AN ANALYTIC DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY

An Introduction
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AN ANALYTIC DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY

An Introduction

ANATOLY LIBERMAN
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF J. LAWRENCE MITCHELL
M IN
NE SO TA

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

 Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of
Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111

Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-
2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Liberman, Anatoly.
An analytic dictionary of English etymology : an
introduction / Anatoly Liberman ; with the assistance of
J. Lawrence Mitchell. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-
13: 978-0-8166-5272-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-
5272-4 (alk. paper)
1. English language—Etymology—Dictionaries. I.
Mitchell, J. Lawrence. II. Title. PE1580.L53 2008 422.03
—dc22
2007047224
 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free
paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-
opportunity educator and employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 To the lasting memory of David R. Tester
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CONTENTS

Abbreviations of Linguistic Terms and Names of

Languages ix
Introduction: The Purpose and Content of a New Dictionary of English

Etymology xi
The Etymologies at a Glance xxxiii

An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology

A 1 Filch 7 Moo 1
dz(e) 4 ch 5
7
B 3 Flatt 7 Nud 1
eacon er 5 ge 6
5
Bi 9 Fuck 7 Oat 1
rd 8 7
0
B 1 Gaw 8 Pim 1
oy 3 k 7 p 7
4
Br 2 Girl 9 Rab 1
ain 0 4 bit 7
6
C 2 Heat 1 Rag 1
hide 4 her 00 amuffin 8
1
Cl 2 Heife 1 Robi 1
over 6 r 01 n 8
4
C 3 Heml 1 Ske 1
ob 1 ock 05 daddle 8
6
C 3 Henb 1 Slan 1
ockne 5 ane 08 g 8
y 9
C 4 Hobb 1 Slo 1
ub 1 ledehoy 11 wworm 9
6
C 4 Hore 1 Stru 2
ushat 3 hound 14 mpet 0
1
D 4 Ivy 1 Stub 2
oxy 5 17 born 0
3
Dr 4 Jeep 1 Toa 2
ab 6 23 d 0
5
D 4 Key 1 Trai 2
warf 6 26 pse 0
7
Ee 6 Kitty- 1 Trot 2
na 2 corner 33 0
8
Ev 6 Lad 1 Und 2
er 4 35 erstand 1
0
6 Lass 1 Witc 2
Fag

Fag(g)ot

7 44 h 1
5
Fi 7 Lillip 1 Yet 2
eldfar 0 utian 46 2
e 4
Man 1
49
Bibli 2
ography 33
 Index of Subjects 313 Index of Words 317
Index of Personal and Place Names 349
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A BBRE V IA TIONS OF LINGUISTIC TERMS AND
NAMES OF LANGUAGES

ations of titles and proper names see the bibliography.

Abbreviations

M Modern pl plural
odF French
M Modern Pol Polish
odG German
M Modern Po Portug
odi Icelandic rt uese
M Modern pp past
odir Irish participle
M Modern Pr Proven
odit Italian ov çal
M Modern reg region
odSp Spanish al
M Modern re reprint
odSw Swedish pr , reprinted
M Middle rev review
Sw Swedish ed, revised
n neuter Ro Roman
m ce
N Norwegian Ru Ruman
m ian
n. no date Ru Russia
d. ss n
N Northumbr sb noun
orthu ian
mbr
n. no Sc Scots
p. indication of
10
Abbreviations

publisher
O Old Danish Sc Scandi
D and navian
O Old English sec section
E (s) (s)
O Old French Se Semiti
F m c
O Old Frisian Skt Sanskri
Fr t
O Old High Sla Slavic
HG German v
Oi Old Sp Spanis
Icelandic h
Oi Old Irish Sw Swedis
r h
O Old Low Sw Swiss
LG German iG German
O Old tra transiti
Pr Prussian ns ve
O Old Russian Uk Ukrain
Russ r ian
O Old Saxon v verb
S
O Old Ve Vedic
Scand Scandinavian d
O Old Slavic VL Vulgar
Sl Latin
11
Abbreviations

Os Ossetic W Welsh
s el
OOld W Westp
Sp Spanish estph halian
O Old W West
Sw Swedish Fl Flemish
Pe Persian W West
rs Fr Frisian
Pi Proto-Indo- W West
E European Gmc Germanic

12
 Introduction

THE

13
 Introduction

PURPOSE AND CONTENT

OF

14
 Introduction

A NEW DICTIONARY OF
ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY

The dominant sense of the word dictionary for

English-speaking people is a book which presents in
alphabetic order the words of our language, with
information as to their spelling, pronunciation, meaning
and (as something more or less unintelligible and
pointless) their etymology.
—James R. Hulbert, Dictionaries: English and
American, 1968

The Readership of Etymological Dictionaries

Disparaging statements like the one given in the
epigraph above are many and at best mildly amusing.
Richard Grant White wrote the following in his book
Words and their Uses Past and Present: A Study of the
English Language (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1899 [this is a revised and corrected
edition], pp. 342-43):
15
 Introduction

With one exception, Etymology is the least valuable

element in the making of a dictionary, as it is of interest
only to those who wish to study the history of language.
It helps no man in his use of the word bishop to know
that it comes from two Greek words, epi, meaning upon,
and scopos, meaning a looker, still less to be told into
what forms those words have passed in Spanish, Arabic,
and Persian. Yet it is in their etymologies that our
dictionaries have shown most improvement during the
last twenty-five years; they having profited in this
respect by the recent great advancement in the
etymological department of philology. The etymologies
of words in our recently published dictionaries, although,
as I have said before, they are of no great value for the
purposes for which dictionaries are consulted, are little
nests (sometimes slightly mare-ish) of curious and
agreeable information, and afford a very pleasant and
instructive pastime to those who have the opportunity
and the inclination to look into them. But they are not
worth, in a dictionary, all the labor that is spent on them,
or all the room they occupy. The noteworthy spectacle
has lately been shown of the casting over of the whole
etymological freight of a well-known dictionary, and the
taking on board of another. For the etymological part of
the last edition of "Webster's American Dictionary," so
called, Dr. Mahn, of Berlin, is responsible. When it was
truly called Webster's Dictionary, it was in this respect
16
 Introduction

discreditable to scholarship in this country, and even

indicative of mental supineness in a people upon whom
such a book could be imposed as having authority. And
now that it is relieved of this blemish, it is, in this
respect, neither Webster's Dictionary nor "American,"
but Mahn's and German.
Whether etymologies in our "thick" dictionaries are
worth the labor that is spent on them and whether it
was prudent to invite a German specialist in Romance
linguistics to rewrite the etymologies in the most famous
American dictionary of English are clearly a matter of
opinion. But one notes with satisfaction that, despite the
avowed uselessness, an undertaking like the present one
will appeal to those who wish to study the history of the
language and even afford them a very pleasant and
instructive pastime. The main questions are: Where do
we find such people? Is the readership of serious essays
on the origin of words limited to professional
philologists? These are not idle questions, for while the
publisher brings out books to sell them, the author
hopes to be noticed and appreciated. So who reads
etymological dictionaries? A tolerably good market
seems to exist for them. The Oxford Dictionary of English
Etymology (ODEE), a volume of xiv + 1025 pages, was
published in 1966 and reprinted again in 1966 and then
in 1967, 1969, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1982 (twice),
1983, and 1985—a remarkable commercial success.
17
 Introduction

Kluge's etymological dictionary of German has been

around for more than a century, and its twenty-fourth
edition, by Elmar Seebold, appeared in 2003. Of great
importance are multivolume etymological dictionaries of
French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and
Hittite, to mention just a few.
The authors of etymological dictionaries often write
forewords to the effect that their works will be
accessible to a broad audience. However, ODEE, Kluge,
and most other books of this type are thrillers only for
the initiated. A few examples will suffice. ODEE explains
that bay in the phrase at bay is traceable to Old French
bai or is an aphetic derivative of Middle English abay,
with at abay "being apprehended as at a bay." This is a
simple etymology, but it presupposes a user who knows
the periodization of English and French, is aware of the
interplay between the two languages in the Middle Ages,
and will not be discouraged by the term aphetic
derivative.
In the entry bone, we read that Old English ban has
cognates in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Low
German, Old High German, and Old Norse, that the
Common Germanic (except Gothic) form was *bainam,
"of which no further cogn[ate]s are recognized." Here it
is taken for granted that the reader is familiar with the
entire spectrum of older Germanic languages and the
meaning of asterisked forms and has been taught to look
18
 Introduction

for cognates of English words outside Germanic. ODEE

passes by the problem of bone being possibly related to
Latin femur or representing the stump of Indo- European
*(o)zdboiness. Henry Cecil Wyld, the editor of The
Universal Dictionary of the English Language and the au-
thor of detailed etymologies written expressly for that
work, mentions the putative Latin cognate of bone but
states that the tempting equation of bone with femur
must be rejected. Who can be tempted by such an
equation? Only Indo- European scholars versed in the
niceties of media aspirata. The entry thigh in ODEE lists
Germanic and several Indo-European cognates. It
contains the following passage: "OE. peh is represented]
immediately] by mod[ern] north[ern] thee; thigh
descends from ME. pih (xii), with e raised to l . . ." The
editors missed e in the list of phonetic symbols, but even
if it had been included, the remark on the history of
thigh is addressed to those with previous exposure to
English historical phonetics.
Seebold, who was under pressure to bring out
"Everyman's" etymological dictionary of German, says
that Mus 'mousse, applesauce, fruit or vegetable puree'
is a vriddhi formation on the same root as the s-stem
word *mati-/ez 'food.' How many Germans with a fond-
ness for mousse have heard about the terms of Sanskrit
grammar and consonantal stems? To be sure, the
dictionary opens with a brief explanation of special
19
 Introduction

terms, but is even a motivated user of the dictionary

ready to look up special terms in the introduction every
time they occur? Asgeir Blondal Magnusson, the author
of the latest etymological dictionary of Modern Icelandic
(xli + 1231 pages), was convinced that all Icelanders with
a fondness for their mother tongue would benefit by his
work. Did he really believe that his entry on eiga 'have,
possess,' with its references to Old Indian, Avestan, and
Tokharian B and discussion of short and long diphthongs
and palatal velars in Indo-European, would appeal to the
so-called educated lay reader?
Language historians cannot speak about etymologies
without referring to the zero grade, s-mobile, prothetic
consonants, aphetic forms, and so forth, but some
modern so-called "lay" readers find it hard to distinguish
even infinitives from participles, the genitive from the
accusative, and nouns from adjectives. One needs little
training to absorb the message of the entry awning in
ODEE: "XVII. Of unkn[own] origin," but most of what is
written in etymological dictionaries makes sense only to
people familiar with historical linguistics. However, the
commercial success of ventures like ODEE shows that
despite high prices and changes in our educational
system, enough individuals and libraries uphold the
tradition and buy serious reference books on the history
of language. At present, the market is flooded with
popular but selective English etymological dictionaries
20
 Introduction

and other compilations for a broad public. Yet the basic

product has always been and should remain a dictionary
whose author has evaluated all that is known about the
origin and later fortunes of words. Such a dictionary is
written for prepared readers. Concise versions and
editions for schools shine with a reflected light.
The barrier existing today between scholarly
etymological dictionaries and the public was erected in
the last decades of the nineteenth century. The audience
of Minsheu, Skinner, Junius, and Richardson could follow
both their reasonable arguments and their fantasies. The
situation changed with the discovery of regular sound
correspondences and the efflorescence of Indo-European
studies. Etymological dictionaries lost their status as
pseu-doscholarly adventure books and became
supplements to manuals of historical linguistics. Country
squires were slow to notice the change and kept on
writing letters to Notes and Queries, which dutifully
published them. Walter W. Skeat scolded such
correspondents for their attempts to guess word origins
instead of researching them. Some of his opponents
refused to listen even in 1910, the year Skeat died. Nor
were publishers in a hurry to recognize the emergence of
a new branch of scholarship. Some still treat etymology
largely as a divertissement; hence many of our woes.

21
 Introduction

The Information an Etymological Dictionary Is

Expected to Provide
The structure of modern etymological dictionaries
depends on the state of the art and the state of the
market. The first etymological dictionary of English was
written in 1617. If every edition of Mueller, Wedgwood,
Skeat, Weekley, and so on is counted as a new diction-
ary, their sum total (from 1617 on) will exceed twenty-
five. Their usefulness is partly open to doubt, for
curiosity about the origin of English words can be
satisfied by less sophisticated works. Thomas Blount
(1656) started the tradition of giving etymologies in
explanatory dictionaries, and his tradition has continued
into the present. Although the focus of Webster, OED,
The Century Dictionary, and others is on meaning and
usage, they contain authoritative statements on
etymology. As we have seen, Richard G. White was no
friend of the tradition that Blount initiated.
Nonspecialists interested in the history of English
words prefer simple conclusions to a string of mutually
exclusive hypotheses. They will normally skip the
cognates in Avestan and the remark on the raising of
closed e in Middle English. But specialists need informed
surveys of the material that has accumulated over the
years, and this is where English etymological dictionaries
are at their most vulnerable. Indo-European linguistics,
all its achievements notwithstanding, is unable to solve
22
 Introduction

some of the riddles it confronts. Often none of the

existing etymologies of an obscure word carries enough
conviction. In other cases, modern scholarship has
accepted certain hypotheses, which does not mean that
the ones that have been rejected are wrong.
Unfortunately, the latest brand of English
etymological lexicography adheres to the all-or-none
principle. The following note on the activity of the
Philological Society appeared in The Athenaeum (No.
4296, 1910, p. 254):
A letter from Sir J.A.H. Murray was also read, stating
that guesses at the derivation of words were deliberately
kept out of the 'N. E. D.,' and that the entry after a word
"etymology uncertain" or "of obscure origin" ought to be
understood to mean that a careful discussion of all
suggested derivations had been held, and since none of
them was satisfactory, they had all been left alone. The
editors should have credit for the exclusion of
plausibilities and absurdities.
Since OED is not an etymological dictionary, Murray
chose the most reasonable approach to presenting his
data. The problem is that "plausibilities and absurdities"
are sometimes hard to distinguish from correct
solutions. The etymologies in OED are detailed and
carefully thought out. The same is true of Wyld's
dictionary, and Webster aspires to be a model of
reliability and solid judgment. But it may be useful to
23
 Introduction

listen to Weekley's verdict. Unlike the impatient and

irascible Skeat, Weekley was restrained and civil in his
published works. Yet this is what he said to the self-same
Philological Society twenty-eight years after Murray (TPS
1939, p.138: a summary of the paper read on October
22, 1938) :
An examination of the Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary, the new Webster, and Professor Wyld's
Universal Dictionary in their relation to recent work on
etymology and the settlement of unsatisfactory
derivations showed that they often repeated old
absurdities, did not attach enough importance to the
original meanings of words or made wrong assumptions
about them, and neglected the guidance of semantic
parallels.
Note the echo word absurdities.
One can understand the editors of "thick"
dictionaries: etymology is only one of their concerns, and
they have little space for discussion. But discussion
should be the prime goal of an etymological dictionary—
something that has not been generally recognized in the
English-speaking world, though statements like the
following are numerous:
What would have been greatly useful for students
and laymen alike would have been a sort of casebook
selection with full commentary showing why the scholar
chose and juxtaposed forms as he did, to what degree
24
 Introduction

the etymologist seems to have illuminated the relations,

what sort of further evidence we could most wish for in
a given case, etc. etc. In short, it would be instructive for
outsiders to see just how a sensitive and learned
etymologist makes decisions and advances to further
knowledge. . . . Many laymen have the notion that we
progress simply by "finding new words" or by
discovering startling distant cousins in far-off Tibet. The
intelligent layman who I would like to think might read
our most readable books ought to be fascinated by the
implications unfolded when one spells out simply but
precisely how our understanding has improved in the
case of words like full or bridge, or how dialect research
has contributed to our grasp of ain't, oxen, or gnat. The
findings, if readably reported, could be much more
exciting and unforeseen than an exact account of the
genesis of OK or sputnik. (From Erik P. Hamp's review of
Alan S. C. Ross's Etymology; With Special Reference to
English. Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential Books, an imprint of
Oxford University Press, Inc., 1958. Word 17, 1961, pp.
96-97.)
For echoes of the same sentiments see André
Martinet, "Pourquoi des dictionnaires étymologiques?"
(La Linguistique 3, 1966, pp. 123-31) and J. Picoche,
"Problèmes des dictionnaires étymologiques" (Cahiers
de lexicologie 16/1, 1970, pp. 53-62).

25
 Introduction

Onions (ODEE), even more so than Skeat and

Weekley, tended to avoid confrontation. For example,
Michel Bréal compared bone and femur, while Herbert
Petersson offered the form *(o)zdboiness. The search by
these outstanding scholars for non- Germanic cognates
of *bainam arose as part of the effort to find cognates
for several seemingly isolated Indo-European words
meaning 'bone.' Meillet's idea that Russian kost' 'bone'
(allegedly, k-ost') is related to Latin ost- owes its
existence to a similar impulse. Bréal and Petersson may
have been wrong, but reference to their hypotheses
would not only have enriched the entry in ODEE: it
should have constituted its main part. Since Onions
preferred to sift the data behind the scenes and
suppressed what seemed doubtful to him, his reader
comes away with a set of unquestionable cognates and a
morsel of distilled truth. When Onions failed to find a
persuasive solution, he followed Murray's example and
said: "Of unknown origin." Since the authors of the latest
English etymological dictionaries seldom disclose their
sources, the scope of their reading remains a secret.
Articles and notes on the origin of words are hard to
find. Titles like "Etymological Miscellany,"
"Etymologies," "Etymologisches," and "Wortdeutungen"
give almost no clue to the content of the works. It is also
a wellknown fact that etymologies are offered in writings
on religion, history, literature, botany, and so forth, and
26
 Introduction

words mentioned in such texts can seldom be recovered

through bibliographies.
Etymology is a vague concept, as shown by the polite
warfare between those who look on it as the science of
reconstruction and those who allow it to subsume "the
history of words." If the etymology of a word like
uncouth is supposed to deal with its modern pro-
nunciation (one would expect it to rhyme with south
rather than sooth), the bibliographical search broadens
considerably. The same uncertainty plagues the choice of
comparative data. For instance, unraveling the history of
the word eel naturally entails the study of its cognates,
but what authors even of multivolume etymological dic
tionaries have enough leisure to familiarize themselves
with the literature on one fish name in eight Germanic
languages and then go on to Latin anguilla and its kin?
ODEE gives three cognates of eel, reconstructs the
protoform *œlaz, and concludes that the word in
question is of unknown origin. If an etymological
dictionary can go no further, why bother to write it? The
situation with eel is typical. At one time, colt was
believed to have several cognates outside Germanic, and
this belief found its reflection in the dictionary by Walde-
Pokorny. From ODEE we learn that colt is "of obscure
origin," though three Swedish dialectal words are similar
to it in sound and meaning. Onions seems to have
treated colt as an isolated form. However, those who
27
 Introduction

turn to his dictionary are interested not only in the

editor's opinions: they expect to be introduced to the
science of English etymology rather than be shielded
from heresy.
Our current English etymological dictionaries are
among the most insubstantial in
Indo-European linguistics. There is no comparison
between them and their Dutch, German, French,
Spanish, Russian, and Lithuanian counterparts, let alone
the etymological dictionaries of Hittite, Classical Greek,
Latin, Gothic, and Old Icelandic. An encyclopedic
dictionary of English etymology like Vasmer's (Russian)
or at the very least like Jan de Vr-ies's (Old Icelandic,
Dutch) is long overdue. Such a dictionary should
summarize and assess what has been said about the
origin of English words and cite the literature pertaining
to the subject. Its authors need not conceal their views
and pose as dispassionate chroniclers of past
achievements. On the contrary, they should burn up the
chaff, weigh the merits of various hypotheses, and draw
conclusions, however guarded, from the material at their
disposal. Their readers will then be able to pick up where
the authors leave off.

The Body of an Etymological Dictionary

28
 Introduction

The first task confronting a dictionary maker is the

selection of words for inclusion. Both publishers and the
public have been taught to appreciate bulk. At first sight,
the more words a dictionary contains, the greater its
value. However, here, too, much depends on the state of
the art (and of the market). Webster and The Century
Dictionary attempted to collect every word that occurred
in printed sources. Dialect dictionaries spread their net
equally wide. Against this background, other
lexicographers can be less ambitious but more practical.
As early as 1858, The Saturday Review (Vol. 6, August 21,
p. 183) carried an article entitled "Dictionary-Making." It
contained the following passage:
Surplusage is the first and great fault of dictionaries.
Their compilers are goaded on by the same mania for
collecting words which sometimes lays hold of the
collectors of books and papers, and they defeat their
own object in the same suicidal manner. Perhaps it never
occurs to them that the labour of finding a paper or a
word is in direct proportion to the number among which
it has to be hunted out. Perhaps they look on a
dictionary as a work of art, which such considerations of
mere convenience would degrade. But if a dictionary is
to be convenient, it must be compact; and if it is to be
compact, all superfluous matter must be ruthlessly
retrenched. It must be weeded of every word for which
there is no real likelihood that any considerable number
29
 Introduction

of students will inquire. Far, however, from practising

this wholesome self-denial, it is rather a point of honor
with lexicographers to reprint all that their predecessors
have printed, and something more besides. Languages
change, words grow, and words decay; but a word that
has once found its way into the lexicographers' museum
remains forever embalmed to meet the wondering gaze
of distant generations who will be puzzled to pronounce
it. The monstrous compounds in which South, Taylor,
and the Caroline school loved to advertise their Latinity
—the quaint distortions to which the Elizabethan poets
resorted to meet the exigencies of their easy verse—are
preserved with as religious a care as a saint's tooth or a
medieval coin.
And almost half a century later, an anonymous
reviewer of the first (1893) edition of Funk's A Standard
Dictionary of the English Language (The Nation, vol. 58,
March 8, 1894, p. 180) said the following:
Great prominence is given in the advertisements to
claims for this dictionary of an enormous number of
words ("Johnson, 45,000; Stormonth, 50,000; Worcester,
105,000; Webster (International), 125,000; Century,
225,000; Standard, nearly 300,000"), although the
strenuous effort of the good lexicographer is to keep
down his vocabulary. In an ordinary dictionary of
reference, 25,000 words comprise all that anybody ever
looks out. The rest is obstructive rubbish.
30
 Introduction

Unfortunately, "the obstructive rubbish" is

indispensable, for who looks up bread, water, or boy in a
dictionary of one's native language? Unrebarbative and
ptosis are a different matter. And yet the idea that
swelling is no virtue in a dictionary deserves every
respect. It is fully applicable to etymological dictionaries
where bread, water, and boy are among the most
important items, whereas rarities attract few people's
attention.
The editors of etymological dictionaries do not
explain how they select their vocabulary. The most
frequent words are always included. The same holds for
some obsolete and dialectal words with established
cognates, for etymologists are perpetually on the
lookout for fossils. Skeat wrote a middle-sized
dictionary, but he did not miss nesh 'tender, soft,'
because it goes back to Old English hnesce and is related
to Gothic hnasqus. ODEE contains at least 10,000 words
more than Skeat. It is instructive to study what has been
added. To form an idea of the increment, we can look at
the vocables beginning with ga-. These are the words
absent from Skeat but featured in ODEE, with glosses
added, to distinguish homonyms:

gabbro (min.), gabelle, gad (in 'by gad'), gadget,

Gadhelic, gadoid, gadroon, gadzooks, gae-kwar (=
gaikwar, guicower), Gael, gaff (sl.) 'secret', gaffe (sl.), gag
31
 Introduction

(sl.) 'impose upon', gaga (sl.), gage (reference word =

greengage), galacto-, galanty, galatea, galbanum, gale
'periodical payment of rent, freeminer's royalty' (Anglo-
Ir.), galeeny, Galen, galena, galilee, galimatias,
galliambic, gallimaufry, gallinazo, gallium, gallivant,
galliwasp, gally, galoot (sl.), galumph, gamba, gambado
'large boot or gaiter attached to a saddle,' gambeson,
gambier, gambrel (dial.), gammon 'lashing of the
bowsprit,' gambroon, gamete (biol.), gamin, gamma
'third letter of the Greek alphabet,' gamma 'gamut,'
gammadion, gammy (sl.), gamp (col-loq.), gangue,
ganoid, gantry (=gauntry), Ganymede, garage, garboard,
garçon, gardenia, gare-fowl (= gairfowl), Gargantuan,
garget, garial (reference word = gavial), garibaldi, garnet
(naut.) 'kind of tackling for hoisting,' garron, garth, gas
'gasolene,' gasket (naut.), gasolene (gasoline),
gasometer, gasteropod, gatling, gauche, Gaucho, gaudy
'rejoicing; annual college feast,' Gaulish, gault (geol.),
gazebo.

