining mysteries. For an example of the importance of this work, see hooker.

English speakers are uniquely privileged by the variety of their linguistic heritage, from Indo-European and from other language families. And since English is now the first truly global language in the history of humanity, as well as the language of the majority of webpages, English can expect to grow even richer with new words.


A Note on Sources

Many different editors have worked over the years to produce the word history notes collected in this volume. Major sources of evidence that they have used in compiling this book are the great historical dictionaries of English and other languages, and readers who seek to know more about the history of English are encouraged to consult these works for further enlightenment. Most important among these sources is the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1989). Also essential are the Middle English Dictionary, edited by Hans Kurath, Sherman E. Kuhn, et al. (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1952-2001), the Dictionary of American Regional English, edited by edited by Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall (4 volumes, A-Sk; Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1985-2002), and the Random House Dictionary of American Slang, edited by J. E. Lighter (2 volumes, A-O; Random House, 1994). When we have given dates at which words or meanings entered the English language, we have often given the dates recorded in these large historical dictionaries. To the editors— past and present—of all these great works we are heavily indebted.

For the study of the history of the pronunciation of English, we have consulted Accents of English by J. C. Wells (3 volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1982) and The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States edited by Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1961).

Another important resource in tracing the history of words is the work of linguists who reconstruct unrecorded languages, such as Germanic and Indo-European. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd edition, edited by Calvert Watkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) has been especially helpful to us in this respect. The Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin by Edwin Pulleyblank (University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1991) was consulted for the etymologies of words of Chinese origin.

We are also greatly indebted to the many authors who have devoted their time to researching individual English words and publishing their findings in scholarly works. In particular, we would like to thank Allen Koenigsberg, whose research has contributed greatly to our understanding of the word hello. We are also grateful to Ward Cunningham for sharing the story of the genesis of the word wiki.




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