The list does look a bit "obstructive." The following

are technical terms: gabbro, gadoid, gadroon, galacto-,
galena, galliambic, gallium, gambier, gamete,
gammadion, gammon, gangue, ganoid, garboard, garnet,
gasket, and gault. One can add the names of exotic
plants and animals and ethnic terms: gaekwark,
galbanum, galeeny, gallinazo, galli-wasp, gardenia,
32
 Introduction

garefowl, garron, gasteropod, Gaucho. Six words (gaff,

gaffe, gag, gaga, galoot, and gammy) are marked 'slang.'
Gammy and gambrel are dialectal (gammy is also slang),
gale is Anglo- Irish, gadzooks is archaic, gambeson is
dated, gamp is colloquial; gally (and garth?) hardly
belong to literary usage. Gambroon, gamp, garibaldi, and
gatling are "words from names," and so are Galen
'doctor' and Ganymede 'cupbearer,' and the adjective
Gargantuan.
Although Onions added so many words to Skeat, his
list could have been made still longer. Where are
gaberlunzie, gabionade, gablock, Gabrielite, gade,
gadwall, Gaillardia, gain 'straight,' gain 'groove,' Galago,
galbe, galiongee, and others of the same type? Each
group (technical terms, plant and animal names, archaic
words, dialectal words, words used in describing objects
and customs of the past, and so forth) is open-ended.
The consequence of expansion is triviality. Consider the
following entries: gaekwar native ruler of Baroda, India.
XIX. Marathi gaekwar, lit. cowherd; gamma third letter
of the Gr. alphabet . . . XIV . . .; the moth Plusius gamma,
having gamma-like markings; (math.) of certain functions
XIX. (Is this an etymology?); galoot (sl.) raw soldier or
marine; U. S. (uncouth) fellow. XIX. of unkn. origin;
Gaucho mixed European and Indian race of the S.
American pampas. XIX. Sp., of native origin; gault (geol.)

33
 Introduction

applied to beds of clay and marl. XVI. Local (E. Anglian)

word of unkn. origin, taken up by geologists.
When it comes to borrowings, we learn the
following: gamin street Arab. XIX. (Thackeray). F. prob.
of dial. origin; garçon waiter. XIX. F., obl. case of OF.
(mod. dial.) gars lad, of disputed origin. Together, gamin
and garçon take up four and a half lines of almost
useless text; girl, ten pages later, is given six and a half
lines, though it is one of the most controversial words in
English etymology. "Equal representation" is the death
of an etymological dictionary. Someone who does not
know that galliwasp is a small West Indian lizard (an-
other word of unascertained origin) or that gambier is an
astringent extract from the plant Uncaria gambir (from
Malay gambir) should look them up in an encyclopedia
or any other reference book.
Work on the present dictionary began with the
understanding that as few words as possible would be
selected, but each of them would be accorded maximum
attention. Three large groups can be isolated in the
vocabulary of Modern English. The first includes words
of Germanic origin, regardless of the details of their
history, such as father (a Germanic word with broad
Indo-European connections), bride (a Common Germanic
word without certain cognates outside Germanic), play
(a West Germanic word), grove (a word going back to
Old English but lacking unambiguous cognates), window
34
 Introduction

(a Middle English word borrowed from Scandinavian),

keel 'vessel' (a Middle English borrowing from Middle
Low German or Middle Dutch), and boy (a Middle English
word of unclear antecedents). Perhaps words like wait (a
Germanic word borrowed by Old French and many
centuries later reborrowed by Middle English in French
guise) can also be subsumed under "Germanic."
The second group includes words of unknown
(doubtful, questionable, uncertain, disputed) etymology.
They may turn out to be native or borrowed (see gault,
above). The combined evidence of several dictionaries,
including OED, yielded about 1,200 "Germanic" and
1,800 "disputed" words if we subtract those marked
slang, dialectal, obsolete, and archaic, technical terms,
and "words from names." The third group includes
borrowings from the non-Germanic, mainly Romance,
languages. The borders between the groups are not
sharp. For example, most sources treat boy as Germanic,
while Onions follows Dobson (who reinvented
Holthausen's etymology) and derives it from Old French;
ivy is a West Germanic word, but dictionaries are not
sure whether Latin ibex is its cognate; colt is either an
isolated English word with unclarified connections to
Scandinavian or a word firmly rooted in Indo-European.
Yet an approximate classification is possible. About
3,000 words borrowed from non-Germanic languages
also deserve detailed etymological analysis.
35
 Introduction

It seemed reasonable to start with English words of

"unknown etymology." As shown in the previous
section, the label unknown should not be taken literally.
Most of such words have been at the center of attention
for a long time, but unanimity about their origin is
lacking. However, disagreement and ignorance are
different things. Words of "unknown etymology" are
stepchildren of English linguistics. Students of Indo-
European and Germanic ignore them or make do with
reference to the substrate. Students of English are
equally unenthusiastic about this material: where Skeat,
Murray, Bradley, and Weekley chose not to venture, the
others usually fear to tread. Someone must finally
descend from the asterisked heights of Indo-European
and Proto-Germanic and subject those English words to
an unbiased and unhurried treatment.
To give an idea of how English vocabulary can be
stratified according to the principles outlined above, we
may again turn to Onions and look at the words
beginning with ba- (pp. 67-81). Among them, some are
Germanic (with or without Gothic), with cognates in
Indo-European:
bairn (dial.?), bake, bale 'evil,' ballock (?), ban 'curse,
denounce,' bane, bare, bark (of a dog), barley (cereal),
barm 'yeast,' barm (dial.) 'bosom,' barrow 'mound,' bath
(and bathe).

36
 Introduction

Barm and bath (bathe) could perhaps have been

assigned to the small group of Germanic words (without
Gothic) lacking Indo-European cognates, such as:
back, bane, barn, barrow 'boar,' barrow (as in
wheelbarrow), base (fish), bast. The following words
were borrowed from other Germanic languages:
baas, babiana, backbite, bait, balefire, balk, ball (as
in football), ballast, balm (cricket), band (for binding),
bank 'slope,' bark (on trees), bask, batten 'grow fat.'
Four of the following six words came to English from
Dutch. The immediate source of two words is German.
None of them is native in those languages, so that it is
probably better not to treat them as Germanic:
bale 'bundle' (French), bamboo (Malay), bandoleer
(French), barouche (Italian), basement (Italian), and
basset-horn (both from French).
Two or three ba- words--ban 'proclamation,' (?)band
'company,' and baste 'sew loosely'--are of the wait type:
from French, ultimately from Germanic. It is unclear how
to classify "words from names," some of them
borrowed:
badminton, bakelite, balbriggan, Banksian, bantam,
barb 'Barbary horse and pigeon,' barege, Barker's mill
("the alleged inventor, a Dr. Barker . . . has not been
identified"), barsack, bass 'ale,' batiste, bawbee, possibly
bant (bant is not a name but a backformation from
Banting), bay-salt.
37
 Introduction

About twenty-five words of those listed above will

end up in the Germanic fascicles. The number of isolated
words and words of uncertain etymology is surprisingly
high:
babe (and baby), backgammon, bad, badger, baffle,
baffy, bag, bail (in cricket), bald, balderdash, bally,
ballyhoo, bamboozle, bandy (in tennis), bandy 'toss,'
bandy 'curved inwards,' banter, bantling, barley 'call for
a truce' (dial.), barnacle 'bit for a horse,' barrister, base
(game), bass (fish name; possibly here), bass 'fibre,'
baste 'pour fat,' bat 'club,' bat (animal name), battel (=
batell), bavin, bawd.
The imitative words—baa, babble, bah, bang, bash,
bawl—and the disguised compound bandog should
probably be assigned to the foregoing group above,
where the sum total is close to thirty.
In every dictionary of Modern English, most words
are of French/Latin origin. The lists above yielded about
sixty words gleaned from pp. 67-81 of ODEE, whereas
the number of words borrowed into English from French
and Latin (nearly all of them are from French) occurring
within the same space is about 110. Approximately fifty
of them are postfifteenth century; they are given below
with asterisks. The entire ODEE contains about 1,400
"Germanic," about 1,800 "questionable," and about
3,000 pre-16th century "French" words. (For comparison:
among the 10,000 most frequent English words, "the
38
 Introduction

native English element" comprises slightly over 35

percent, and "words of Latin origin" comprise almost 46
percent. See Edward Y. Lindsay, An Etymological Study of
the Ten Thousand Words in Thorndike's Teacher's Word
Book. Indiana University Studies, vol. XII, No. 65, 1925, p.
6.) Such words will constitute the bulk of the prospective
dictionary.
Let us examine two more lists: 1) words from French
and Latin, and 2) words from other languages (all of
them are from the ba- section).

Borrowings from French and Latin

baboon, "babouche, "baccalaureate, "baccara(t),
"bacchanal, bachelor, "bacillus, bacon, "'bacterium,
badge, "badinage, "bagatelle, "baignoire, bail 'security,'
bailey, bailie (Scottish), bailiff, "bain-marie, "baize,
balance, balas, baldric, bale 'lade out,' baleen, "ball
'assembly for dancing,' ballad, ballade, "ballet, "ballista,
balm, balsam, "baluster, "banal, "bandage, "bandeau,
"banderole, banish, "bank 'tier of oars' (bank 'bench'
was borrowed in the thirteenth century), banner,
banneret (a historical term), banquet, baptize, bar 'rod;
barre"r,' barb 'beard-like appendage,' "barbaresque,
barbaric, "barbed, barber, "barberry, "barbette,
barbican, bard 'horse armor,' bargain, barge, barnacle
'wild goose,' "barnacle (on the bottom of a ship), baron,
39
 Introduction

"baroque (= barrok), "barque (= bark) 'boat,'

"barquentine, "barrack 'soldiers, quarters,' "barrage,
barrator, barrel, barren, "barricade, barrier, barring
'excepting,' barny (in heraldry), (? "bartizan, a word
revived by Walter Scott), "basalt, "basan (= bazan),
"bascule, base 'bottom,' base 'of low quality,' basil,
"basilar, "basilica, "basilisk, basin, basinet, basis, basket,
"bas-relief, bass 'deepsounding,' "basset, bassinette,
bastard, bastille, "bastion, (")bat 'pack-saddle' (first
known only in compounds), bate 'beat the wings,' bate
'reduce,' "bateau, ("batman 'army officer's servant'; only
bat is from French), "baton, "battalion, batter 'beat,'
batter 'paste,' "battery, battle, battlement, "battology,
"battue, bauble, baudekin, bauson (dial.), "bauxite (=
beauxite), bay 'tree,' bay (in the sea), bay (as in bay-
window), bay (as in at bay), bay 'reddish-brown,' bay
'bark,' "bayadere, (? bayard), "bayonet.

Borrowings from Languages Other than French and

Latin
babiroussa, baboo (= babu), badmash (= budmash),
bael (= bel), bagnio, bahadur, baksheesh, balalaika,
balcony, baldac(c)hino, balibuntal (partly belonging to
"words from names"), ballerina, bambino, ban 'governor
in Hungary,' banana, bandanna, bandicoot, bandit,
bandore, bangle, banian (= banyan), banjo, bankrupt,
40
 Introduction

bannock, banshee, banxring, banzai, baobab, barbeque,

bard 'minstrel,' barilla, baritone, barometz, barrack
'banter,' barytone, bashaw, bashi-bazouk, basistan,
basso, bassoon, bastinado, bat 'colloquial speech of a
foreign country,' batata, bath 'Hebrew liquid measure,'
bathos, batik, batman 'Oriental weight,' batra-chian,
batta 'discount,' batta 'allowance,' bawn, bayou, bazaar
(cf. also socalled individual coinages: barium, barometer,
baryta, barytes, bathybius).

Every word needs a "biography," but some

biographies are uninspiring. A specialized etymological
dictionary gains little by filling its pages with curt
statements that baritone is from Italian, ultimately from
Greek, and that bacterium is from Latin, ultimately also
from Greek. It has been argued above that galliwasp (the
name of a small West Indian lizard) should be featured in
encyclopedias and "thick" dictionaries rather than in
books like ODEE. Baritone and bacterium are relatively
common words, but they clutter ODEE in equal measure.
The sophisticated reader, used to consulting ODEE,
undoubtedly consults other dictionaries, each of which
offers the same information on bacterium and baritone.
An etymological dictionary of English can probably
dispense with words about which it has or chooses so
little to say.

41
 Introduction

In the list "Borrowings from Languages Other than

French and Latin," only banana, bankrupt, and perhaps
bannock deserved a mention. The asterisked words in
the list of borrowings from French and Latin are trivial
from the perspective of an etymologist of English.
Consider the entry ballet: ". . . XVII (balette, ballat).—F.
ballet—It. balletto, dim. of ballo BALL2." or basilica: ". . .
XVI.—L.—Gr. basilike, sb. use of fem. of basilikos royal, f.
basileus king." Most asterisked words (babouche,
baccara(t), and so on) should have been included only if
Onions had decided to treat their history in Greek, Latin,
and Italian in depth. Among the "Germanic" and
"questionable" words, obstructive rubbish is equally
common, but there is less of it.
Dialectal words and slang pose special problems.
Both explanatory and etymological dictionaries feature
some "nonstandard" vocabulary, but on a relatively
small scale. Even OED left out hundreds of so-called
provincialisms; their absence is not due to oversight. A
special etymological dictionary of dialectal vocabulary
needs a good deal of preparatory work. Dialectal words
of Scandinavian and Low German/Dutch origin have
been studied in considerable detail, but the remainder
—"words of unknown etymology"—is huge. Before all
the recorded words of English dialects have been
stratified according to the most elementary rubrics
(words going back to Old English, borrowings from
42
 Introduction

Scandinavian, borrowings from Low German/Dutch,

Romance words, words of unknown origin, and so forth),
it is pointless to include bairn, barm, bauson, and nesh in
etymological dictionaries only because their history
happens to be known. Some such words--for example,
oss(e)--have been the object of protracted controversies
and have "attained celebrity," yet they have to be left for
the future.
Slang is an elusive concept. Although informal by
definition, short-lived, and local, it often acquires a
certain degree of respectability, stays in the language,
and overcomes territorial barriers. However unscientific
such a procedure may be, it is probably best to decide
which slang words should go into an etymological
dictionary by using one's intuition. Here are six "low"
synonyms of steal: purloin, cop, filch, mooch, pilfer, and
swipe. None of them is metaphoric in the sense in which
the verbs bone, cabbage, hook, lift, nick, and pinch are.
Probably even the most conservative lexicographers will
not object to the presence of purloin, filch, mooch, and
pilfer in an etymological dictionary, while the other two
will be acceptable only to some. In the prospective
dictionary, slang will occupy a modest place.

The Uses of the Prospective Dictionary of English

Etymology
43
 Introduction

One of the functions of the prospective dictionary

(represented below by fiftyfive samples) is to make the
literature on English etymology available. Information on
the origin of words that surfaced in Middle English and
later is especially hard to collect. But this dictionary has
not been conceived as a showcase of old and recent
opinions. The user of Week-ley, Partridge, Onions, Klein,
and Barnhart learns little about researchers' and
amateurs' doubts and almost nothing about their
tortuous way to the truth. Dictionaries formulate their
conclusions in such a way that few would suspect any
depth behind the statements in their pages (compare
what has been said about the treatment of bone in
ODEE). Etymology, as it appears in English dictionaries, is
the only philological science enjoying complete
anonymity. Who suggested that soot is related to sit?
Who detected cock's egg in Cockney? Who guessed that
surround has nothing to do with round? Are these
discoveries final? Indo-European linguistics is full of laws:
Verner's Law, Sievers's Law, and dozens of others. It is
sad that the most brilliant English etymologies are
nameless waifs.
The format of the entry in Walde-Hofmann, Feist,
Vasmer, and Jan de Vries reveals the extent of the
authors' knowledge of their subject. In dealing with
English etymological dictionaries, one has to take
everything on trust. Onions could have done without
44
 Introduction

balalaika, but he included it in ODEE and inadvertently

revealed the danger of dogmatic entries. According to
ODEE, balalaika is "Russ[ian], of Tatar origin." In a
nondogmatic work, a reference would have supported
his statement, but since ODEE almost never gives
references, it begins to seem that no proof is needed:
the Tatar origin of balalaika is apparently a fact. But it is
not. Whoever wrote Slavic etymologies for ODEE could
have looked up balalaika in several dictionaries of Slavic
and found that the word is probably native. Why did
ODEE prefer the less reliable etymology? Onions's Slavic
consultants had a strong predilection for Tatar: they
derived even Kremlin, an undoubtedly Russian word,
from that language. If at the end of the entry on
balalaika the source of information had been cited (as is
done, for instance, under Samoed), the procedure could
have been subjected to criticism, but in a dogmatic
dictionary an insufficient familiarity with the material is
hidden. An etymological dictionary is not a repository of
aphorisms, and it should be written according to the
rules valid for all linguistic works; that is, with a scholarly
apparatus that allows the reader to see what is original
and what is common knowledge in each entry, what
authority stands behind the main formulations, and
what the authors (editors, compilers) have read.
A still more important issue is the gap between
English etymology as a science and as a body of
45
 Introduction

information presented in dictionaries. One can assume

with some confidence that Skeat, Murray, and Bradley
tried to keep abreast of the times and followed the
major publications on the history of English vocabulary.
Since 1884-1928, the years in which OED was being
published, thousands of articles and books on the origin
of English words and their cognates have appeared.
Most people take it for granted that the editors of our
latest dictionaries are aware of those works; but if it
were so, it would be hard to explain why ODEE,
Partridge, Klein, and the rest show such disregard of
post-1928 contributions. Most of the ongoing
etymological research leaves no trace in English
etymological dictionaries. Are the new ideas so bad that
they do not even deserve refutation? In his review of
Alistair Campbell's Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda to
Bosworth-Toller, R. I. Page wrote: "The difficulty . . . is
that the reader does not know if Campbell's omissions
are reasoned and intended, or accidental" (Medium
JEvum vol. 44, 1975, p. 67). This is exactly where the
shoe pinches the most. Etymology as a branch of
linguistics is different from phonetics and grammar in
that its practitioners do not meet at special conferences,
few manuals summarize the latest contributions to the
subject, and it is taught (when at all) only as a
component of other courses. An article on the origin of

46
 Introduction

an English word can make an impact on scholarship only

if it is mentioned in an etymological dictionary.
Several circumstances disrupted the practice of
coordinating dictionary work with achievements in
English linguistics. The main one is the excellence of OED
and Skeat4.
Most etymologies in these dictionaries are so solid,
even when incomplete and outdated, that recycling
them guarantees a measure of success to any
lexicographic enterprise. Second, English philology chose
not to follow the example of Walde, Feist, Van Wijk,
Vasmer, Jan de Vries, and others (more excellent models
can be found in Romance linguistics) and did not develop
an encyclopedic or analytic etymological dictionary. In a
dogmatic dictionary, controversial ideas have no chance
of being noticed. Finally, owing to the progress in
comparative linguistics, most hypotheses advanced
before roughly 1860-1880 appear obsolete; and old
dictionaries, as well as old articles and books, have lost
their appeal in the eyes of those who learned etymology
from Brugmann, Noreen, and their contemporaries and
pupils. Not only Skinner, Wachter, Junius, and Ihre, but
also Mueller, who had the ill luck to publish the second
edition of his dictionary shortly before Skeat, and
Wedgwood, with his cavalier attitude toward phonetic
correspondences, have been shelved once and for all. On
one hand, English etymology abandoned its remote past
47
 Introduction

as a laughable superstition. On the other, it became too

self-sufficient to bother with recent contributions.
Everyone will probably applaud the effort made in
this dictionary to discuss the post-1928 works that have
not been given due credit. But to what extent are pre-
Skeat and especially pre-Grimm books worthy of
attention? The answer depends on the word under con-
sideration. Many etymologies yield to a combination of
Neogrammarian algebra, imagination, and serendipity.
Recourse to phonetic correspondences makes certain
hypotheses untenable by definition, but when a
tempting etymology collapses under the weight of
phonetic evidence, linguists have numerous ways to save
the situation: the substrate, borrowing, hybrid forms
(Mischformen), residual forms (Restformen), migratory
words (Kul-turworter or Wanderworter), sound
symbolism, onomatopoeic and expressive formations,
baby language, anagrams, individual coinages, taboo,
and the multifarious forms of language play.
Assimilation, dissimilation, metanalysis, metathesis,
redistribution of morphemes, back formation, allegro
forms, fear of homonymy, "corruption" (that is, folk ety-
mology or mistakes in transmission), and analogy, for
some reason usually called false, though being false is its
only raison d'etre, also prove useful. Contemporary
knowledge of language families is another great asset.
We no longer derive English from Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
48
 Introduction

or German. But if an English word bears a close

resemblance to a word in Hebrew, the two may be
related. With the growth of Nostratic linguistics,
modified versions of broad and even "global"
etymologies, once favored and later ridiculed as fantasy,
are again in vogue. Consequently, even reference to
Hebrew words in old dictionaries can sometimes be put
to use.
When etymology tries to solve the riddle of the
origin of language, it fails. In Indo-European, one can
seldom go beyond the roots posited by Brugmann,
Walde, and Pokorny (with or without laryngeals): the
circumstances in which allegedly primitive sound strings
like *bhlag-, *ster, and *wegh- (in so far as they are not
obviously onomatopoeic) came by their meanings is
hidden. Older authors, even such learned men as Junius
and Ihre, were at their weakest when correct solutions
required the use of socalled sound laws, for they sought
phonetic similarity, while we rely on correspondences.
But thousands of etymologies are more or less inspired
guesswork. Strumpet resembles English strumpot
(whatever that means), French tromper 'cheat,' Latin
stuprum 'disgrace,' and German Strumpf 'stocking' or
'trouser leg.' The more obscure the word, the more clues
have to be examined. In such cases, the conjectures of
old scholars have not necessarily lost their value.

49
 Introduction

An instructive example is the legacy of Wedgwood,

the greatest authority on English etymology before
Skeat. He took a keen interest in the distant roots of
language (an interest he shared with Charles Darwin, his
brother-in-law). His papers could at one time be found in
every volume of the Transactions of the Philological
Society. After the appearance of Skeat's dictionary
(1882), he published a sizable book of objections to it,
and although there was no love lost between the two
scholars, Skeat accepted some of his rival's suggestions.
Later, Skeat and OED upstaged Wedgwood; but in the
sixties of the nineteenth century, George March, a
leading specialist in the history of English, was so
impressed with Wedgwood's dictionary that he
envisaged an American edition of it with his additions
and corrections (only the first volume appeared). Even
Mayhew, who never missed a chance to denigrate his
colleagues and who was aware of Wedgwood's faults,
admired his ability to detect semantic connections.
Regrettably, Wedgwood's works have fallen into
oblivion.
In the prospective dictionary, more than one fourth
of the words are of "obscure origin." In trying to unravel
their past, old works with an etymological component
have been occasionally found to be of use. References to
forgotten and half-forgotten publications will benefit
readers in several ways. Critical surveys will allow them
50
 Introduction

to trace the path from the ancient rambles among words

or word gossip (as this genre was called) to the terse
formulations of ODEE. All modern solutions will be put
into perspective. Even a hundred years ago, the most
distinguished scholars in the field used to begin their
articles with disclaimers such as: "My etymology is so
simple that it must have occurred to someone else."
Their fears were not always groundless. Our
contemporaries find it difficult to master the scholarly
literature that seemed vast as far back as 1880 (which is
the reason they rarely try to do so) and need a detailed
overview of books, articles, and notes in the style of
Feist and Vas-mer. Since such overviews exist for all the
major Indo-European languages, English need not remain
the only exception. Despite the emphasis on survey and
overview above, the idea is not to publish an annotated
bibliography disguised as an etymological dictionary. The
surveys will examine early etymologies from chance
juxtapositions to relatively convincing hypotheses. It will
be hard to avoid some reference to uninformed
opinions. Even those who will agree that we can learn
something from Minsheu, Junius, and Skinner (and who
welcomed the reprints of their dictionaries) may wonder
why the fantasies of John B. Ker, Charles Mackay, Karl
Faulmann, Frederick Ebener, M. M. Makovskii, Isaac E.
Mozeson, and a few other researchers of the same type
have not been ignored. The answer is simple. The history
51
 Introduction

of linguistics is as erratic as all human history, and it is

useful to be aware of this fact, the more so because our
age produces "absurdities" with the enthusiasm and self-
assurance even exceeding those of the past epochs.
The main situations we encounter are two: 1) A word
has been given some attention in dictionaries and in
special publications, but no one has discovered its
etymology. Here the case will be presented and
suggestions added, wherever possible. 2) The etymology
of a word has been discovered, but English dictionaries
keep repeating: "Origin unknown." For instance, the
etymology of cub is no longer a puzzle, but articles on it
and mentions of it in Scandinavian, German, and Dutch
dictionaries escaped the attention of English lexicog-
raphers (the most probable explanation), or Onions and
others found the existing hypotheses unconvincing and
preferred not to rank them according to their worth. In
such cases, everyone will be given a fair hearing and the
best solution defended. This dictionary will close with a
summary, a subject index, a word index, and a name
index, so that lexicographers, etymologists, historians of
ideas, specialists in the external history of English (in-
cluding material culture), and students of any Indo-
European language and of any aspect of the history of
English will be able to retrace most of what they need.
Truly original etymological dictionaries of major
Indo-European languages (that is, dictionaries in which
52
 Introduction

every or almost every word receives a novel explanation)

are no longer possible. Even such imaginative scholars as
Ernst Zupitza and Francis A. Wood, quite naturally, found
inspiration in the work of their predecessors; the same is
true of de Saussure and Meillet. This is what Skeat said
about his achievement in the last year of his life: "I have
received so much assistance from so many kind friends
that I fail to remember whence my ideas have come.
May I say, once for all, that I claim to be no better than a
compiler; and though some of the contributions have
come from my own stores, I cannot always say which
they are" (Modern Language Review vol. 6, 1911, p. 210;
published posthumously).

On Methodology
By way of conclusion, it may be useful to formulate a
few general principles on which the prospective
dictionary is based. They are a mixture of a
lexicographer's common sense and philology.
1. Many Birds, One Stone. An etymologist's first
task is to find the cognates of any given word in the
target language. By and large, the same etymology will
be valid for the entire group. Once we agree that fit
'attack of illness; sudden onset,' fiddle, fickle, and so on
belong together, the search for the origin of every
member of the group resolves itself into documenting
53
 Introduction

the attested forms. Dictionaries arrange words

alphabetically and thereby destroy the ties they are
supposed to restore. Even a dictionary devoted to the
etymology of one language will gain if it partly follows
the example of Fick, Walde, and others, whose format is
"nests." In the entry FUCK, below, about twenty words
with the presumable semantic core 'move back and
forth' are etymologized. Some of them, like fiddle,
deserve special treatment, but the rest can be dismissed
summarily. The same holds for miche, meech, mich,
mouch, mooch, and, possibly, mug 'waylay and rob;
(ugly) face,' hugger-mugger, and curmudgeon (see
MOOCH). See also GAWK and TOAD. Cross-references in
etymological dictionaries invariably miss some of the
words belonging to a large cluster, and since each
headword has to be relatively self-sufficient, the same
data are recycled over and over again, instead of
relegating them to an index. It seems more profitable to
write six pages on mooch and its kin than a half-dozen
short entries that the reader will have to combine, in
order to obtain a full picture. An average user has
neither the time nor the expertise to do such work. The
format advocated here enjoyed some popularity at the
dawn of etymological lexicography but was later
abandoned.
2. Scorched Earth. This principle, which is a variant
of the previous one, was formulated by Skeat in his
54
 Introduction

Canon 10: "It is useless to offer an explanation of an

English word which will not also explain all the cognate
forms." Skeat was right, but in the world of words
kinship is not always evident. Consider the never-ending
debate over the validity of lists in Walde-Pokorny and
Pokorny. Even within one language group (Germanic),
secondary ablaut produces forms whose relationship to
one another constitutes the main part of etymological
inquiry. For example, to understand the origin of lad, it is
necessary to explore the prehistory of many
Scandinavian, English, Old Saxon, and German words
having a, o, u, and other vowels between l and d (Ö, t).
Until all of them reveal their past, the origin of lad will
remain uncertain. The same holds for cob, cub, keb, and
the rest (also in several languages) and for miche, G
meucheln, E mug, L muger, and so forth. Compare 7,
below.
Etymologists prefer to concentrate on the obvious
rather than distant, questionable, and spurious cognates.
On the other hand, they will catch at the thinnest straw
to explain the origin of a hard word. The purpose of the
present dictionary is not only to discover the truth to the
extent that we can do it with the information available
today but also to expose all the false tracks. The entry
KEY might be adequate without discussion of OI
kogurbarn, but the temptation to connect *kag- and
*kaig- is great, and a special note emphasizes their
55
 Introduction

incompatibility. It comes as a surprise that in the Middle

Ages stunted growth was considered a mental disease
rather than a physical deformity and that dwarves were
associated with lunacy. Every piece of evidence that
illustrates this idea has value. Herein lies the justification
of a long note on altvile appended to the entry DWARF.
Only exhaustive critical surveys of all forms actually and
allegedly related to the word under consideration and a
thorough analysis of the Wörter und Sachen aspect of
the problem at hand (which complement an overview of
the state of the art) can weaken the speculative basis of
etymology as a science.
The method employed in this dictionary owes little
to Jost Trier's procedures despite some superficial
similarity between them. Trier's overriding categories
(fence building, young trees, the needs of a community,
and so forth), which he treated as motors of semantic
change, often produce doubtful and even wrong results
because a bird's-eye view of word history cannot replace
a painstaking study of the contexts in which words occur.
Trier was an inspired scholar and saw far, but, as they
say, God is in the details. This is true of etymology as
much as of any other branch of scholarship.
3. The Centrifugal Principle. Tracing word origins is
a game of probabilities. A language historian often
reaches a stage when all the facts have been presented
and it becomes necessary to weigh several hypotheses
56
 Introduction

and choose the most probable or, to use a less charitable

formation, the least improbable one. All other conditions
being equal, tracing a word to a native root should be
preferred to declaring it a borrowing. In similar fashion,
it is more attractive to refer to an ascertainable foreign
source than to an unidentifiable substrate. The origin of
numerous plant and animal names, as well as of the
names of tools, is obscure. Some scholars believe that
clover and ivy, both limited to West Germanic, are
substrate words taken over from a non-Indo-European
language. Both propositions, most likely, are wrong
because a persuasive Germanic etymology exists for
clover ('sticky') and especially for ivy ('bitter'). However,
the discovery of a plausible English source for clover and
ivy does not mean that our task has been accomplished.
By choosing an attested native etymon and refusing to
deal with a plant name of non-Germanic origin, we only
pay tribute to the centrifugal principle: the closer to the
center, the better. OE afor 'bitter' looks like a perfect
match for ifig. Yet the relative value of the results
obtained is self-evident.
4. Say 'no' to 'obscurum per obscurius.' When a
word is isolated in one language (like heifer: only
English), several languages (like ivy: West Germanic), or
a language group (like dwarf: Germanic), etymologists
make great efforts to find related forms elsewhere; see
what is said above about their propensity to catch at the
57
 Introduction

thinnest straw. As a rule, they succeed in discovering

some word whose phonetic shape and meaning match
those of the word under discussion. It is usually hard to
decide whether the alleged connection is valid. But the
following principle provides some help: a word of
unknown etymology in one language should never be
compared with an equally obscure word in another
language.
Heifer (< OE heahfore) resembles vaguely a few
animal names outside English, Russ. koza 'nanny-goat'
being among them. However the pair heifer / koza need
not delay us, for the origin of koza remains a matter of
debate (it may be a borrowing from some Turkic lan-
guage). When Hoops suggested that ivy is related to L
ibex, he found many supporters: both the plant and the
animal are indeed climbers, whereas from the phonetic
point of view the correspondence is flawless. But
nothing is known about the origin of ibex (a substrate
Alpine word?), which means that Hoops's etymology is
unacceptable by definition. Dwarf (< OE dweorg) has
exact counterparts in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Old High
German, and Old Icelandic, but attempts to find its non-
Germanic cognates have failed. Among those proposed
are Avestan drva, the name of some physical deformity,
Skt dhvards- 'crooked, dishonest,' an epithet
accompanying the demon Druh, and Gk aep(l)(poc,
'midge' (or some other insect). The origin and the exact
58
 Introduction

meaning of those three words are uncertain. It follows

that they should not have been proposed, let alone
taken seriously, as putative cognates of dwarf.
Inevitably, after a short life in dictionaries (some of our
best), they, especially drva and aepdXpoj, returned to
their obscurity, and the search for the derivation of
dwarf started from scratch.
5. Stylistic Congruity. The deterioration and the
amelioration of meaning are well-known phenomena.
Yet the etymon of the word whose origin we are
investigating should ideally be searched among the
words of the same style. Reconstruction, let it be
repeated, is about probabilities. Incredible semantic
leaps have occurred in the history of words, but only
such changes can be posited that have the support of
documented analogs. According to a recent hypothesis,
girl, though it surfaced in the thirteenth century, goes
back to OE gierela (gerela, girela, gyrela) 'dress, apparel,
adornment; banner.' A metonymy of this type (from
clothes to a person wearing them) is common, but ME
girle seems to have been an informal word that meant
both 'young male' and 'young female' and was used
mainly in the plural, whereas OE gierela appears to have
belonged to a relatively elevated register and did not
designate children's clothes. Inasmuch as the stylistic gap
between OE gierela and ME girle remains unbridged, the
former should be rejected as the source of the latter.
59
 Introduction

Considerations of style are among the most neglected in

etymological studies, though Vofiler and Spitzer never
tired of emphasizing them.
6. Language at Play. Sound correspondences
remain the foundation of etymological analysis, but all
branches of historical linguistics have to reckon with the
existence of ludic forms. The union of Neogrammarian
linguistics and phonosemantics should be welcomed, but
only in so far as phonosemantics knows its place. Facile
references to ideophones do not produce lasting results.
It may be that the sound complex k + vowel + b conveys
or at one time conveyed the idea of roundness, but even
if so, the history of cub and cob remains obscure. We
have to explain why both words were attested so late,
how they are related to similar words in other Germanic
languages, to what extent the many meanings of cob
(noun and verb) belong together, whether it is legitimate
to reconstruct a phonosemantic explosion in the history
of English six or seven centuries ago, or whether earlier
forms have to be reconstructed. Yet neither the strictest
application of Neogrammarian laws nor the broadest
recognition of the role of sound symbolism, expressive
gemination, and so forth will turn etymology into a strict
science. It will forever depend on a combination of intu-
ition, guesswork, and all-encompassing knowledge.
7. Entries versus Essays. The length of the entries in
this book is untraditional. Some
60
 Introduction

are longer than average journal articles, and even the

shortest do not resemble those in
Skeat, Kluge, or Feist. The format chosen for the entries
is a consequence of the principle
of scorched Earth. A single example will suffice. Lad,
mentioned at the beginning of No. 2
("Scorched earth"), has been compared with E lead (v),
OE leod, hlafxta, *hldeda, and Ladda,
G ledig, Go (jugga-)laups, Gr λαός, Welsh llawd, VL litus,
Hebr. yeled, and its cognate Ara-
bic (wa)-lad-. In addition, a thicket of look-alikes
surrounds it: OE loddere, OI lydda, MHG
(sumer)lat(t)e, N ladd, and E lath, to mention the most
important ones. A convincing etymol-
ogy of lad can be offered only after all of them have been
investigated and either weeded
out or left as probable cognates of the English noun.
Along the way, Hamlet's name turns
up, and it, too, requires some attention. Discussion of so
many side issues needs space.
The apodictic, telegraphic style common among
etymologists ("wrong cognates are offered
by . . .", "different treatment can be found in . . .",
without elaboration) would do a disser-
vice to English, with its tradition of dogmatic
dictionaries. A diffuse essay is preferable to
an entry in which hints take precedence over detailed
61
 Introduction

examination. After all, people not

interested in circling the battlefield can come to the
point at once, skip the digressions, and
read only the summary and the conclusion.
Kluge, too, wrote a dogmatic dictionary, but his
successors began to include references to the scholarly
literature, and every new edition witnessed an increase
in the number of works cited. In English etymological
lexicography, even the few references Skeat chose to
give have disappeared. The entries below are long
because they follow every lead and contain exhaustive
surveys of opinion going back to 1599 (Kilianus) or 1617
(Minsheu). A bibliography comparable in size to the text
of the samples may seem excessive to some, but the
time has come to cleanse the Augean stable of English
etymology (a labor that is not only necessary but also
pleasant). Another extenuating circumstance is that if
this project were conceived by a German scholar, the
book would be called kurzgefasstes Wörterbuch. Brevity
is a matter of definition.
Otto Jespersen says the following in his review of
Wyld's The Universal English Dictionary: "One of the
distinctive features of this Dictionary is the great space
given to etymology, and on the whole this part of the
work is admirable. The author has shown much discrimi-
nation in selecting all that is reliable in recent
etymological investigations without bewildering the
62
 Introduction

reader, as some etymological dictionaries do, with a

great many fanciful proposals that have found their way
to linguistic periodicals" (English Studies vol. 15, 1933, p.
44). In the same paragraph, Jespersen notes that Wyld's
interest in history sometimes carried him away. For
example, "[t]he word crinite, from the English point of
view certainly one of the most unimportant words,
receives nine lines of etymology to half a line of defini-
tion." However, having said that and having adduced
another instance of the same type, he remarks: "But why
grumble if a man who gives us so much excellent
information seems here and there to give us a little too
much?" May his disarmingly kind question serve as a
reminder that "fanciful proposals," both old and new,
constitute the main body of etymological literature.
8. The Samples. The words treated in this book
represent all the letters of the English al-
phabet except Q, V, X and Z. Most have been in the
language since the earliest period, a few surfaced in
Middle English; slang does not antedate the eighteenth
century, Lilliputian and jeep are "coinages," and kitty-
corner (whatever its age) was first attested in recent
memory. Nouns predominate among the samples, but
there are also verbs, two adverbs (ever and yet), and a
numeral (eena). One entry (heifer) deals with a disguised
compound. Fieldfare, henbane, horehound, and
ragamuffin are still decomposable, but their constituent
63
 Introduction

elements are partly or wholly opaque. In understand,

both parts are transparent; it is their sum (under + stand
= 'comprehend') that baffles the modern speaker. The
same holds for slowworm. Kitty-corner (a phrase) has
been included for the sake of the incomprehensible kitty.
The present book, a showcase of the entire project,
contains words of various origins. Brain, clover, and ivy
are West Germanic. Beacon is also West Germanic, but
OI bdkn, even if it is a borrowing from Old English,
requires special attention. Dwarf has cognates all over
the Germanic speaking world. The entries on clover, ivy,
beacon, and dwarf demonstrate the treatment of the
less isolated words of English. Man has cognates in Indo-
Iranian and Slavic. Words with broad Indo-European
connections, such as kin terms and ancient numerals,
have not been included. The same holds for
unquestionable borrowings even from other Germanic
languages, but the question of language contacts turns
up in the history of many words with obscure history.
See the entries onflatter, fuck, gawk, girl, rabbit, and
strumpet. Research into the possible sources of the
seemingly isolated words plays a role in the etymology
of cushat, drab, filch, skedaddle, and stubborn. The ghost
of the substrate haunts the investigation of clover, ivy,
and key; adz(e) resembles old migratory words.
Some entries form small cycles. Clover and ever end
in -er; cub and cob are similar in sound and meaning; boy
64
 Introduction

and girl, lad and lass are traditionally discussed together

pairwise (this is especially true of lad and lass). Doxy,
drab, strumpet, and traipse are near synonyms. The
emphasis on plant and animal names is not due to
chance (they are notoriously obscure), the more so as
hemlock, henbane, and horehound share reference to
poison.
The common denominator of all fifty-five words is
their etymological opaqueness. The solutions offered
here are, of necessity, controversial. If the history of
bird, cockney, slang, and the rest were less troublesome,
their etymology would have been discovered and ac-
cepted long ago. Some solutions look like a tour de force
(see especially fag(g)ot and pimp), others may arouse no
serious objections (for example, cushat, stubborn). The
goal of the dictionary is to do justice to four centuries of
research, not to close the science of English etymology.
Fifty-five is a good number when it comes to
etymological cruces and enough to give an idea of the
project in its entirety.

A Few Practical Considerations

Since this book introduces a project of great
magnitude, a few comments on its practical aspects may
not be out of place. Work on the dictionary began in
1987. At that time, Ana-toly Liberman (AL) and J.
65
 Introduction

Lawrence Mitchell (JLM) were colleagues at the

University of Minnesota. In 1988 JLM moved to Texas,
where he spent sixteen years as Head of the Department
of English at Texas A&M University. AL is a professor of
Germanic Philology in the Department of German,
Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota
(Minneapolis). He is responsible for the research and
writes the etymologies. JLM prepared part of the volume
for publication.
Before the first entry could be written, it was
necessary to collect the literature on English etymology.
The available bibliographies have yielded numerous
relevant titles, but most references to the history of
English words can be discovered only by screening jour-
nals de visu. Close to a hundred people have looked
through major philological journals and numerous
popular and semipopular publications dealing with
English linguistics and photocopied the articles, reviews,
and notes that, in their opinion, were useful for future
work. All the works have been marked for the English
words they contain and entered into the computer. This
search is endless, for it is impossible to examine the
entire corpus of old literature, while new journals and
books appear every month. However, sufficiently
detailed entries can be written on the basis of the files
kept at the University of Minnesota. Etymological
dictionaries of German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic,
66
 Introduction

Dutch, and several other languages have been indexed

for English words. The writing of each entry begins with
the production of two summaries: 1) everything said
about the word in about two hundred dictionaries, and
2) everything said about it in articles and books. More
about collecting the material has been said in the
introduction to A Bibliography of English Etymology,
being published simultaneously with these samples.
The authors of etymological dictionaries find it
difficult to eliminate errors. In retrospect, one wonders
how Walde could occasionally give a Latin word a wrong
length or how Onions could spell a Czech word with
letters nonexistent in that language. Reviewers call such
mistakes abhorrent, unconscionable, and unpardonable.
Moral indignation elevates the critic, but the fact
remains that no one is fully qualified to write an
etymological dictionary of an Indo-European language,
especially of English. If authors and editors are versed in
Old and Middle English, they are probably less
comfortable in Old High German and Old Icelandic. If
they spent years studying Classical Greek and Latin, they
must have missed a good deal in Old Frisian and Middle
Dutch, and if they know all those things, they could not
have had enough exposure to Old French and Old Irish.
The present book has been written to test the
chosen approach to the new dictionary. The entries
reflect accurately the format to be followed in the
67
 Introduction

future, but their text may not remain unchanged in the

body of the dictionary. New information will inevitably
lead to revision. Also, the longer one works on a project,
the more experienced one becomes. Every new entry
reveals some missed opportunities in the composition of
those already written, brings new associations, and
suggests formerly unsuspected moves. An etymologist
describing the origin of zip and someone who, years
before, pondered the origin of adz(e) are, figuratively
speaking, different people. A noticeable distance
separates Skeat's ideas in 1910 and in 1882, and, as is
well known, OED improved from letter to letter, though
even the first fascicle was superb. It would be ideal to
complete the dictionary, use the acquired wisdom for
revising all the early entries, and only then publish the
whole work. But in this case one would lose the much
appreciated "feedback" and run the risk of leaving
behind only a heap of rough drafts on one's dying day.
To ensure readability, abbreviations have been used
sparingly in the book. There is no period after
abbreviations (thus, v or dial, not v. or dial.). Names are
always given in full (thus, Wedgwood or Chantraine, not
Wedg. or Chantr..), except for the instances like Meyer-
Lübke (ML) and joint authors, such as Sievers-Brunner
(SB). The titles of most dictionaries have been
abbreviated; thus Jan de Vries's Altnordisches
etymologisches Wörterbuch and Ned-erlands
68
 Introduction

etymologisch woordenboek are referred to as AEW and

NEW. Some choices have been arbitrary. Abbreviations
like OED (= The Oxford English Dictionary) appear
without the definite article, without periods after the
capitals, and nonitalicized: OED, not OED, the OED, or
(the) O.E.D. In the bibliography, some traditional
abbreviations have been retained, for it seems that, for
instance, PBB is still more familiar to most than BGDSL.
If the reference is Mueller, Wedgwood, and so forth
(this is done only for dictionaries), it means that all the
editions of the respective works contain the same
information on the matter in question. Skeat's great
1882 dictionary was reset only for the 4th edition.
Therefore, Skeat1 means Skeat1-3. Citations in the text
have the form as in: Tobler (1846:46), or if the name
occurs in parentheses, then: (Tobler [1846:46]), without
a space between the colon and the page number.
Dictionaries are cited without dates: Wright, IEW, and so
on, but when a dictionary-maker is cited as the author of
an article or book, the reference has the usual form, for
instance, Skeat (1887:468, 470). When an article is
contained within the space of one page, the page
number has been left out: Collyns (1857), rather than
Collyns (1857:258). Page numbers are also omitted when
reference is to the whole work, for instance, Gusmani
(1972). If a dictionary is arranged alphabetically and the
letters are Greek or follow in the same order as in
69
 Introduction

English, neither the page number nor the reference of

the type s.v., q.v. is given. The same holds for
Scandinavian dictionaries in which x, 0, and a; or a, a,
and o follow z (so in Danish/ Norwegian and Swedish
respectively). In Icelandic, the last letters are p, x and o,
but in AEW p follows t, as is done in dictionaries of Old
English. Only in dictionaries of Old English x either
follows a or occupies the place of ae. A sentence like: "So
Skeat1-3 . . ." means that the etymology just cited can be
found in the first three editions of Skeat's dictionary,
under the headword. In references to the dictionaries of
Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Hebrew, and Slavic and to
dictionaries like WP, page numbers are always given.
Palatalized c and g in Old English words are not
distinguished from their velar counterparts by dots or
any other sign. In transliteration of words recorded in
Cyrillic characters, diacritics have been avoided wherever
possible. A Gothic word with an asterisk after it means
that, although the word in question has been attested,
the form cited in the book does not occur in the extant
corpus. This is a convenient old tradition. In recent
works, asterisks always appear before Gothic words, and
the user of a dictionary gets the impression that most
words of that language have not been recorded.
As far as the reliability of the forms cited in the book
is concerned, see the introduction to the index.

70
 Introduction

Acknowledgments
Work on this book consisted of two parts. Since the
idea of the dictionary was to produce analytic rather
than dogmatic entries, a huge bibliography of English
etymology had to be amassed. This work was done at
Minnesota; see the acknowledgments in the
introduction to the bibliography. It should only be
repeated that the turning point in the support for the
project was a meeting with the late David R. Fesler. He
and his wife Mrs. Elizabeth (BJ) Fesler set up a fund
without which screening journals and books and,
consequently, the writing of etymologies would not have
been completed. From benefactors the Feslers soon
became my good friends, and it is appropriate that the
"showcase" volume of the dictionary be dedicated to
David's memory.
Most entries in the book end with references like
Liberman (1988a) and Liberman (2003). Some
etymologies featured below were published in General
Linguistics, whose then editor Ernst A. Ebbinghaus liked
the idea of an analytic dictionary and started a special
rubric "Studies in Etymology" in his journal. After his
death, my articles apxli ii peared in various journals,
miscellaneous collections, and Festschriften. None of
them is reprinted here unchanged. Their style has been
reworked drastically. Countless additions have been
71
 Introduction

made, mistakes corrected, doubtful formulations altered

or expunged, and a few solutions modified. This is
especially true of the earliest samples, but even the
latest ones are in many respects new. References to their
initial versions are of historical interest only: all those
contributions have been "canceled" by the present
publication.
The idea of the dictionary gained the support of
several eminent scholars. Hans Aarsleff, Ernst A.
Ebbinghaus, W.P. Lehmann, Albert L. Lloyd, and Edgar C.
Polomé read twenty-three etymologies (this was years
ago), and their approval of the format and the content of
those early enteries was of inestimable importance.
Recently, W.P. Lehmann and Albert L. Lloyd kindly have
read almost the entire book. Three more attentive
readers of my articles have been Bernhard Diensberg,
David L. Gold, and Ladislav Zgusta. David L. Gold has also
read about two-thirds of the text, and innumerable
improvements in its final shape are due to his advice.
The initial stage of the preparation of the dictionary
for print fell to the lot of Professor J. Lawrence Mitchell.
This volume owes more to his patience and the diligence
of his assistants than words can tell. Changes and
additions on an almost weekly basis, endless telephone
conversations about the form and content of the entries,
an extremely difficult text that I submitted to him in
barely legible longhand, and a multilingual bibliography
72
 Introduction

needed the dedication of a scholar and the devotion of

an old friend. Initial indexing has also been done at
Texas. It is our pleasure to recognize the work of the
following assistants at Texas A&M University: Dragana
D'ordjevic, Seunggu Lew, Hui Hui Li, and Polixenia
Tohaneanu in particular, and especially Nathan E.J.
Carlson at University of Minnesota, who worked
tirelessly at polishing the book for over three years.
The timing of this project was truly auspicious. In the
eighties, personal computers appeared in our offices,
and where would we have been without copying
machines? Card catalogs, too, were replaced with
powerful computers, and WorldCat came into being.
Then email took care of our correspondence, and the era
of online publications and downloading set in. May this
page of acknowledgments express not only our gratitude
to all those who helped us finish the work but also our
joy that we are living in an age when unheard-of
technical improvements serve basic sciences.

73
 THE ETYMOLOGIES AT A GLANCE

The following etymologies aim at making the

conclusions reached in the present volume easily
available to those who are more interested in the results
of the investigation than in going over conflicting
hypotheses. They are also addressed to the etymological
editors of "thick" dictionaries. The summaries will allow
them to decide whether they want to read further and
modify their entries in accordance with the solutions
proposed here. "For many words, a thorough etymology
can easily run to twenty or thirty pages of analysis.
Obviously, no regular dictionary could allocate that much
space for etymology. Nevertheless, most regular
dictionaries could profitably incorporate the results of
such an analysis into their brief presentation and at least
reduce the shallowness of their etymologies" (Louis G.

74
Heller, "Lexicographic Etymology: Practice versus
Theory." American Speech 40, 1965, p. 118).
Although the volume contains fifty-five entries, it
discusses hundreds of words (see the index), some of
them in sufficient detail to justify summaries. The most
characteristic examples are COB, FUCK, MOOCH, NUDGE, and
RAGAMUFFIN. Therefore, this supplement presents the
etymologies of 68 Modern English and three Old English
words tfxöel, ludgeat, and myltestre).

ADZ(E) (880)
OE adesa and adusa, ME ad(e)se. ModE adze has
been monosyllabic only since the seventeenth century.
The word has no established cognates, though it
resembles the names of the adz and the hammer in
many languages. OE adusa is probably *acusa 'ax,'
with /d/ substituted for /k/ under the influence of some
continental form like MLG desele 'adz.' The names of
tools are among the most common migratory words
(Wanderwörter and Kulturwörter). Adz seems to be one
of them.

BEACON (900)
OE beacen goes back to *baukn-. It has cognates in
all the Old Germanic languages except Gothic. The
earliest sign for ships was probably *bak-, preserved as
LG bak and MDu baec. *Bak- must have been one of the
75
words designating objects capable of inflating
themselves and making noise. A similar word was *bauk-
(cf G Bauch 'belly'), which may have acquired -n and a
specialized meaning under the influence of its synonym
*taikn- 'token.' *Bak- and *baukn- were sound symbolic
synonyms, not cognates.

76
 The Etymologies at a Glance BIRD (800)
OE bird is less frequent than bridd 'nestling.' Middle
English, in which bird referred to various young animals
and even human beings, may have preserved the original
meaning of this word. Despite its early attestation, bridd
is not necessarily the oldest form of bird. It is usually
assumed that -ir- from -ri- arose by metathesis, but here,
too, the Middle English form may go back to an ancient
period. Gemination in bridd is typical of hypocoristic
names and should not be ascribed to West Germanic
gemination: the protoform with in the second syllable
has been set up for the sole purpose of explaining -dd.
Bird (from *bird-, not from bridd) was probably derived
from the root of beran 'give birth' with the help of the
suffix -d. Modern researchers have rejected this
etymology, but it seems to be the best we have.

BOY (1260)
In Old English, only the proper name Boia has been
recorded. ME boi meant 'churl, servant' and (rarely)
'devil.' In texts, the meaning 'male child' does not
antedate 1400. ModE boy looks like a semantic blend of
an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit (*boi) and a
baby word for 'brother' (*bo). The former may have
survived in the exclamation ataboy!, whereas the latter
gave rise to OE Boia. The derogatory senses of ME boy

77
must go back to *boi 'evil spirit, devil.' Boy 'servant' and
-boy in compounds like bellboy reflect medieval usage.

BRAIN (1000)
Brain (OE brxgeri) has no established cognates
outside West Germanic; Gk Ppeg|ia 'top of the head,'
which many dictionaries cite, is hardly related to it. More
probably, its etymon is PIE *bhragno 'something broken.'
From this protoform Irish has bran 'chaff, bran.' Accord-
ing to the reconstruction offered here, the Celtic word
was borrowed by Old French, and from there it made its
way into English. Consequently, brxgen should be
glossed as 'refuse,' almost coinciding with the modern
phrase gray matter.

BUOY (1466)
Buoy is a borrowing from Middle Dutch, in which it is
more probably native than a loan of OF boie ~ buie
'chain.' It is one of the names of inflatable, noisy objects
like G Bo 'squall' and ME boi 'devil.' See BEACON and BOY.

CATER-COUSIN (1547)
Cater-cousin, now remembered only because it
occurs in The Merchant of Venice, originally seems to
have meant 'distant relative.' The element cater-, most
probably of Scandinavian origin, means 'diagonally,
across, askew.' Perhaps because of its regular use with
78
reinforcing adverbs like scarce, cater-cousin acquired the
meaning 'friend,' nearly the opposite of 'distant relative':
scarce cater-cousins 'distant relatives of the remotest
type' was misunderstood as 'not friends.' Confusion with
cater 'provide' may have contributed to such a drastic
semantic change. See also KITTY-CORNER.

CHIDE (1000)
OE cldan 'chide' is probably related to OHG *kidal
'wedge' (> ModG Keil). The development must have
been from *T>randish sticks' to 'scold, reprove.' OE gecid
'strife, altercation' presumably also first had the meaning
*'brandishing sticks in a fight.'

79
 The Etymologies at a Glance

CLOVER (1000)
OE clafre (> ModE clover) and clxfre (> ModE claver)
probably trace back to WGmc *klaiwaz-'sticky pap'
(klaiw- as in ModE cleave 'adhere'). The sticky juice of
clover was the base of the most popular sort of honey.
Clafre and clxfre have the element -re, occurring in
several plant names. That element may have been
extracted from *-tro, a suffix common in the Germanic
botanical nomenclature.

COB 'round object' (1420)

Although known from texts only since the fifteenth
century, cob belongs to a sizable group of words in the
languages of Eurasia having a similar sound shape and a
similar meaning. Cob often alternates with cop (whose
predominant meaning is 'head'), but it is neither a
variant nor a derivative of cop. Two meanings seem to
have merged in cob: 'round object' and 'animal' (the
latter possibly from 'lump'). The first of them is
prominent in cub, a word closely connected with cob.
See also CUB.

COB 'mixture of earth and straw' (1602)

Possibly from cob 'muddle, mess; badly executed
work,' of onomatopoeic origin. COB 'take a liking to
someone; like one another' (1893)

80
 The Etymologies at a Glance

The verb cob, poorly attested in British dialects but

known in Australian and New Zealand English, is a back
formation from cobber 'friend,' an argotic word whose
etymon is Yiddish khaver 'friend,' from Hebrew.

COCKNEY (1362)
Cockney 'cock's egg,' a rare and seemingly obsolete
word in Middle English, was, in all likelihood, not the
etymon of ME cokeney 'milksop, simpleton; effeminate
man; Londoner,' which is rather a reshaping of OF
acoquiné 'spoiled' (participle). However, this derivation
poses some phonetic problems that have not been
resolved. Cockney does not go back to cock, ME coquina
'kitchen,' or F coquin 'rogue, beggar.' An association
between cockney and cockaigne is also late.

CUB (1530)
Cub is one of the numerous monosyllabic, less often
disyllabic, animal names having the structure k + vowel +
b or bb. Some connection between this group and words
for 'piece of wood' with the structure k + vowel + p (as in
chip < OE cipp) is possible. Most of them, whether
ending in -b or -p, seem to be of onomatopoeic or sound
symbolic origin. They are hard to distinguish from
migratory words for 'cup,' 'cap,' and 'head.' See also COB
'round object.'

81
 The Etymologies at a Glance

CURMUDGEON (1577)
The oldest meaning of curmudgeon was probably
'cantankerous person,' not 'miser.' The word must have
been borrowed from Gaelic: -mudgeon (= muigean
'disagreeable person') with the intensifying prefix ker-,
spelled cur-, as in curfuffle and many other Lowland
Scots words. It is also possible that -mudgeon meant
'scowl'; curmudgeon would then have started out as 'big
scowl.' Ties between -mudgeon and mooch (one of
whose variants is modge), mug
'face,' and -mugger in hugger-mugger will turn out
to be the same in both cases. The similarity between cur
'dog,' F coeur 'heart' and cur- is accidental. See also
HUGGER-MUGGER, MOOCH, and MUG.

CUSHAT (700)
OE cusceote, most probably, had u in the first
syllable and was a compound, cu-sceote 'cow-shot.' A
connection with cows may be due to the fact that
pigeons are lactating birds. If cusceote is a reshaping of
Wel ysguthan 'wood pigeon,' that connection may have
been instrumental in producing the Old English form
under the influence of folk etymology. The second
element -sceote 'shot' referred to the bird's precipitous
flight.

DOXY (1530)
82
 The Etymologies at a Glance

Doxy probably goes back to LG dokke 'doll,' with the

deterioration of meaning from 'sweetheart' and 'wench'
to 'whore.'

DRAB 'slut' (1515)

Drab appears to be an etymological doublet of
traipse; hence the meanings 'gadabout' and 'slut.' See
also TRAIPSE.

DWARF (700)
The oldest recorded forms are OE dweorg, OS
(gi)twerg, OHG (gi)twerc, and OI dvergr. The word has
no established cognates outside Germanic. G zwerch-
'diagonally,' Skt dhvards 'crooked,' Avestan drva (the
name of some physical deformity), and Gk aep(l)fOj
'midge' are not related to dwarf. The consonant r in
dweorg and its cognates is, most likely, the product of
rhotacism. Gmc *dwer-g- < *dwez-g- < *dwes-g- had the
same root as OE dwXs, OHG twas, and MDu dwaes (>
ModDu dwaas), all of them meaning 'foolish.' This
reconstruction presupposes that a foolish or mad person
was said to be possessed by an evil spirit. Initially
dwarves must have belonged with other supernatural
beings, such as the gods and the elves, that caused
people harm and inflicted diseases. Their short size and
association with mountains and rocks are thus not their
original features.
83
 The Etymologies at a Glance

EENA (1855)
Eena is a reshaping of one. The origin of the counting
out rhyme eena, meena, mina, mo from Celtic sheep
scoring numerals and the source of the rhyme in the
New World remain debatable.

ELVER 'young eel' (1640)

Elver is a variant of eelfare 'young eel.' Its second
element (-ver and -fare) is probably identical with - fare
in fieldfare and -fer in heifer (< OE heahfore). The original
meaning of *xlfore or *xlfare may have been *'occupant
of a place favored by eels,' later *'. . . by young eels.' See
also FIELDFARE and HEIFER.

EVER (1000)
/Efre emerged in texts at the end of the Old English
period and may have been coined by clerics or religious
poets around that time. Its probable etymon is a
'always,' reinforced by the suffix -re, the same as in the
comparative form of adjectives. The umlauted variant X,
rather than a, may have been chosen unxii der the
influence of other comparatives or because of the
confusion between OE a and X 'law, covenant.' The
meaning of the coinage was 'more than always,' that is,
'in all eternity.' The often suggested origin of ever in old
prepositional phrases is unlikely.
84
 The Etymologies at a Glance

[OE F/EDEL 'play actor'] The word occurs once in a

gloss. Fxd- is probably akin to the root of the English
verbs faddle and fiddle. The actor must have been a kind
of juggler who entertained the public with quick
movements. A word with a similar root but with
postvocalic -g- is Polfiglarz 'juggler' (Polfigiel means
'trick, prank'). See also FIDDLE.

FAG 'servant; male homosexual' (1775); FAG(G)OT

(1300)
Faggot (or fagot) 'bundle of wood' is a borrowing
into Middle English, whereas the earliest known uses of
fag 'servant' do not antedate the last quarter of the
eighteenth century. The meanings of fag go all the way
from 'drudge; junior in a public school' and 'male ho-
mosexual' to 'dish made of inferior portions of a pig or
sheep.' Perhaps faggot acquired its derogotary meanings
under the influence of pimp 'boy who does menial jobs;
procurer of prostitutes' and also 'bundle of wood.' Fag is
a clipped form of faggot. See also PIMP.

FIDDLE (1205)
The verb fiddle, first recorded in 1530 with the
meaning 'make aimless or frivolous movements,' and
fiddle (1205), the name of a musical instrument, go back
to the same etymon. Their root fid- is indistinguishable
85
 The Etymologies at a Glance

from those in the words fitful and fidget, that is, 'move
back and forth.' Those words belong with faddle 'caress;
play; trifle,' fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks, and fiddle-de-dee.
A fiddle is an instrument that requires the 'fiddling' of a
bow. ML *vitula is a borrowing from Germanic rather
than the etymon of OE *fitele and OHG fidula.

FIDGET (1754)
Fidget is an extension of the earlier verb fidge, two
of whose synonyms are fig and fitch. Final / cfc;/
sometimes lends verbs an expressive character. The
development from fig to fidge and later to fitch is
probable. In contrast, a verb like OI fikja 'desire eagerly'
is an unlikely etymon of fidge: the meanings do not
match, and the few examples of /kj/ > /ff/ are con-
troversial (the voicing of final /ff/, as in hodgepodge <
hotch-potch, is common: it is the derivation of /ff / that
remains unclear). See NUDGE for examples of the
alternation /g/~/cC/ and WITCH for /ff/ < /kj/.

FIELDFARE (1100)
Despite its seeming etymological transparency, this
bird name poses problems, because 'fieldfarer' is too
vague and makes little sense. More likely, -fare in it is a
reflex of an old suffix that once meant 'belonging or
pertaining to,' later 'dweller, occupant.' The fieldfare is
thus 'field bird.' A reflex of the same suffix is present in
86
 The Etymologies at a Glance

Du ooievaar and G adebar (both mean 'stork') and OE

sceolfor 'cormorant.' See also ELVER and HEIFER.

FILCH (1561?)
Filch is, most probably, an adaptation of G argotic
filzen 'comb through.' OE gefylcan 'marshal troops' (>
filch 'beat, attack') is a different word.

87
 The Etymologies at a Glance

The Etymologies at a Glance FINAGLE (1926)

Finagle is probably an extended form (a form with an
infix) offiggle (finagle = fi-na-gle), which, in turn, is a
phonetic variant of fiddle 'fidget about.' Figgle is a
frequentative form of fig, the likeliest etymon offidge
(see FIDGET). Another similar extended form is SKEDADDLE.

FIT 'song' (800) and many more meanings; 'array of

soldiers' (1400) and other meanings All the words
spelled fit in Modern English are related. The basic
meaning of the sound complex /fit/ is 'move back and
forth; move up and down; make sporadic movements,'
as seen in fitful and in the phrase by fits and starts. The
other meanings, for instance, 'division of a poem' and
'match, suit; be a good fit; interval' are derivative. Go
fitan 'be in labor,' Du vitten 'find fault with, carp,' and
Icel fitla 'fidget' are akin to Efit.

FLATTER (1386)
Flatter is one of many onomatopoeic verbs beginning
with fl- and denoting unsteady or light, repeated
movement. Flutter and flit are similar formations. The
original meaning of flatter must have been 'flit about,'
whence 'dance attendance, ingratiate oneself by saying
pleasant things.' Flatter is not related to the adjective
flat. It is not a borrowing of L flatare 'make big' or of

88
Fflatter. The French verb may be a borrowing from
Middle English, but its history is unclear.

FUCK (1503)
Germanic words of similar form (f + vowel +
consonant) and meaning 'copulate' are numerous. One
of them is G ficken. They often have additional senses,
especially 'cheat,' but their basic meaning is 'move back
and forth.' As onomatopoeic or sound symbolic forma-
tions, FIDDLE (v), FIT, and FIDGET belong with FUCK. Most
probably, fuck is a borrowing from Low German and has
no cognates outside Germanic.

GAWK (1785, v; 1867, sb)

Gawk and gawky belong with several English, Dutch,
and German words designating fools, simpletons, and
awkward persons and their actions. It belongs with E
geck, from Dutch, and geek, presumably from Low
German. The history of gawk is inseparable from the his-
tory of gowk, an English reflex of the Scandinavian bird
name gaukr 'cuckoo.' However, gawk need not have
been derived from gowk. It is possibly another
independent onomatopoeic formation with the structure
g-k. Gawk 'fool; stare stupidly' was not derived from the
dialectal adjective gawk 'left (hand),' believed
mistakenly to be a contraction of its synonym gaulick ~
gallock. The development must have gone in the
89
 The Etymologies at a Glance

opposite direction: from 'clumsy' to 'left.' Nor was gawk

formed on the base of the Scandinavian verb gd 'stare,'
with the addition of the suffix -k. F gauche 'clumsy' is
most probably a borrowing from Germanic; its influence
on gawk is unlikely.

GIRL (1290)
Girl does not go back to any Old English or Old
Germanic form. It is part of a large group of Germanic
words whose root begins with g or k and ends in r. The
final consonant in girl is a diminutive suffix. The g-r
words denote young animals, children, and all kinds of
creatures considered immature, worthless, or past their
prime. Various vowels may occur be

90
 tween g/k and final r. ME girl seems to have been
borrowed with a diminutive suffix from Low German (LG
Gör(e) also means 'girl'). MLG kerle, OHG karl (both
meant 'man'), OI kerl 'old woman,' MHG gurre 'old jade,'
and N dial gorre 'wether, little boy; lazy person; glutton'
belong to the girl ~ Göre group. They are loosely related
as similar onomatopoeic or sound symbolic formations.

HEATHER (1730)
Heather continues hadder, one of several similar-
sounding words (for example, hadyr and hathir) that
designated the plant Erica in Middle English. Its etymon
is supposedly OI *haör, whose origin is unknown.
Perhaps *haö- meant 'hair': heather is sometimes
associated with shagginess. The vowel in heath goes
back to *ai, which, according to the rules of Germanic
ablaut, cannot alternate with *a in *haör. Consequently,
heather and heath are unrelated despite their similarity
and the existence of the German word Heidekraut
'heather,' literally 'heath grass.'

HEIFER (900)
Most probably, ea and o in heahfore, the earliest
recorded form of heifer, were short, which excludes a
connection between heifer and OE heah 'high.' Old
English seems to have had the word *hxgfore 'heifer.'
The first element (*ha?g-) presumably meant 'enclosure'
91
 The Etymologies at a Glance

(as do haw and hedge), whereas -fore was a suffix

meaning 'dweller, occupant' (see ELVER and FIELDFARE). By
regular phonetic changes, *hxgfore became *hxhfore
and heahfore. In some dialects, heahfore yielded [heif\
(r)], in others [hef\(r)]. Standard English heifer reflects
the spelling of the first group and the pronunciation of
the second. E dial hekfore has the same structure as
*hxgfore (heck means 'rail; fence; gate').

HEMLOCK (700)
The earliest known forms of hemlock are OE
hymblicx and hemlick. Besides LG Hemer and Hemern
'hellbore,' they have cognates in the Slavic and Baltic
languages. The root hem-means 'poison.' The origin of -
lock is less clear, but an association with lock, whether
the verb or the noun, is late. A probable etymon of
hemlock is *hem-l-ig, perhaps a variant of hem-l-ing.
Both -ling and -ig are well-attested suffixes in plant
names, as seen in G Schierling 'hemlock' and OE ifig 'ivy.'

HENBANE (1265)
The first element of henbane is hen- 'death.' This
plant was originally called henbell, with -bell possibly
traceable to belene, the Old English name of henbane.
When the meaning of hen-had been forgotten, -bell was
replaced with bane 'murder, death.' From a historical

92
point of view, henbane is a tautological compound
'death-death.'

HOBBLEDEHOY (1540)
The original form of hobbledehoy seems to have
been *Robert le Roy, one of the many names of the
Devil. Later the popular form Hob replaced Rob. The
same hob- appears in hobgoblin. *Hobert le Roy changed
further to *Hobert le Hoy, and that piece of alliterative
gibberish yielded hobbert-de-hoy, apparently because
the names of demons often contained -de- (-di-) or -te- (-
ti-), as in Flibbertigibbet and Hobberdidance. Folk
etymology substituted hobble- for the meaningless
element hobbert-, and the resulting compound
hobbledehoy was associated with an unwieldy person.
See RAGAMUFFIN for a similar development from the
Devil's name to a derogatory name of a young man.

HOREHOUND (1000)
Hore- in horehound (< OE hare hune) means 'white'
(< 'hoary'). One of the meanings of Gmc *hUnseems to
have been 'black.' Possibly, OE hune was at one time the
name of Ballota nigra, and hare was chosen to modify
hune when hune began to designate Marrubium vulgare.
Final -d appeared in horehound in Middle English,
perhaps because horehound was confused with alyssum,
a plant whose name suggested that it could cure
93
 The Etymologies at a Glance

hydrophobia. Words like gund 'poison,' now current only

in a limited area, may also have influenced the develop-
ment of -houn to -hound.

HUGGER-MUGGER (1529)
Hugger-mugger remains a word of unclear origin
mainly because we do not know whether -mugger has
been coined to rhyme with hugger- or is traceable to an
ascertainable etymon (with -hugger added as a nonsense
word for rhyme's sake) or whether each element of the
compound has its own etymon, so that the two were
combined later and perhaps influenced each other's
phonetic shape. Hugger-mugger has numerous variants,
with -k-, -g-, and -d-, and it cannot be decided which of
them is original and in need of an explanation. Hugger-
has so far defied attempts to etymologize it (its
derivation from huddle is unlikely), whereas -mugger is
probably related to mooch (? < *mycan). See
CURMUDGEON and MUG. Therefore, a search for the origin
of hugger-mugger should probably begin with -mugger
rather than -hugger. See MOOCH for the history of the
root *myc- and its variants.

IVY (800)
OE ifig has established cognates only in German
(Efeu; OHG ebah and ebahewi) and Dutch (eiloof),
though the name of the mythic river Ifing, known from
94
Old Icelandic, may also be akin to it. In all probability,
ifig is related to OE afor and OHG eibar 'pungent; bitter;
fierce.' Ivy got its name because it was a bitter, pungent
plant. The suffix -ig usually occurred in collective nouns,
so that ifig initially must have meant *'place overgrown
with ivy.' Ivy is not related to L ibex (as though both the
plant and the animal were climbers).

JEEP (1940)
The vehicle was called after Eugene the Jeep, a small
wonder-working animal in E. C. Segar's cartoon rather
than from the abbreviation G. P. ('General Purpose')
Vehicle that marked the first jeeps.

KEY (1000)
The etymon of OE cXg ~ cXge ~ cXga was *kaig-jo-.
Its reflexes in Modern English are the noun key and the
northern dialectal adjective key 'twisted.' The original
meaning of *kaig-jo-was presumably *'pin with a twisted
end.' Words with the root *kai- followed by a consonant
meaning 'crooked, bent; twisted' are common only in
the North Germanic languages. It is therefore likely that
*kaigjo- reached English and Frisian (the only language
with a cognate of cXg: OFr kai) from Scandinavia. The
*kaig- words interacted with synonyms having the root
kag-. Despite their phonetic and semantic proximity, key
and the cognates of G Kegel 'pin' (its e goes back to *a)
95
 The Etymologies at a Glance

and E dial cag 'stiff point,' from Scandinavian, are not

related, because *ai and *a belong to different ablaut
series.

KICK (1386)
Kick is a borrowing from Scandinavian, as seen in OI
kikna 'give way at the knees.' A near synonym of kikna is
OI keikja 'bend back'; it has the same root but in the full
grade of ablaut. Related to kikna and keikja are many
words whose root ends in other consonants. All of them
are united by the meaning 'bend, twist.' The doubts OED
has about the Scandinavian origin of kick are probably
unfounded. See also KEY and KITTY-CORNER.

KITTY-CORNER (1890)
Kitty-corner and catty-corner have nothing to do with
F quatre 'four' or with cats. Both forms are folk
etymological reshapings of cater-corner. The element
cater-, most probably of Danish origin, means
'diagonally, across, askew.' Dan kejte means 'left hand'
and keitet means 'clumsy.' See also CATER-COUSIN and KEY.

LAD (1300)
Lad reached northern English dialects from
Scandinavia. Its etymon is N ladd 'hose; woolen
stocking.' Words for socks, stockings, and shoes seem to
have been current as terms of abuse for and nicknames
96
of fools. However, Scand ladd *'fool' is unknown. Ladd
has come down to us only in the compounds Oskeladd
(or Askeladd) 'Boots, male Cinderella,' N tus-seladd
'nincompoop' and Laddfdfnir (a name from a
mythological poem). The vowels a and o alternated in
the root *lod- ~ lad- 'woolen sock; shoe.' *Lad- is a
secondary form of unclear origin, whereas *lod- is the
zero grade of *leud (as in OE leodan 'grow'), with o < *u.
OI Amlodi, probably from *Amlodi, the etymon of
Hamlet's name, belongs with Oskeladd and Laddfdfnir.
The development must have been from 'stocking,'
'foolish youth' to 'youngster of inferior status' and (with
an ameliorated meaning) to 'young fellow.' The Old
English name Ladda emerged in texts two centuries
before ME ladde. The evidence of their kinship is
wanting. Scand -ladd was borrowed around 1300 and
became a weak noun in Middle English. No English
compounds with -ladda have been attested.

LASS (1300) The most probable etymon of lass is

some Scandinavian word like ODan las 'rag.' Slang words
for 'rag' sometimes acquire the jocular meaning 'child'
and especially 'girl.' Middle English also had lasce, a
diminutive of las. ModE dial lassikie is either a form
parallel to it or a continuation of the Middle English
word. Lass is not related to lad (only folk etymology
connected them), though both words are of
97
 The Etymologies at a Glance

Scandinavian origin and surfaced in Middle English texts

at the same time.

LILLIPUTIAN (1726)
Swift left no explanation about the origin of his
coinage. Lill(e)- is probably a variant of little, and -put
may be E put(t) 'lout, blockhead.' Swift must have been
aware of the vulgar association that put- arouses in
speakers of the Romance languages and of Sw putte
'boy.' Since Lil-liput is easy to pronounce and carries
derogatory overtones in many languages, it has found
acceptance far beyond England. Later, Swift coined
Laputa on the analogy of Lilliputian.

98
 The Etymologies at a Glance [OE LUDGEAT 'postern']
Lud- is cognate with OS lud '?functioning genitals'
(usually glossed as 'form; figure; bodily strength; sexual
power'), Sc lud 'buttocks,' and Sc luddock 'loin; buttock.'
It is related to Gmc *leud- 'grow' (as in OE leodan). The
most general meaning of lud- was 'object fully shaped.'
OE *lud- apparently meant ^'posterior,' whence ludgeat
'back door, postern.'

MAN (971)
Man is not a cognate of L homo (through an etymon
beginning with *ghm-) and has no ties with L mannus
'hand' or the Proto-Indo-European root *men-, which
allegedly meant 'think' or 'be aroused,' or 'breathe.'
Most probably, man 'human being' is a secularized
divine name. The god Mannus was believed to be the
progenitor of the human race. The steps of the
development seem to be as follows: *'the circle of
Mannus's worshipers' _ 'member of that circle' (Go
gaman means both 'fellowship' and 'partner') _ 'slave,
servant' (from 'votary'; both meanings have been
attested) _ 'human being of either sex' _ 'male.' The
name Mannus seems to be of onomatopoeic origin,
unless it is a baby word.

MOOCH (1460)

99
 The Etymologies at a Glance

Mooch and its doublet miche are verbs of Germanic

origin (miche is memorable because of Hamlet's miching
malico 'sneaking mischief'). OE *mycan or *myccan
meant *'conceal' and had cognates in Old High German,
Old Irish, and Latin. Those words referred to all kinds of
underhand dealings and criminal activities. The etymon
of *mycan may have been onomatopoeic, from muk-
'silence,' or a reflex of a root meaning 'darkness.'
Whatever the distant origin of mooch, the verb *mycan
and its cognates have been part of European slang for at
least two millennia. Many similar-sounding Romance
words, including F muser 'hide' (< OF mucier), are
probably borrowings from Germanic. See CURMUDGEON,
HUGGER-MUGGER, and MUG.

MUG 'face' (1709); MUG 'waylay and rob' (1846)

Mug (v) probably derived from mug 'face,' which
seems to go back to a word like Sc mud-geon 'scowl,
grimace.' See CURMUDGEON.

[OE MYLTESTRE 'prostitute']

Myltestre has been explained as an adaptation of L
meretrix 'prostitute.' However, the resemblance
between the two words is insignificant. Speakers of Old
English must have analyzed myltestre into mylte + stre
(perhaps under the influence of meltan 'burn up' and
mieltan 'digest; purge; exhaust'), since one of the words
100
for 'brothel' was OE myltenhus. An Old English cognate
of G Strunze 'slattern,' originally a derogatory term for a
woman, may also have existed, and one can even go so
far as to imagine that the compound *myltestrunta
yielded mylterstre, especially because Old English had
other words for 'prostitute' ending in -re. Myltestre
should be recognized as a word of unknown origin rather
than a "corruption" of L meretrix.

NUDGE (1675)
Nudge is one of many words having the structure n +
short vowel + consonant (stop) and designating quick,
partly repetitive movements that, as a rule, do not
require a strong ef

101
 The Etymologies at a Glance

fort, for instance, nibble, nod, nag, and knock. Some

verbs of that type occur only in dialects. They usually
have cognates in Low German and Scandinavian. Verbs
with postvocalic /d/ sometimes coexist with synonyms
ending in /(%/. In the seventeenth century, nud 'boss
with the head' and nuddle 'push' were recorded. Nudge
may be a variant of nud, because /Ê/, both initial and
final, lends verbs like jab, jolt, dodge, and budge an
expressive character. However, nudge may have had an
Old English etymon, either *hnygelan (only the noun
hnygelan 'clippings' has been attested) or *cnyccan
'push,' related to cnucian 'knock.' Sc gnidge 'rub;
squeeze' is probably a variant or a cognate of nudge.
Attempts to find a Proto-Indo-European root (for
example,* gen-) from which all the Germanic verbs like
nudge have been derived presuppose great antiquity of
the whole group, but its old age need not be taken for
granted. Gk νύττω and νύσσω 'push' are probably sound
symbolic formations of the same type as nudge, not akin
to it.

OAT (700)
Contrary to what most English dictionaries say, oat is
not an isolated word: it has cognates in Frisian and some
Dutch dialects. Of the etymologies proposed for oat the
one that relates OE ate to Icel eitill 'nodule in stone' and
OHG -eizi in araweizi 'pea' is probably the best, though
102
the origin of araweizi (a borrowing from some non-Indo-
European language?) is obscure. Oat is not akin to eat or
goat and hardly a substrate word in West Germanic.

PIMP (1607)
Although E p before vowels corresponds to G pf, G
Pimpf 'little boy' is a probable cognate of pimp. Judging
by such recorded meanings of pimp as 'helper in mines;
servant in logging camps,' this word was originally
applied to boys and servants. The root pimp- ~ pamp- ~
pump- means 'swell'; a Pimpf was someone unable to
give a big Pumpf 'fart.' Dial pimp 'bundle of wood' (that
is, 'something swollen; armful') has the same root as
Pimpf. The development must have been from 'boy;
young inexperienced person' to 'servant; *despised ser-
vant' and finally to 'procurer of sex.' See FAG(G)OT, which
also means 'bundle of wood', and is a term of abuse in
sexual matters. Pimp does not owe its existence to any
Romance word.

RABBIT (1398)
Germanic makes wide use of the root r-b in naming
animals (G Robbe 'seal,' Fl rabbe ~ robbe 'rabbit,' and the
like). E rabbit is apparently one such word. ME rabet(t)
'small rabbit' was a word mainly associated with French
cuisine. Rabbit is a Germanic noun with a French suffix.
Walloon robett (from Flemish) need not have been its
103
 The Etymologies at a Glance

etymon. F râble 'back and loins of certain quadrupeds,

especially used of the rabbit and the hare,' F rabouillère
'rabbit hole,' Sp rabo 'tail,' Sp raposo (m) ~ raposa (f)
'fox,' let alone G Raupe ~ Du rups 'caterpillar,' and Russ
ryba 'fish,' all of which have been suggested as cognates
of rabbit, have nothing to do with it. See also ROBIN.

RAGAMUFFIN (1344)
Ragamuffin appeared in texts as one of the names of
the Devil, and 'devil' seems to be the meaning of both
rag- and -muffin. Rag- occurs in ME Ragman 'devil,' and -
muffi- is akin to Muffy (in Old Muffy), another name of
the Devil from F maufé 'ugly.' Final -n may have been
added to -muffi- under the influence of tatterdemallion
and other similar names of evil spirits. Intrusive -a-
between rag- and -muffin is the same as in Jack-a-dandy
and so forth. The Devil was often presented as ragged in
medieval mysteries, which explains the development
from 'Devil' to 'ragged street urchin,' but the original
Ragamoffin (the earliest spelling of the word) was a
tautological compound *'devil-a-devil.' See HOBBLEDEHOY,
another word with an infix and of comparable meaning,
SLOWWORM (a tautological compound), and SKEDADDLE for
words with infixation.

ROBIN (1549)

104
 Despite the consensus that the etymon of robin is
the proper name Robin, robin may be one of many
animal names having the structure r + vowel + b. The last
syllable in it is a diminutive suffix, as in Dobbin 'horse.'
See also RABBIT.

SKEDADDLE (1861)
Skedaddle is probably a verb with an infix. Almost all
such extended forms have three syllables with stress on
the second one and are usually of dialectal origin. For
example, fundaw-dle 'caress' is possibly fondle with the
infix -daw-. See also FINAGLE. Most likely, skedaddle is E
dial scaddle or *sceddle 'scare, frighten' with the infix -
da-. It has no connection with any word of Greek, Irish,
or Swedish, and it is not a blend.

SLANG (1756)
One of the meanings of the word slang is 'narrow
piece of land running up between other and larger
divisions of ground.' Slang must also have meant
^'territory over which hawkers, strolling showmen, and
other itenerants traveled.' Later it came to mean *'those
who were on the slang' and finally *'hawkers' patter';
hence the modern meaning. The phrase *on the slang is
a gloss on some Scandinavian phrase like Sw *pă slanget
(E slanget has been recorded). Slang 'piece of land' is a
word of Scandinavian origin, but its meaning may have
105
 The Etymologies at a Glance

been influenced by southern E slang 'border.' Slang

'informal speech' does not go back to F langue
'language,' and it is not a derivative of N slengja 'throw.'

SLOWWORM (900)
The only secure cognates of E slowworm are Sw and
ODan ormslă and N ormslo. The element slow- goes back
to OE sla- and has nothing to do with slow, sloe, or slay.
Its most probable etymon is *slanho- related to G
Schlange 'snake' (h and g alternate by Verner's Law).
Since -worm also meant 'snake,' the whole turns out to
be a tautological compound 'snake-snake.' Cf RAGAMUFFIN
(another tautological compound) and possibly
HOBBLEDEHOY.

STRUMPET (1327)
The words relevant for understanding the origin of
strumpet are MHG Strumpf 'stump,' ModG Strunze
'slattern,' and ModI strympa 'bucket; big woman.' Some
words without a nasal (m, n) belong here too, for
instance, G Gestrüpp 'shrubbery' and G strüppig
'tousled.' The root of strumpet meant either *'rough;
sticking out like a stump' or *'big, unwieldy,' the latter
mainly occurring in the names of vessels. Either could
have been the basis of a word meaning 'unpolished or
unwieldy woman; virago.' Most probably, English
borrowed a Low German cognate of strunze, added a
106
French suffix (-et) to it, and narrowed down the meaning
of the loanword from *'ugly woman; virago' to
'prostitute.' In Modern German, Strumpf means 'hose' or
'stocking' (< 'stump'). See LAD for a tie between long
socks and terms of abuse. E dial strumpet 'fat, hearty
child' shows that in some areas, strumpet could refer to
any unwieldy human being, not necessarily a woman.
Strumpet is not a reshaping of L stuprum 'dishonor' or OI
striapach 'prostitute.'

STUBBORN (1386)
An association between stubborn and stub is due to
folk etymology. The only unquestionable cognate of
stubborn is ModI tybbin 'obstinate.' The ancient meaning
of *tub- was probably 'swell.' Stubborn has the same
root as tybbin (with s-mobile), but, unlike the well-
attested Icelandic suffix -in, E -orn is of unknown origin.

TOAD (1000)
Old English had tadige, tadde, and tosca ~ tocsa, all
meaning 'toad.' In the Scandinavian languages, similar
forms are Sw and N dial tossa and Dan tudse. Most
probably, a in tadde is the product of shortening (a < *a),
but a in tadige is *a lengthened, possibly because the
name of the toad is often changed as a result of taboo.
North Sea Germanic has numerous words whose root
begins with t and ends in d. They designate small objects
107
 The Etymologies at a Glance

and small movements, as in tidbit and toddle. Tadige and

tadde belong to that group. The toad seems to have
been named *tad- because it is small or because it has
warts, or because it moves in short steps. The
Scandinavian words have a similar history.

TRAIPSE 'walk in an untidy way' (1593); 'slattern'

(1676)
The verb traipse is a doublet of trape. Both resemble
G traben 'tramp' and other similar verbs meaning
'tramp; wander; flee' in several European languages.
They seem to have been part of soldiers' and vagabonds'
slang between 1400 and 1700. In all likelihood, they
originated as onomatopoeias and spread to neighboring
languages from Low German. Traipse 'slattern' is then
'woman who traipses': either 'untidy woman' or
'gadabout.' See also DRAB and TROT.

TROT 'old woman' (1352)

The most probable cognates of trot are MHG trut(e)
'female monster' and G Drude 'sorceress, incubus.' If
they are related to E tread and G treten, trot originally
meant 'gadabout.' Women often get disparaging names
from their manner of walking, and a trot may have been
'someone with an ungainly gait; woman who treads
heavily.' If at any time trot had the meaning 'useless,
worthless, immature creature,' it may also have been
108
applied to children; hence trot 'toddler; young animal.'
See GIRL for a comparable semantic shift, as well as
TRAIPSE and DRAB for disparaging names of women
derived from their manner of walking.

UNDERSTAND (888)
Understand is one of several West Germanic verbs
having the same meaning and the structure prefix +
stand (for example, G verstehen). OE understandan
competed with the synonyms undergietan, underniman,
underpencan, and forstandan. The prefix under- meant
'under' and
'between; among,' whereas for- meant 'in front of.'
Those verbs conveyed the idea of standing among the
objects or in front of a thing and getting to know their
properties. Under-standan may have arisen as a blend of
forstandan and undergietan, but the details and the age
of that coinage can no longer be reconstructed with
certainty.

WITCH (890)
None of the proposed etymologies of witch is free
from phonetic or semantic difficulties. It is not known
what OE wicca (m) and wicce (f) meant: the reference
may have been to a seer(ess), a demon, a person
possessing mantic knowledge, a miracle worker, or an
enchanter (enchantress), to mention the main
109
 The Etymologies at a Glance

possibilities. Old English seems to have had three related

words, namely wita 'wise man,' witiga or witega (that is,
wit-ig-a) 'wise man; prophet, soothsayer,' and *witja
*'divinator' or perhaps 'healer' ('witch doctor'). Although
secure examples are few, OE -tj- occasionally changed to
c'c' (palatalized), as happened in OE fecc(e)an,
presumably from fetian 'fetch' (v). Likewise, *witja 'he
who knows' probably became wicca. A Slavic analog of
witch < *witja would be, for example, Russ ved'ma:
ORuss ve:fd meant both 'knowledge' and 'enchantment.'
Later phonetic processes effaced the difference between
wicca and wicce, and witch began to be associated with
women. The usual word for a male witch is now wizard.
Its most common meaning is 'magician.'

YET (888)
The Old English forms were giet(a), git(a), gyt(a), and
geta. The protoform of the first three seems to have
been *iu-ta, in which *iu- meant 'already' and -ta (< *-
do) was an intensifying enclitic with cognates in and
outside Germanic. As in many other cases, the rising
diphthong iu became falling, and iuta yielded *iuta, later
gyta. The vowels in giet(a) and git(a) are traceable to y.
Despite the similarity between gyta and geta, their
etymons must have been different, because e in geta
cannot be derived from y (ie, i). The protoform of geta
was, as it seems, *e-ta (a synonym of *iu-ta), which later
110
got initial /j/ under the influence of gy ta, gieta, gita.
The existence of /j/ in the protoform is less likely. ModE
yit, now obsolete or dialectal, goes back to git. The
history of G jetzt 'now' (< *iu-ze < *iu-zuo) is similar to
that of yet. Monosyllabic and disyllabic forms (gyt ~ gyta
and so forth) coexisted in Old English, so that ModE yet
is not the product of apocope. The shortening of the
vowel in yet is due to the conditions of sentence stress:
gyta was sometimes stressed and sometimes unstressed
in a sentence. Modern English generalized the short
vowel of the unstressed form. The synonyms of West
Saxon gyta and its side forms were Anglian gena, giena,
and geona (the latter with a short vowel), none of which
continued into Middle English. Contrary to what is
usually said, gyta was not an isolated Old English word:
besides MHG iezuo, there are OFr eta and ieta, MLG jetto
(and many other forms), and Du ooit 'ever' (-t in ooit is
akin to -t in yet), but the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and
Welsh words cited in older dictionaries are not related to
it.

111
AN ANALYTIC DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY
An Introduction
This page intentionally left blank
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ADZ(E) (880)
The earlier forms of adz(e) are OE adesa and ME
ad(e)se; in dialects, only nadge (a nadge < an adge), and
so forth with initial m-/n- have been recorded. Addice re-
mained the standard form until the 17th century. OE
adesa has no obvious cognates but resembles the names
of the ax in many Germanic and Romance languages;
some of them begin with a- (such as Go aquisi and L
ascia), others with d-(OHG dehsala). It may be a blend of
two words for 'ax': *acusa and some ancestor of MLG
dessele. The names of tools were part of workmen's
international vocabulary and often changed their form in
the process of borrowing. The phonetic shape of adesa
may have been influenced by several such words. Most
likely, the protoform of adz(e) is *acusa 'ax,' with d
substituted for k under the influence of some continental
form like MLG dessele 'adz.' If this reconstruction is
correct, adusa is a blend.
The sections are devoted to 1) the form of the English
word, 2) its origin, and 3) the history of words for 'ax' in
other languages and the possibility that OE adesa is akin
to Hitt ates.
1. The OE forms of adz(e) are adesa (m) and adese (f)
(recorded once). Adesa < adosa < adusa (Mercian) is due
to the Old English rule of dissimilation of two back
vowels in unstressed syllables; eadesa in the Vespasian
Psalter has ea < *x by velar umlaut (SB [sec 50, note 1,
113
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and sec 142]; Luick [1964:sec 342, note 1; 347]; A.

Campbell [1959:sec 385]). The spelling addice indicates
that OE s rendered a voiceless fricative. The cause of the
preservation of voicelessness is not clear. Owing to the
position between two unstressed vowels? (so Luick
[1964:846]). One would rather expect voicing under no
stress. As the result of the special status of the formative
elements, with ad- understood as the root and -es as a
suffix? (so A. Campbell [1959:sec 445, note 1]). Both
(1909:47) treats s
in adesa as a suffix and lists this word among iso-
lated formations, but adesa was rather ades-a than ad-
es-a.
Addice remained the standard form until the 17th
century, and Johnson considered adz(e) to be a
reprehensible corruption of addice, a view in which
Kenrick followed him. No firm rule of syncope in the
penultimate syllable of trisyllabic words existed: Thames
(< Temese) has been monosyllabic since Middle English,
but temse 'sieve' could be spelled temize even in the 17th
century. In domesticated borrowings like lettuce and
trellis, postradical vowels have been preserved.
Although adsan (pl) occurs in Old English, the final stage
of syncope in addice happened unusually late. Only
when i was lost, did addice acquire the pronunciation
[aedz] and the modern spelling adz(e). For a more de-

114
Adz(e) Adz(e)

tailed discussion of syncope and voicing in this word see

Skeat (1887 = 1892:252) and HL (959 and
963).
Among other forms, OED lists atch from the 17th
century, and in the 1580 example nads appears (an adz >
a nads). None of Scott's regional forms (1892:182)—
edge, eatch, eitch, eetch—appears in EDD; nor does EDD
note the confusion of adz(e) and edge. Atch may have
arisen after syncope, with /s/ > /tjV, as in sketch (HL,
810, where Sc its 'adz' is mentioned), but atch 'adz' is
hard to distinguish from hatch 'hatchet' (a short-lived
word; the earliest citation in OED goes back to 1704:
hatch sb4; see also Fehr [1910:317]). The only form of
adz(e) in EDD is nadge; mads, presumably from the mads
< them ads, was recorded in Connecticut in 1893
(Scott 1893:108-9).
2. Adz(e) has no established cognates.
Makovskii's attempt to compare adesa and OE Xdre
'vein,' related to OHG adra (> ModG Ader) and OI xdr (>
Modi x5) from the common base meaning 'cut, bend (for
ritualistic purposes),' is typical of his irresponsible
etymologizing (1991:139). In a later work (Makovskii
[1992b:73]), he throws in OE ad 'fire,' adl 'disease,' and
xdele 'noble, glorious' but does not mention Xdre (Xdre
and xdele recur on page 76, under the rubric 'blood').
This reconstruction appears once again in
Makovskii
115
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(2000a:137-38).
Equally fanciful are Tucker's comparisons. He lists E
adz(e), L arcia and astus 'dexterity, craft,' as-tutus 'sly,
shrewd,' from *ad-stutus, and Gr &9&pr| ~ L ador 'spelt'
(sb) (originally an Egyptian word) ([n.d.]:11), all of which
share the feature 'sharpness.' EG connect adz(e) with E
eat ~ L edo, G atsen 'etch,' L esca 'food,' and so on;
adz(e) emerges as 'any instrument that is sharp and
makes cut.' Both Tucker and EG are notorious for their
wild guesses.
Still another unsubstantiated comparison is between
OE adesa, understood as *ad-es-, and Lith vedega
'adz(e), icepick.' Allegedly, *ad-es- was formed like ax
and might, by association with it, have lost *w (RHD2).
The Lithuanian word is akin to Skt vddhar- 'deadly
weapon,' from a verb meaning 'strike,' and its cognates
(see the relevant forms and the literature in LEW,
vedega). A blend of *akwiz and a noun like vedega has
no foundation in reality, for no cognate of vedega exists
in Germanic and no borrowing resembling it has been
recorded. A cognate would have had t. OE *akwiz, if it
ever existed, would have lost its w early (Luick [1964:sec
618, note 2]), while *adwis- is opaque.
Adesa resembles OE xx (eax) 'ax' (with which
Adz(e)

116
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Adz(e)

it sometimes forms an alliterative pair; on the rela-

tions between these words see also Buck
[1949:561/9.25]), Gk a%ivr\ (Bailey [1721], not in 1730;
Skinner), L ascia (a cognate of sex), and several old and
modern words in the Romance languages, such as Ital
azza 'battle ax' and Sp azuela 'adz(e),' with which it was
compared in the early dictionaries. Of the more recent
authors, Baly (1897:48) derives several European words
for ax and, hesitatingly, adz(e) from the same root.
CEDEL calls adz(e) a borrowing from Old French, but
adesa existed in Old English before the Norman
Conquest, as Dietz (1967:356, 358) and C. J. E. Ball
(1970:68) noted. KD writes: "? cf OF aze."
Skeat1 "suspected" that adesa was a "corruption" of
*acesa or *acwesa (he may have added *acusa), while
Heyne (1908:5-6, note 9) suggested a prehistorical
borrowing of L ascia. In both reconstructions, the
attested Old English form comes out too garbled. In the
fourth edition of his dictionary, Skeat abandoned his
hypothesis; see also Brasch (1910:57). OED calls adesa a
word of unknown origin, a decision in which practically
all later dictionaries, including AeEW, followed it. The
only exceptions are Partridge (1958), who asserts that
adz(e) is akin to ax and cites "the extremely relevant Go.

117
Adz(e) Adz(e)

aqizi," and Shipley (1984:3), who traces ax and adze to

PIE *agu(e)si.
Some other words resembling adusa and adosa are
OHG dehsala 'ax' (ModG Dechsel and Dachsbeil), MLG
dessele, de(i)ssel, (M)Du dissel (<*pehsalon 'adz(e)': see
KS, OED [thixel], and IEW, 1058). DW (Dechsel) lists
adesa among the cognates of dehsala, and so does,
without certainty, Mueller1 (noncom-mittally in the
second edition). Minsheu gives two nouns at addis: LG
diesse and Wel neddau 'adz(e).' He may have derived
neddau from (a)n addis, but neddau and neddyf go back
to the root of naddu 'cut' (so already Richards), from the
base *snadh (Lewis
[1923:15]; see also Stokes [1894], 315; LE, snath; WP
II:694, and IEW, 973). The same holds for Br eze,
neze and other Celtic forms (which Thomson derives
from "German" egg 'edge'). The counterparts of adz(e),
with and without a-, sounded similarly in much of
Western Europe. OE adusa seems to be *acusa 'ax,' with
d substituted for k under the influence of some
continental form like MLG dessele 'adz.' Thus the form in
need of an etymology is adusa, not adesa. A blend seems
more probable than pre-OE *adehsa (< pre-Gmc *o-
tekson), as in
OHG dehsala (Wood [1931:sec 18.10]; Wood ex-
amined prothetic vowels in Indo-European, and his
*adehsa turned out to be a-dehsa). Bugge (1874:158-59)
118
Adz(e) Adz(e)

thought that even F tille 'roofer's or cooper's ax' goes

back to OHG dehsala.
3. The names of tools were among the many
migratory words in the Middle Ages, such as Russ topor
'ax' < ORuss toporu, Arm t'ap'ar, OE taper-xx 'small ax,'
Finn tappara, Middle Persian tab'ar, Skt parasuh 'ax,'
and Gk melEKUj 'ax,' probably from some non-Indo-
European language of Asia (KEWA II:213), though
Uhlenbeck (KEWAS, 156) thought of an Indo-European
root. According to Abaev (IESOI, fxrxt), PIE *parta, from
which he derived Oss fxrxt and Skt parasuh, was
borrowed by some people in the form *tapar and spread
as tabar, taper, tappara over a large territory; see also
Thieme
(1953:586-87), Ogonovs'ka (1989), and Georgiev
(1953) on words for 'ax.' The history of OE adesa
may be similar to that of OE taper-. Vennemann
(2000:246) suggests a Basque origin of adz, but as is the
case with KEY, there is probably no need to go so far.
The pronunciation of such words was often changed.
For instance, F hache, known since the 13th century, Ital
azza, and their Romance cognates were borrowed from
Gmc (Franconian) *happia (OHG happa, heppa, happia,
hebba; see Hippe 'pruning knife; death's scythe' in KM
and KS); Frings (1943:178) sets up *happja as the
protoform. FEW (XVI:147) and all modern etymological
dictionaries of the Romance languages take the change
119
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of -pp-to other stops for granted; see also hatchet and

the verbs hack, hash, and hatch in Lund (1935:114/3)
and in dictionaries of English and Hacke in dictionaries of
German. However, Seebold (KS, Hippe) emphasizes the
unpredictability of sound substitution in such cases.
Similar processes also happened at the dawn of Indo-
European (Buck [1949:561/9.25]). See Rooth's remarks
(1960-62:49) on the exchange of the names of tools
between Romania and Germania. If adesa is a blend, its
history brings to mind a similar convergence in the name
of a shaft: OHG dihsala (ModG Deichsel) and Ved isa
(Meringer [1892:43], M. Bloomfield [1895:430, note 1]),
let alone such hybrid forms as G reg Geiskel 'shaft'
(Geischel + Deichsel; B. Martin [1923:256]). To be sure, Br
eze, Ital azza, and E adz(e) are unrelated, but they seem
to have become, by accident, part of carpenters' and
coopers' lingua franca.
Finally, there is Hitt URUDUates. It occurs several times,
but its exact meaning has not been established. J.
Friedrich (HW, 38) glosses it as 'dish; metal plate,' with a
question mark. Having the second meaning in mind, E.
Sturtevant (1942:secs 46a and 47) compared ates (or
ates) with OE e(o)dor 'fence, roof,' a word with solid
cognates in Germanic (AeEW [eodor]; AEW [jadarr]; WP
I: 121;
IEW, 290, edh2). But in Kronasser (1962:328/2 and

120
Adz(e) Adz(e)

341/4), ates is glossed 'ax.' Puhvel (HED, 227) gives

ates(sa) 'adze, axe, hatchet,' without explaining how he
obtained the more specific meanings ('adze, hatchet').
According to Cop (1955a:406-07, the most detailed
discussion; 1955b:31; 1957:140; 1964:43), ates and OE
adesa are related; he cites that fact as proof of ancient
Hittite-Germanic connections. Although the
voicelessness of s in OE adesa poses problems, no
evidence supports Cop's conclusion that OE adosa was
stressed on the penult (hence s, not z, by Verner's Law).
Nor are the ety-mologically obscure Latin words asser
'stake,' assis (with its doublet axis) 'board,' and assula
'piece of kindling, splinter' of much help. Cop derived
them from *adh 'cut' ('cut' —» 'a thing cut off'). Tischler
(1977-[90]:369) does not reject Cop's etymology.
However, as Puhvel (HED, 228) observes, "The
compelling adduction of OE adesa... does not clinch an
Indo-European etymology. At best Hitt. t- and OE -d-
would point to a common *-dd-.... The odd shape of Hitt.
ates (normal spelling e, rather than accommodation to
normal s-stem neuters like ne-pis) may point to its
noninherited lexical character." He briefly discusses the
literature mentioned above (a similar survey can be
found in Tischler) and dismisses as improbable H.
Eichner's reconstruction of PIE *E1sw-e-dhE1ti 'having a
good fit' versus PIE o-dhE1-es- in Hitt ates, Gmc *adus-on
(Eichner's personal communication to Mayrhofer: KEWA
121
Adz(e) Adz(e)

III:804). GI (1984:716 / 1995:620) set up *a/odhtt-es-,

based on the Hittite-Germanic-Indic correspondences,
and MA (37) call ates ~ adz "a common inheritance of a
PIE word;" but the Hittite word is too obscure to justify
E. Sturtevant's and Cop's conjectures, while Eichner's
gloss 'having a good fit' for 'adz' lacks foundation. A
migratory word for 'adz' is a possibility, but if adesa is a
blend, Hitt ates and OE eodor are not related to it. They
are probably not related even if adesa is not a blend.
BEACON (900)
Beacon has cognates in all the old West Germanic
languages (OE beacen, OFr baken, beken, OS bokan,
OHG bouhhan, etc). OI bakn was, most likely, borrowed
from West Germanic. The original meanings of the
English word are 'banner' and 'portent.' The meaning
'signal fire' was not attested until the end of the 14 th
century. Beacon has been etymologized as '(object)
before one's eyes,' 'bright (object),' 'bent sign for
averting evil,' 'stick, pole,' and as a Germanized variant
of L bucina 'signal horn'; attempts have also been made
to connect beacen with OE beam 'tree' and boc 'book.'
It is usually believed that beacon goes back to some
Proto-Indo-European root, but *bauk- was one of
numerous 'local' Germanic words designating objects
capable of swelling (cf OE buc 'stomach') and taking on a
monstrous appearance. It could refer to a nonspecific
huge and formless mass. Its various ancient meanings
122
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and its suffix -n seem to have been adopted from *taikn-

(E token), which, in Old English, functioned as a synonym
of beacen. Another object of the same type was *bak (Du
baak, LG bak, bake 'buoy, beacon'). It, too, belonged with
the words denoting inflatable objects, sometimes
frightening (cf E bug), sometimes harmless (cf E bag and,
possibly, buck and back), and it probably meant 'buoy'
from the start. Judging by the recorded forms, bak has
always been a synonym of MDu boy ~ boey. Its falling
together with *baukn- would be easy to explain.
However, bak is not a shortened variant of beacon; nor is
beacon an extended form of bak.
Closely related to *baukn- is buoy (1466), a loan
word in English. According to the prevailing opinion, Gmc
*boken 'beacon' became boie in Old French, and
returned as boeye ~ boye 'buoy' to Dutch, from which it
spread over most of Europe. Yet the Middle Dutch form
is, more likely, native. Many objects capable of inflating
themselves and producing frightening sounds had, in
Germanic, the form bo, boo, and so forth. Sometimes the
aural aspect predominated, as, arguably, was the case
with boi 'devil'; sometimes both may have been present,
as in Du bui 'squall.' The primitive buoy was probably an
anchored bladder or something similar.
The sections are devoted to 1) the meaning of OE
beacen and its cognates, 2) the proposed etymologies of
beacon, 3) an assessment of the semantic history of
123
Adz(e) Adz(e)

beacon and the relations between *baukn- and *bak-, 4)

beacon and other words having a similar phonetic shape,
5) the Germanic origin of beacon and the interaction of
beacon with token, and 6) beacon and buoy. Section 7 is
the conclusion.
1. Gmc *baukn- has reflexes in all the old languages
except Gothic: OE beac(e)n, Old EFr baken,
Old WFr be ken (Van Haeringen [1921:274]), OHG
bouhhan, OS bokan, and several others. In Modern
Low German, beeken means 'straw torch' (Carstens
[1879a:16; 1879b:93-94]). The Old Icelandic form is
bdkn, and since it has a, as opposed to Gmc *au, it is
believed to be a borrowing from Old Frisian: see
Bugge (1888b:179); Wadstein (1918-22:7, 1925:147,
1932:85; 1936:16); Mosse (1933:65), Feitsma
(1962:108-9), Hoekstra (2001:139), and various ety-
mological dictionaries. But Modeer (1943:132) was right
that the lending language may have been Low German,
for *au yielded a also in some Low German dialects.
Ejder (1961-62:95-96) came to a similar conclusion.
The recorded words have a variety of meanings. In
Old English, (ge)beacen has been attested in the senses
'sign, phenomenon, portent, apparition; banner' and
once 'audible signal.' It occurs three times in Beowulf. In
line 2777 (Klaeber [1950]), it means 'banner'; in line
3160, it refers to Beowulf's monument erected after his
death (see R. Page [1975:66] on beacen 'monument'),
124
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and in line 570, it is part of the kenning beacen Godes

'sun,' reminiscent of heofonbeacen 'sign in the sky' in
Exodus (see other examples in Klaeber [1912:122]). In
the Old Saxon Heliand, the alliterative phrase bokan endi
bilidi 'signs [= miraculous signs] and pictures,' a rather
close counterpart of Gk σημεία καί τέρατα 'signs and
wonders,' memorable from the gospels, turns up. The
Old Saxon compound heribocan 'sign of war'
corresponds in form to OHG heripouhhan. Their antonym
is OE fridobeacen 'sign of peace.' OE sigebeacen 'sign
(emblem) of victory, trophy' and 'the cross of Christ' has
also been recorded several times.
OE beacenfyr 'beacon fire, lighthouse' and especially
beacenstan 'stone on which to light a beacon fire' (both
in glosses) testify to the existence of beacen in its
modern sense (see Hill and Sharp [1997] on Anglo-Saxon
beacon system, esp pp. 15758). That *baukn- often
referred to miraculous things also follows from its
Middle High German reflex bouhnen 'important event'
(among other meanings), from a late-13 th-century Low
German gloss boken 'misterium, omen,' and from the
Middle Dutch gloss bokene 'phantasma, spectrum'
(Rooth 1960-62:50). The ease with which OHG
boununga, bauhnung(a) 'significatio' (from bouhnen
'significare, innuere'), and OE gebe acnung 'categoria,'
both of them derivatives of *baukn-, passed into
religious and philosophical language points in the same
125
Adz(e) Adz(e)

direction. Modern English has beckon (< OE becnan). The

word beck in at one's beck and call is its truncated form.
Of special interest is OI bákn. As a loanword, it may
have preserved the meaning it had in the lending West
Germanic language, especially because it was of such
rare occurrence. CV gloss bákn as a foreign word and
refer to the compound sigr-bákn, but the context is
unrevealing ("the thing with which the king made signs
in front of his horse is called sigrbákn in other
countries"). Fritzner (ODGNS) explains: "A sign with
which one hopes to ensure victory." In the absence of
other relevant texts, more can hardly be said.
Bákn occurs only twice in Old Icelandic, both times in
a verse—a situation, in principle, uncharacteristic of a
foreign word. It is used (contemptuously or in
wonderment) about a stallion's phallus worshipped by a
benighted heathen couple (Volsa páttr) and about a troll
woman (Hjálmpérs saga), that is, about a most unusual
thing and an extraordinary figure. Modi bdkn means
'huge and formless mass'; see Modeer (1943:143, note 3)
for more details. Any viable etymology of *baukn- has to
explain why this word so regularly refers to miraculous
and supernatural phenomena and creatures (apparitions
and trolls). Modeer, in the note cited above, says that
*baukn- developed the secondary meaning 'monstrum,
portentum, miracu-lum,' but no evidence suggests that
this meaning is secondary.
126
Adz(e) Adz(e)

2. The origin of *baukn- has been explained in many

different ways: 1) Bugge (1888b:180) treated *baukn- as
*b-aukn and traced it to *ba-aug\nan 'an object before
one's eyes.' A. Noreen (1894:126, 165) and the authors
of several etymological dictionaries supported him (FT,
SEO, and, in a modified form, EWA). A similar but less
sophisticated idea occurred to Skinner, who analyzed
beacen into OE be- (a prefix) and [a]cennan 'produce,
show.' 2) Möller (1879:439-41), who noted that *baukn-,
like Go bandwjan* 'make signs,' combines the meanings
of 'shine' and 'speak,' derived the Germanic word from
the root *bha- 'shine.' His etymology appears in
numerous dictionaries because WP II:123 and IEW, 105,
endorsed it. Skt vi-bhaevah 'shining, brilliant,' Gk
pxxeQcov 'shining,' and other words are said to have the
same root. Some modern researchers look on this
derivation as fact: Loewen-thal (1916:296/46), Austin
(1958:206/5), Wood (1904:5/38; the same in
1923:334/21), and Ramat (1963a:53). Dietz (1967:359)
prefers it for want of a better one. A related hypothesis
connects the beacon group with Gk jupxx'DOKew 'make
signs' (Skeat1; no longer in Skeat4). Hirt, in WHirt, gives
this hypothesis as the most probable one, but Götze
(EWDS11) calls it into question.
3) From *baukn- 'shining object' a direct path leads
to bandwjan* (as indicated by Möller) and to Go boka
'book, letter,' OE bo c, and their cognates, to the extent
127
Adz(e) Adz(e)

those words are believed to be related to the name of

the beech. The first to connect *baukn- and Old Icelandic
bök was Ettmüller (1851:299), but he failed to discern a
semantic tie between them. H. Kuhn (1938:59-60 = 1969-
78/III:473-74) thought of two words: bök 'book' and bök
'sign.' He cited an OS gloss bokon 'knit' and OI gullböka
'knit in gold' (once in the Elder Edda). From the phonetic
point of view *au and o are viable partners, as one can
see in OHG goumo (ou < *au) 'palate' ~ OI gömr and OE
hream 'fame, glory' (ea < *au) ~ OS hrom. Later, H. Kuhn
(1952:264 = 1969-78/II:104-05 and in the notes to the
reprint of the 1938 article) distanced himself from his old
idea, but AEW mentions it (bdk 2) and Szemerenyi
(1989:371) cites it with sympathy, if not with approval.
Polome (1985:7-8) characterized Kuhn's etymology as
improbable.
4) Since Gmc *baum- (OE beam, OS bom, OHG
boum 'tree') are supposed in some obscure way to
be connected with Go bagms and OI badmr, Uhlen-
beck (1905:263-64) suggested that bagms is a
blend of *baumaz and *bagnaz, with the root
*bag- or *bak-. Voyles (1968:743) reconstructed
one root for *baum- and bagm-, and Markey
(1976:XIV) added *baukn- to them. In his opinion,
"[b]oth the semantic and formal relationships ob-
taining between Gmc *bagm- and *baukna- ... are
clear." He proposed a derivation of Go bagms from
128
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*bhogh-m- and of Gmc *baum- from *bhough-m-.

"Both etyma (OE beam and beacen) derive from
variants (bhogh— bhough— bhoug-) of the same
root with nasal enlargements."
5) Hamp (1984:10; 1985; 1986b:345-6; 1988a:45)
had his own protoforms to offer. At first, he did not
object to Markey's idea but preferred PIE *bhorghmos
becoming Gmc *bargmaz, with the subsequent
development to bagms, badmr, and *baumaz. He
reconstructed the earliest meaning of *baukn- as 'signal
fire' and set up PIE *bhor(d)g-no-'what shines' (related
to Go bairhts* 'bright') > *barkna-n (Hamp [1985]) and
thus ended up with two similar roots: Gmc *bargmaz
'tree' and Gmc *barknan 'beacon' (the same in the 1986b
note). In Hamp (1984:10), he says that the vocalism of
beacen was early conflated with that of be am <
*bagmaz and operates with the roots *bagma- and
*bakna-.
Later (Hamp [1986b and 1988b]) he withdrew his
support of Markey's etymology. Hamp (and here he
stands alone) is ready to accept OI bdkn as a native
Scandinavian word. Since all those reconstructions are
mere linguistic algebra, their value is hard to assess. The
original meaning of *baukn-cannot be ascertained in a
passing remark, as Hamp would like to do it, but in any
case, early 'beacons' (signs, special signs for sailors,
apparitions, monsters, banners, and funeral mounds)
129
Adz(e) Adz(e)

were not trees. Nor were they exclusively signal fires,

which makes all etymologies of *baukn-based on the
concepts of sheen and brightness suspect.
6) According to Senn (1933:508), *baukn- does
not fall into b + aukn. He asserts that *baukn- is
related to Latv bauze 'stick, cudgel' and budze
'stick, cudgel, wedge, steelyard' and Lith buoze
'stick, cudgel.' He does not elaborate on the con-
nection 'sign' ~ 'stick.' E. Fraenkel (LEW, bauzas,
and so on) makes no mention of Senn's etymology,
and neither does anyone else.
7) Ettmuller (1851:299), who compared beacen and
boc, also cited OHG buh 'stomach' (ModG Bauch). He
traced both words to the hypothetical verb *be ocan or
*bu can 'prominere' ('protrude, project'). His
reconstruction attracted no attention. Instead of *bucan,
the verb bugan 'bend, bow' emerged as the etymon of
*baukn-. Ten Doornkaat Koolman (1879-84, bake)
developed this etymology at great length. Presumably,
people waved their hands or made movements with the
head, to show the way to the ship. He listed bu k
(corresponding to OHG buh) and the verb bukken along
with bugan but did not explain how g and k are related.
In addition, he supported Grimm's etymology (see the
end of no. 8, below), so that the result came out
confusing. Modeer (1943:145, note 4) dismissed Ten
Doornkaat Koolman's idea as unworthy of discussion,
130
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and no one seems to have shown any interest in it

except Goedel (1902, Bak), who copied Ten Doornkaat
Koolman's text without referring to his source, until
Guntert resuscitated or reinvented it, at which time it
acquired some notoriety. Guntert (1928:134/22) thought
that *baukn- could be derived from the root of Skt
bhogd- 'coil, ring,' OI baugr ~ OE be ag 'ring,' OE bu c ~ G
Bauch (< OHG buh 'body') ~ OI bukr 'body, trunk.' Bea-
cons, he explained, were bent signs with the power to
avert magic. Since no evidence points to the existence of
such signs, his etymology has become the favorite target
of ridicule: it is called in some works amusing nonsense,
a typical sample of "chairborne" philology, and the like.
8) Modeer (1943) offered a new etymology of
*baukn-; of related interest is also Modeer (1937:9092).
In the 1943 article, he analyzed all the extant meanings
of the relevant words in Scandinavian and West
Germanic and examined the reflexes of *baukn- and
their n-less counterparts, namely Du baak (known since
the Middle Dutch period: baec-), LG bak and bake, Sw
bdk, Dan bake, N bdk(e) (see
these words in Hellquist [1929-30:805-6]). He
noted that OE be acen could refer to an audible
signal and took Gmc *baukn- for a Germanized form of L
bu cina 'signal horn,' which has come down to us as E
bassoon, G Posaune, Sw basun, and so forth. Modeer
submitted his paper as part of his application materials
131
Adz(e) Adz(e)

for a professorship at Lund. Three readers offered their

comments, as Modeer recounts at the end of the article.
Erik Noreen called the proposed etymology extremely
hypothetical (and Modeer agreed), while Hjalmar Lin-
droth had no objections. Bengt Hesselman characterized
it as bold, but still he preferred it to "some fantastic
etymologies of foreign scholars (Bugge, Kluge, and
others)." DEO3,4 (bake) and KM (Bake) considers the
derivation of *baukn- from buclna probable. CEDEL gives
it as the only one, but KS do not mention it, and J. de
Vries (AEW [bákn] and NEW [baak]) calls it precarious.
Polomé (1985:7-8) and EWA concur with this verdict;
ÁBM (bákn) is noncommittal. Critics have only one
counterargument: they point out that Gmc *au could not
render L U. According to Okasha (1976:200), Modéer's
reconstruction remains an attractive hypothesis, and J.
de Vries's words are "perhaps a little too scathing." Page
also found some value in Modéer's etymology (Okasha
[1976:200, note 1]).
In a different form, the idea that *baukn- originally
designated an audible signal was offered long before
Modéer. The Grimms (DW, Bak) related *baukn to
German Pauke 'kettledrum.' No progress has been made
in the search for the origin of Pauke since the Grimms'
times; even its connection with G pochen 'knock, thump'
(another obscure word) is doubtful. Kauffmann
(1887:510, 522) found the Grimms' etymology to be
132
Adz(e) Adz(e)

right. For more details he refers to Möller (1879:439-41),

but von Friesen (1897:7, 13) criticized (deservedly as it
seems) his comparison *baukn— Swabian baoka (pl)
'kettledrum.' Johansson (1900:360-61 and note on p.
361), whose work will be discussed below, explained the
origin of many b-k words, including L bucina, and
doubted that Old English beacen belonged with them
(Weigand, however, derived Pauke directly from bucina);
he argued for the beacen ~ bugan link. Thus bucina
turned up twice in the discussions of *baukn-. Pauke,
owing to the Grimms' reputation, occupied a more
prominent place in the proposed etymologies of
*baukn-, but Modéer passed it by.
9) A few remarks to the effect that *baukn- is re-
lated to some Hebrew word (jra, that is, b-h-n 'try,
prove; examine, as metals'; suggested by Parkhurst
[1792:67] and rejected by Whiter III:333, who pre-
ferred derivation from pick because beacons "stick
out"—III:286), that it was borrowed from Welsh or
some other Celtic language (beachd 'watching, ob-
servation': Mackay [1877]), or that beacon is possi-
bly akin to E reg beck (corresponding to G Bach
'stream, rivulet': Cameron [1892:220-21]) need not
occupy us here. They are pure fancies.
10) The most authoritative dictionaries of En-
glish (OED, CD, Weekley, and Skeat) offer no ety-
mology of beacon. An exception is UED. Wyld's
133
Adz(e) Adz(e)

reconstruction escaped the notice of Germanic

scholars and deserves to be quoted in full. "O.E.
beac(e)n, 'sign, token,' also 'banner,' M. E. beekne.
The certain cognates in other Gmc. languages are O.
Fris. beken, O.S. bokan, O.H.G. pouhhan. Beyond this the
etymol[ogy] seems not to have been carried, so far. We
have here a Gmc. base *bauk-, for wh[ich] we may
confidently reconstruct an Aryan predecessor *bhoug-,
wh[ich] w[oul]d have also the grades *bheug-, *bhug-.
Such a base appears in Gk. pheugo, 'flee,' phuza (fr[om]
*phug-ja), 'headlong flight, rout'; Lat. fugire [sic;
apparently, fugere is meant] 'flee,' fuga, 'flight'. With
these the etymologists connect Lith. bugti, 'terrify,'
baugus, 'frightful' &c. (See the prob[ably] related Gmc.
base *biug-, *bug &c. at BIGHT, BOW (I & II), where the
development of meaning has gone on quite different
lines.) The base *bheug- then seems to have the sense of
running away fr[om] something wh[ich] frightens one. It
is now suggested that the base in Gmc. came to mean
'fear of something dangerous, danger, sign of danger,
warning,' then, 'a sign or token' generally. Cf. also
beckon."
3. Some of the foregoing hypotheses are more
probable than the others, but few of them pay sufficient
attention to the semantic history of *baukn-. For
instance, how did the meanings 'specter, marvel; banner'
develop from 'signal of a war trumpet?' What unites
134
Adz(e) Adz(e)

trees and sticks (cudgels) with 'signal fire'? If brightness

is what gave the object in question its name *baukn-,
when and in what circumstances did the meanings
'specter, marvel; banner' emerge? Only Wyld was fully
interested in this aspect of the problem.
No one says anything on the relationship between
beacen, baken, beken, bokan, and bouhhan and their n-
less partners. Stray remarks on bak- being a shortened
form of bak-en have no value even for Scandinavian, as
Modeer (1943:132) has shown, while deriving baken
from an oblique case of bake (Collinder [1932:210]) can
hardly be substantiated (besides this, it is *baukn-, not
baken that has to be explained). Yet even Modeer made
do with deriving *baukn- and neglected the history of
bak ~ bak. Although the n-less forms are poorer in con-
tent than the Old Germanic words ending in -n (they
mean only 'beacon, beacon fire'), some link between the
two sets must exist, and the opposition OE beacen ~ OFr
boken versus MDu baec ~ LG bak(e) and so forth has to
be explained. If we assume that *bak- is in some way
related to *baukn-(a regular connection cannot be
postulated, for a and au do not alternate by ablaut),
Bugge's etymology, which depends crucially on the
presence of n, and the etymologies based on the idea of
*baukn- as the past participle of some verb lose much of
their appeal. Caution is also invited in dealing with
Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European nasal
135
Adz(e) Adz(e)

enlargements: despite its late attestation, *bak- may be

the original form, whereas the n-forms need not be old.
4. It was noticed early on that short English and
German words beginning with b- and p- convey the idea
of swelling. J. Whitaker (1771-75:24962) and Whiter
III:191-205 offer a detailed discussion of such words.
Since neither of them was aware of sound
correspondences, they included numerous examples that
should have been left out, but the observations they
made were right. Johansson (1900:354-63) did not read
authors like Whitaker and Whiter, but armed with the
best achievements of comparative philology, he came to
conclusions close to those of his distant predecessors.
Gysseling (1987:52) reached similar results.
The list below is longer than Johansson's, though it is
limited to English; the groups are b-g, b-k, b-d, b-t, b-b,
p-g, p-k, p-d, and p-t, p-p. (b-g): bag, big, bug 'insect' and
'object of dread,' bogey, boggle, and so forth; cf E reg
bog 'boastful' and bug 'big' (the last, most probably, of
Scandinavian origin); (b-k): ?back, buck (if the animal is
'a big beast'); in SEO, Hellquist (at troll 'troll,' sb)
mentions Sw troll, trullpacka and troll-, trullbacka
'witch'; in his opinion, the words with b- are older, as
evidenced by Sw rattbacka and Dan aftenbakke 'bat';
this is probably right, but -backa need not be an
alteration of -blacka 'flutter,' for rather rattblacka (the
older form had one t in both Swedish and Danish) looks
136
Adz(e) Adz(e)

like a folk etymological alteration of rattbacka, with -

backa being one of the words discussed here, that is,
'frightening creature' (Hellquist repeats an old opinion,
which OED, bat, sb1, calls into question, but ODEE, bat2,
endorses; the Middle English for bat was backe,
apparently, from Scandinavian, for Old English had
hreremus; the change from back- to bat has not been
explained); Kluge's idea (KL, bat) that backe and so forth
may be connected with bacon because in German
dialects Speckmaus, literally 'flitchmouse,' occurs is
fanciful; (b-d): bud, body; (b-t): butt(ock), bottle, but
'flatfish' and -bot in turbot, button; (b-b): bob 'bunch,
knot,' bobbin, bubble; (p-g): pig, pug (cf LG Pogge 'frog');
(p-k): pack, pock 'pustule, pockmark' (cf G Pocke),
pocket, poke 'sack,' Puck, pucker, ?spook; (p-d): pad
'small cushion, paw, etc' (compare the meaning of
padding and G Pfote 'paw'), pad ~ paddock 'frog' (cf LG
Pogge, above), pod (historically a variant of cod), podge
~ pudge 'short, fat person' (and the adjectives pudsey,
pudgy, podgy), poodle (another dog is pug, above), pud
'hand of a child, paw of an animal'; (p-t) ?pate, pot, pout;
(p-p): pap 'nipple, teat.'
Some of those words (like big) have been the object
of sustained etymological investigation; others (like
pate) have attracted minimal attention. Most of them
are of unclear origin, and a few may not belong here
(this is especially true of words
137
Adz(e) Adz(e)

like butt: see Dahlberg [1955: 29-39] and the remarks

on G Butzemann at BOY). Bottle and several others
traveled back and forth between Germanic and
Romance. In this case, details are less important than the
principle. We have to admit the existence of a
considerable number of vaguely synonymous words
beginning with b or p followed by a vowel and a stop (b,
p, d, t, g, k; however, b and p are rare).
Compare the following Russian words, some of
which are near homonyms of the English ones: byk
'buck,' bok 'side' (related to E back?), bukashka 'little
insect' (stress on the second syllable), buka 'bogey,'
biaka 'bad, dirty thing,' pug- 'dread, fright,' pugovitsa
'button' (stress on the first syllable), puzo 'belly,' puzyr'
'bubble' (stress on the second syllable). They are not
related to their English counterparts in the same way
Russ slab 'weak' is sometimes believed to be related to E
sleep, for the consonants in the two lists violate sound
correspondences. For example, the Dutch for pig is big (p
: b), the English for Russ buka is bogey (k : g), and so on.
Yet the authors of Germanic etymological dictionaries
regularly admit Slavic words through the back door, and
their Slavic colleagues occasionally do the same with the
German and Dutch words.
The English words given above have short (or so-
called checked) vowels in the root. They are matched by
bu - words with historically long vowels. Here we see
138
Adz(e) Adz(e)

nouns and verbs designating inflated objects that

suddenly burst and the sounds they produce. 'Being
swollen' and 'being noisy' are often inseparable.
Consider Russ bukhnut' 'make a loud sound' and 'swell';
bukhnut' 'swell' (usually with a prefix) has a synonym
(practically, a doublet) pukhnut'. Similarly, E puff means
'emit steam' (cf puff-puff imitating the corresponding
sound) and 'swell out' (cf puffed up). German has pusten,
pfusten 'puff, blow' and fauchen, pfauchen 'hiss' (mainly
said about cats; MHG pfuchen). Bausch 'paper ball, pleat
on a curtain, bustle on a dress, puff on a sleeve' is not
common, but the idiom in Bausch und Bogen
'completely' has universal currency, as do the p- words
pauschal, said about an across-the-board estimated
amount, and Pausbacken 'chubby cheeks,' Backe 'puffed
up cheek,' along with L bucca (the same). E back and
Russ bok form part of the first list. It follows that both
parts of the compound Pausbacken have approximately
the same origin (a tautological compound: see
SLOWWORM. Bauch 'stomach, belly' (see sect 6 on
Ettmuller and Guntert's etymology), is another bu -word.
Seebold, who discusses the Bausch group in detail (KS),
adds G Bo 'squall, gust' to it.
5. MDu baec- [ModDu baak, LG bak, bak(e)] seem to
belong with other b-k words, while *baukn- belongs with
OE buk and its cognates. The earliest 'bak' must have
been a float, a buoy (a similar case is ModI dufl 'buoy,
139
Adz(e) Adz(e)

beacon'; dufla 'splash about'). If 'growth' can be equated

with 'swelling (out),' Go bagms will fit the b-g group,
though -m- remains problematic. Gmc *bau-m- easily
aligns itself with Bau-ch, Bau-sch, for not only stops but
also resonants can be attached to bu ~ bau-, as in G
Beule 'bump, boil' (OHG bula, bula, bu lla, bulla 'bladder,
etc'—note the wealth of forms typical of onomatopoeic
and sound symbolic formations—OS bulia, OE by l, by le,
OFr be l, beil, and Go ufbauljan* 'puff up,' OI bola 'boil,'
alongside ModI beyla 'lump' and the unexplained Eddic
name Beyla). It unnecessary to set up one etymon for
bagms and Baum. Bagms may be a blend (*bag-az with a
suffix from *baum-az; cf. Uhlenbeck, above).
Bogey, boggle, and the rest emphasize the
frightening aspect of the objects designated by b-g
words, so that a meaning like 'apparition' was not too
remote even from bac 'buoy,' especially if ancient buoys
were visible at night. But beacon is not a synonym of
buoy (although the similarity of their function must have
led to some influence in one or more directions), for
beacons were signal fires on a coast, wooden towers,
branches tied to poles, and so forth. *Baukn- is
particularly difficult because of its -n. Neither bak nor
*baukn- should be mechanically projected to Proto-Indo-
European. Both are members of the big-bag-buk-pig
litter, and their age is indeterminate. Setting up ancient
participles and an n-enlargement is a futile procedure. If
140
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Bugge's etymology is rejected, the origin of -n remains a

puzzle. Most probably, it appeared in *baukn- under the
influence of *taikn-, in which -n is a genuine suffix.
Gmc *taikn- had strong religious (magical)
connotations. Finn taika (from Germanic) means
'divination, portent' (on this word see especially
Collinder [1932:204-15]). OI ...krossa ok oll heilog tdkn
'crosses (acc pl) and all holy signs' (Njdls saga, quoted in
CV under tdkn) is reminiscent of OS bokan endi bilidi and
of the English biblical phrase tokens and wonders (see
OED, token, sb4). Ta cen and beacen have almost
completely overlapping glosses in dictionaries of Old
English. Be acen: "beacon," sign, token, phenomenon,
portent, apparition;
standard, banner; audible signal. Tacen "token,"
symbol, sign, signal, mark, indication, suggestion;
portent, marvel, wonder, miracle; evidence, proof;
standard, banner (Clark Hall). Exodus has both
fridobeacen and fridotdcn for 'sign of peace.' Beacen and
tacen often occurred together, as in Beowulf 140-41
(...pa him gebeacnod wxs... sweotolan tacne... 'when it
was indicated to him by a manifest sign') and in The
Blickling Homilies (ealle pa tacno & pa forebeacno...,
quoted in OED, token, sb5), and see the examples in
Klaeber (1912:122). Even the phonetic variation in the
second syllables beacen ~ beacn, tacen ~ tacn is the
same in both pairs. The fact of interaction between
141
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*baukn- and *taikn- is commonplace in etymological

studies (WP II:123).
Three or four words meaning 'sign; omen' must at
first have referred to different phenomena. For example,
according to Ûçok (1938:38-40), Go bandwa* was
restricted to concrete signs for demonstrating a
meaning, and Go fauratani* meant 'supernatural sign,'
whereas taikn referred to any sign and was thus a
general word (cited approvingly in Feist-Lehmann,
*bandwa). However, taikn also meant 'sign' and
'portent, miracle,' as did Gk oqmeiov (which that Gothic
noun renders) and xépcxç. Gothic did not have *baukn; it
would probably have turned up if it had existed. Its
presumed nonexistence is indirect proof that WGmc
*baukn-emerged late, crossed the path of *taikn- (an old
word), and partly usurped its functions. Go fau-ratani*
must be another local innovation.
6. The etymology of beacon < *bauk-n- will be
incomplete without a few remarks on buoy, which is in
turn connected with BOY. Diez's theory (1466, boja)
reproduced in ODEE, traces MDu bo(e)ye (ModDu boei)
to OF boie ~ buie 'chain, fetter,' a word that is mentioned
elsewhere in Germanic etymologies: see Feist 3 at
baidjan* 'compel.' As Modéer (1943:141) pointed out,
floating buoys are never chained, and being anchored
could hardly be looked on as their most conspicuous

142
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feature. The main difficulty consists in the fact that the

origin of the French word is unknown.
Diez's derivation of boie from Late L boia 'fetter'
poses phonetic problems, regardless of whether o in
boia is short or long. (See Vidos [1957:96, note 2], on the
vowel length.) A. Tobler's attempt (1896:862) to rescue
Diez's etymology met with little success. Nigra's
conjecture (1903) that bouée goes back to L bo(v)a
'snake,' reg Ital boa 'rope or floating log used as a signal,'
because the chain of a buoy reflects the light and
resembles a water snake, also found few supporters (see
only Pianigiani [boia]). Most other authors of the mod-
ern dictionaries of the Romance languages (for example,
Battisti-Alessio, Devoto [boia], Corominas [boya]) and
NEW trace the French word to MHG bouchen (the same,
much earlier, Schuchardt [1901:346-47, 1903:611]) or
Old Franconian bôkan (ML, 1005). In French, *bokan
allegedly changed to boi (as it did in F jouer 'play' from L
jocari) and returned to Middle Dutch as bo(e)ye.
Considering the late appearance of the French word (the
end of the 15th century), this reconstruction looks
strained.
Vidos (1957:95-105, esp 103-04) suggested that the
etymon of the French word is MDu bo(e)ye (boie, boey,
boei), which owes its origin to OF buie 'chain,' from boia.
His article deals with so-called organic etymology. This is
how Szemerényi (1962:179) summarizes Vidos's views:
143
Adz(e) Adz(e)

"[I]f a member of a technical, especially nautical

vocabulary, is of unknown origin, it is likely to derive
from the same source as other words of the same field,
especially if the first attestation is roughly of the same
date as the others; if the word denotes an integral part
of the object, the probability is even greater. The use-
fulness of the principle is demonstrated by Prof. Vidos
on French bouée 'buoy,' which has at long last been
traced to its Dutch source." In this case, the "organic"
element is the progression anchor— chain—buoy, with
buoy getting its name from an object that constitutes its
inalienable part. FEW (XV:83, *baukn) tentatively sides
with Vidos. Modéer, whose investigation predates
Vidos's by many years, subscribed to the *bokan theory.
Hardly anyone remembers that Bilderdijk I:120 saw a
reflex of bode in Du boei, for beacons are signals
('messengers') of storms, or that Van den Helm
(1861:207-08) traced Du boie to Ital tempo boio 'dark
weather.'
Both Schuchardt's etymology (in its original form or
modified by Meyer-Lubke [see also EWFS, bouée] and
Vidos's radical revision of it presuppose that the word
for 'buoy' wandered from a Germanic language to Old
French and returned to Middle Dutch, to designate the
same object in a new way. The question arises why
Dutch speakers needed to borrow the Old French word.
It is more natural to suppose that MDu bo(e)ye was a
144
Adz(e) Adz(e)

native word and spread from its center to other lan-

guages. French also had beekenes (pl) (Cameron [1892],
Ott [1892]).
Boi and boy (see BOY) are creatures that frighten
people with the sounds they make (bo, boo, and the
like). But, as already pointed out, the same 'devils' could
inflate themselves and inspire awe by being both loud
and big, whence Du bui 'squall' (another word recorded
late). Low German borrowed this word as Bo and Bdje,
High German as Bo, Swedish as by, but Danish as byge;
byge resembles forms like E bogey more than Du bui.
With MDu bo(e)ye as native, the following triad presents
itself: MDu bo(e)ye 'buoy,' ME boi 'devil' (an almost
extinct meaning), and late MDu bui 'squall.' If we allow
'inflation, swelling out' and 'noise' to be related concepts
in describing demons, natural phenomena, and all kinds
of objects, those three words will form a close-knit
group. Puck and boy were probably evil spirits that
struck fear in people by puffing themselves up and
occasionally roaring, moaning, howling, and whistling.
Bui was their inhuman incarnation, whereas man-made
buoys were big and inflated.
7. Germanic had numerous words beginning with b
and p and alternating vowels. All of them were vaguely
synonymous, and their meanings were unpredictable:
'something big,' 'something loud (and frightening).' They
could end in a consonant, as a rule in g, k, d, and t, but a
145
Adz(e) Adz(e)

resonant, most often l, was allowed too. Bugs and

bogeys swelled out and made a lot of noise. Other words
designated harmless objects. One such object was a float
called bak. Since it showed the way to ships, it acquired
the meaning 'sign.' Another sign was called *baukn-.
Perhaps it had some magical senses from the start, but,
more probably, it acquired a set of elevated meanings
and the suffix -n under the influence of the ancestor of
modern token ~ tecken ~ Zeichen. ModI bdkn still refers,
nonspecifically, to a huge formless mass. The words
discussed here are not restricted to Germanic: they
occur, sometimes in identical form, in Sanskrit, Classical
Greek, Romance, Slavic, and Celtic. They are products of
primitive creation, and this circumstance makes tracing
the routes of borrowings particularly difficult (Liberman
[2001a:213-26]).
BIRD (800)
The most frequent Old English form of bird is bridd.
Since this noun has been assigned to the Germanic ja-
stem (*brid-ja-z, *bred-ja-z), -dd appears to be due to
West Germanic gemination. Bird surfaced late and is
usually explained as a metathesized form of brid(d).
Brid(d) supplanted OE fugol (ModE fowl) as the common
name of a flying feathered animal. The oldest recorded
meaning of bird was 'nestling,' but in late Middle English
it occurred with reference to all kinds of young animals
and human beings, from bees to devils. Bird has been
146
Adz(e) Adz(e)

compared with the verbs breed ~ brood and bear 'give

birth,' the adjective broad, and with several other words
in and outside Germanic. Some etymologists believe in
the derivation of bird from bredan 'breed,' but the
difficulty of connecting OE e, from umlauted o (bredan <
*brodjan),
with OE i from e (or with old i) in bridd has not been
solved, and most modern dictionaries call bird a word of
unknown origin. The stumbling block in the bird ~ beran
etymology is that the earliest recorded form is bridd, not
bird. However, that etymology can be rescued if two
assumptions are made: that in spite of the discrepancy in
dates bird, not brid(d), is the original form and that the
original meaning of bird was 'the young of any animal'
(as recorded in Middle English), not 'nestling.' Then bird,
from *berd-jo-z, would acquire the meaning 'born
creature' and join such nouns as *barn- (OE bearn) 'child'
('bairn'), OE gebyrd 'offspring,' OE byre 'son,' Sc birky (=
bir-k-y) 'fellow,' and several others, with cognates
elsewhere in Germanic, especially in German.
The sections are devoted to 1) the attested forms of
bird, 2) the attested meanings of bird, 3) the proposed
derivation of bird from breed, 4) the proposed derivation
of bird from bear (v), 5) other hypotheses on the origin of
bird, and 6) the vindication of the etymology of bird from
bear. Section 7 is the conclusion.

147
Adz(e) Adz(e)

1. The Old English forms of bird are brid and

bridd. According to the microfiche concordance of
the Toronto Dictionary of Old English, it occurs
eleven times in the singular and fifty-four times in
the plural, practically always with dd. Bird (pl bir-
das) has been recorded in Northumbrian glosses.
Bridd, assigned in grammars to the ja-stem, sup-
posedly has a double consonant because of West
Germanic gemination. Birdas is believed to be a
metathesized form of bridas (SB [sec 179.1]; A.
Campbell [1959:sec 459.2]). The only analogue of
such metathesis is dirda (pirda) < dridda (pridda)
'third.' In Middle English, both words underwent
a second metathesis. Luick (1964:secs 432, note 1;
714.1 and note; 756.1) points out that in late Middle
English, dirt and thirty were sometimes spelled drit
and thritty, whereas the reverse process ri > ir in
pirde and bird occurred in Old English. Bird has no
prehistoric antecedents, so that when Kaluza (1906-
07:I, secs 65a and 85a) calls i and d in bridd reflexes
of Proto-Germanic (Urgermanisch), he has in mind a
reconstructed rather than an attested form (*bridja).
He cites the same two Northumbrian words (pirda
and brid) as examples of metathesis (sec 99a). OED
gives the form *bridjo-z, and it turns up in Hamp
(1981:40, 1989:197-98): Pre-Germanic *b red-ja >

148
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Gmc *b riddja > OE bridd. The earliest occurrence of

brid is in a gloss: pullus, brid. Briddas goes back to
the year 1000.
2. The forms *bridja- and *bridjo-z may never
have existed. Brid(d) ~ bird supplanted fugol
(ModE fowl), the common Germanic name of a
feathered animal, just as ME pigge (< *picga 'pig')
and OE docga 'dog' supplanted swln and hund.
Such newcomers are usually 'homey' words, bor-
rowed from baby language or slang. They often contain
expressive geminates and need not be native. Thus E
puppy seems to be of French origin; whelp is English but
without cognates outside Germanic, and hjuppi ~ heppi
'whelp' is only Icelandic. Typically, such words refer to
more animals than one. For instance, stag is a male deer
in Standard English, but in northern dialects it means
'horse'; OI steggi means 'drake,' but in Modern Icelandic,
steggur is a male seabird and a male cat (ODEE cites OI
stagi and stagg at stag, neither of which has been
attested). Projecting stag and the like to Common
Germanic and Proto-Indo-European is a risky,
uncontrollable procedure.
Another fact to be considered is the early meaning of
bird. At the end of the 14th century, the words bridd and
byrd begin to occur with reference to all kinds of young
animals, such as adders, bees, fish, serpents, foxes, and
wolves, as well as human beings and even fiends. The
149
Adz(e) Adz(e)

unexpected meanings of brydd were the subject of an

exchange between Maxwell (1891a), who cited an
instance of bird 'wolf cub' without consulting OED, and
his respondents (Murray [1891], Mayhew
[1891a], and W. Logeman [1891]; see also Maxwell
[1891b]). More recently, Lockwood (1981b:185)
emphasized the importance of the Middle English
meaning of bird. Although those examples fall into the
period 1388-1591, slangy usage that would allow whelps,
cubs, and young devils to be called 'bird' is hard to
imagine. (Compare the transparent metaphor jailbird,
based on the idea of a caged creature, or gallows bird.) It
is more likely that the meaning 'the young of any animal'
is ancient, even though the extant evidence is late. OE
brid ~ bird was not a synonym of fugol 'bird, avis,' for
brid(d) designated 'the young of the feathered tribes; a
young bird; a chicken, eaglet, etc; a nestling.' OED adds:
"The only sense in OE. found in literature down to 1600;
still retained in north. dial. as 'a hen and her birds'."
Older dictionaries were fond of quoting 1Henry IV, V: 1,
60: "...you used us so / As that ungentle gull the cuckoo's
bird / Useth the sparrow" (SG, bird, cites two more
similar examples in Shakespeare).
3. Several etymologies of bird have been suggested
and rejected. Minsheu considered Dutch ("Belgian")
broeden 'brood, sit on eggs' (his gloss is 'sit upon') to be
the etymon of bird. Skinner's correction "rather from OE
150
Adz(e) Adz(e)

bredan 'keep warm'" is reasonable, for why should an

English word go back to Dutch rather than to an attested
Old English form? But it does not change anything in
principle, for OE bre dan 'produce or cherish a brood,'
that is, 'breed' is a cognate of G brüten (OHG bruotan)
and MDu brueden. Junius cited bry-dan, but, apparently,
he meant bre dan. Likewise, N. Bailey (1721 and 1730),
Wedgwood, Ettmüller (1851:320), and Webster (1864
and 1880) traced bird to brood. That etymology then
appears in Skeat1, but in the Errata et Addenda, while
defending himself against Stratmann's criticism, Skeat
hedges and says that he "merely suggested a
connection." Connection is a meaningless word in this
context. Skeat must have realized the weakness of his
defense because he added: "I still hold that the
Teut[onic] base is BRU, whence also A[nglo]-S[axon]
brew, broth, bread, brood, breed, etc. See Fick III: 217. If
this be not the right form of the base, what is?" In CED
between 1882 and 1900, he says that bird is "perhaps
allied to brood," and in Skeat4 he admits that bird was
understood as a thing bred. But a derivative of bredan
could be neither *bridjoz nor *bredjoz. The last edition
of CED contains no etymology at all: Skeat only repeats
Murray's verdict ("of unknown origin").
Bredan (< *brodjan) has vowels incompatible with i
in brid(d). One can perhaps reconstruct OE e alternating
with *e lowered to i before *j, but no way leads from o
151
Adz(e) Adz(e)

to e. Mayhew (1891a), a scholar much given to bullying

his opponents, declared that "[t]o connect brid with brod
and bredan is high treason against those severe laws
which govern the relations of vowels to one another in
the several 'Ablaut' series."
Yet the relatedness of bird to breed ~ brood seems so
obvious that Minsheu's etymology lives on. Weekley
noted that the connection between bird and breed ~
brood is doubtful (he does not say
"out of the question"). Wyld (UED) suggested that
it would be possible to overcome the phonetic dif-
ficulties if we assumed that o in *bro djan goes back to
PIE *oi; then i in brid would be the zero grade of this
diphthong. Unlike his predecessors, he considered i in
brid to be old rather than a reflex of e lowered before j
because of West Germanic breaking.
Finally, Hamp (1981:40) reconstructed the vowels in
Gmc *bred- ~ *brod- 'brood' as the lengthening grades of
e, o. "As a back-formation from these *bred-ja-z 'one of
a brood' is perfectly intelligible as a neo-normal grade.
Under the rules of Indo-European ablaut, in a thematic
stem (and a derived -io-stem) derived from a noun (here
*brodo~) we expect *e vocalism; cf wild beside Wald..."
Theoretically, such a back formation is possible, but se-
cure analogues are wanting. The alternation o ~ e is
sometimes set up (Noreen [1894:54]) on the strength of
pairs like OE bro c 'brook' and brecan 'break,' but all such
152
Adz(e) Adz(e)

etymologies are problematic. Hamp does not cite any

examples illustrating the alleged pattern (long grade in a
collective noun ~ normal grade in a word designating a
member of the group), and it is unclear what G wild ~
Wald have to do with o ~ e. However, Markey (1987:277)
supported Hamp. Both Wyld and Hamp believed that
brid(d) is an ancient word with a prehistory reaching far
back into Early Germanic and, like all supporters of
Minsheu's idea, ignored the later meanings of brid.
Breed must originally have meant 'hatch,' and brood
refers only to young birds.
Deriving brid from bre dan leaves the problem of
Middle English semantics (brid 'young bear,' and so
forth) unsolved, a circumstance even such an
experienced etymologist as Trubachev (1980:9-10)
disregarded.
4. Another group of researchers derive bird
from Gmc *beran 'bear, give birth'; so Thomson,
E. Adams (1858:101), the pre-1864 editions of Web-
ster (from bear or the Welsh verb bridaw 'break
forth'), and Leo (1877). Mueller, who cited Wedg-
wood and Ettmuller (brid from breed), preferred to
trace bird to beran. By contrast, Scott connected bird
and beran in the first edition of CD but switched to
breed ~ brood in the second. From the semantic
point of view the bird ~ beran etymology is irre-
proachable. The original meaning of bird would
153
Adz(e) Adz(e)

come out as 'a born creature,' which fits both the

Middle English meanings and the meaning 'nest-
ling.' OE gebyrd meant 'birth; descent, parentage,
race' and 'offspring' (f, i-stem), while 'child' is one
of the meanings of OHG giburt and MHG geburt.
OE gebyrd, OHG giburt, and Go gabaurps*, as well
as OE byrden and OHG burdin 'burden,' have the
zero grade of the alternating vowel, whereas bird, if
related to beran, would have i < *e, the normal
grade. A parallel in the normal grade would be Go
barn 'child,' with cognates in all the Germanic lan-
guages (from an ancient past participle: barn =
'born creature'). Later dictionaries do not favor
this etymology, but Specht (1944:148) cited it with
some confidence. The main problem with deriving
bird from beran is that the original form of the Old
English noun seems to have been brid, not bird. For this
reason, Mayhew (1891c:450) called the idea of tracing
bird to beran impossible. It must have been Mayhew's
criticism that made Scott revert to the bird ~ breed
etymology.
5. Other, more or less fanciful, attempts to
explain the origin of bird will be mentioned here
for completeness' sake. Somner (1659:325) de-
rived bird from Gk mxepov 'feather, wing'—not a
bad idea, considering that Jixepöv is a gloss for feather
and its cognates. Tooke (1798-1805 I:348) may have
154
Adz(e) Adz(e)

been the first to connect bird and broad. In his opinion,

bird was the past participle of OE brxdan 'make broad,
extend, spread, stretch out' (he usually derived nouns
from participles), and he derived board from that word.
Richardson gave no references, but his etymology of bird
must be from Tooke: "So called from the increased
breadth when the wings are expanded." EG also cited G
breiten 'spread,' along with E breed and brood, and
added Sc birky 'lively young fellow,' 'old boy' (from Jami-
eson), about which see below. W. Barnes (1862:28) gave
bird under one of his imaginary roots br*ng: a bird is
"what rises or is borne up"; breed and brood are cited
there too. Mackay (1877), true to his program (all words
are from Gaelic), declared bird to be a derivative or
"corruption" of Gaelic brid eun 'little bird,' from brid
(obsolete) 'little.' Rather early in his career (for the first
and last time), Holthausen (1909:147) compared bird and
L fritin-nire 'chirp.' He offered no other conjectures on
the etymology of bird but advised Götze to dissociate
bird from brood (Holthausen [1935:167]). Garcia de
Diego (1968:186, 187) considered the onomatopoeic
origin of bird possible. If the original meaning of bird is
'any young animal,' Holthausen's and Garcia de Diego's
proposals can be ruled out. The comparison brid ~ broad
needs no further refutation.
The most recent and utterly fanciful etymologies of
bird have been Makovskii's ([1977:60], repeated
155
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verbatim in Makovskii [1980:64]): 1) In the seventies, he

was developing the theory that many common English
words arose as the result of mistakes made by medieval
glossators. L pullus, he observed, was most often glossed
as bird, brid, but pullus allegedly also meant 'board,
plank.' The Old English for 'board' was bred. The
glossator may have looked at pullus : bred and decided
that bred refers to a flying animal. Hence brid 'bird' (in
sum: since pullus means 'bird' and supposedly 'board,'
OE bred came to mean 'bird'). This and many similar
hypotheses met with Shchur's approval (1982:153). 2) In
his later publications, Makovskii
(1989a:137, 1993:137) defended the bird ~ breed ~
brood etymology. 3) According to his other guess
(Makovskii [1998:166]), bird is related to breath, for
birds were believed to be the receptacles of souls. He
made no mention of the fact that breath and breed are
usually traced to the same Proto-Indo-European root. 4)
In Makovskii (1999b:80), bird is compared with Latv
burts 'letter' because ancient writing was allegedly
connected with 'the birds' script,' a sacral language of
the inhabitants of heaven. 5) Makovskii (1999a:61-62) is
a variation on the themes of PIE *bher- 'move fast,'
gestures of prohibition, the World Egg, and breeding.
6. The result of several centuries of speculation is
that bird joined the list of words of unknown origin, as
stated in ODEE, AeEW, and elsewhere. However, the
156
Adz(e) Adz(e)

connection bird ~ beran can perhaps be rescued. The

argument that OE bird is a secondary formation, a
metathesized variant of brid(d), is not absolutely
watertight. We only know that brid(d) antedates bird in
Old English texts. Metathesis in words like irnan <
*rinnan 'run' and bir-nan < *brinnan 'burn' occurred
early; compare gxrs 'grass,' forst 'frost,' fersc 'fresh,' and
so forth (SB, sec 179). Birdas ~ briddas, dirdda ~ dridda
do not form a class of their own ('before d') despite what
is always asserted, because two words hardly constitute
a distributional group. In West Germanic roots of the
TRET ~ TERT type, the date of metathesis is hard to
ascertain. The interaction of burd 'maiden' and bride in
Middle and Early Modern English is reminiscent of an
older confusion. Both the most ancient form and the
most ancient meaning of bird appear to have emerged in
texts relatively late.
Bird 'young animal' looks like a variant of the noun
(-)byrd, with d in bridd, briddas, and so on lengthened, as
usually happens in hypocoristic forms, though the
masculine gender of brid(d) and the delabialization of y
are irregular (see SB, sec 31, note 2 on OE i < y);
however, OE byrd had the variant bird.
Many words were formed from the root of the verb
beran. Beside OE (ge)byr-d and bear-n (ea < *a by Old
English breaking), OE byre 'child, son, descendant,
youth' existed. Krogmann's idea
157
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(1938c:191) that OHG and OS -boro and OE -bora

mean 'born' rather than 'bearer' is convincing (for
instance, OE wXgbora 'wave-born,' not 'wave-borne'; the
editors of Beowulf neither accept nor deny this
interpretation, but OHG eliboro 'foreigner' originally
meant 'born elsewhere'). Byre had no suffix. Jamieson
and, unenthusiastically, OED compared Sc birky 'child,
fellow; self-assertive man' with OI berkja 'boast, bluster.'
Two words seem to have merged here. Birky 'crusty,
independent, self-assertive man' may perhaps have
developed its meaning under the influence of berkja, but
birky 'child, fellow' is byr(e) followed by the diminutive
suffix -k, as in ModI Jonki, Sveinki, and the like. Birky
thus means 'sonny.' Against the background of (ge)byrd,
bearn (< *barn), byre, and birk, the word bird, that is, bir-
d looks natural;
cf OHG herd* 'growth, descendant' (only in Tatian;
OE beordor) (Kluge [1926:sec 141]; EWA: the references
in the entry give no information about what can be
found in Kluge).
7. Definitive conclusions cannot be expected in such
a case. Bird as 'born one, (some)one born; young
creature' is possible. In choosing the most common word
for 'bird,' languages typically deviate from or oust the
'protoform': cf Sp pájaro and Ital uccello alongside L ave
and avis. With regard to ModE bird, the only alternative
to a confession of ignorance ("origin unknown" = "will
158
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never be discovered") is an etymology based on several

assumptions. To obtain a satisfactory etymology of bird,
we have to agree that neither the original form nor the
original meaning of this word was preserved in the
oldest texts. Whether such a solution requires a price in
excess of its value is clearly a matter of opinion
(Liberman [2003:37681]).
BOY (1260)
The original meanings of ME boi were 'churl, servant'
and 'devil' (rare). This is why boi was often used as a
derogatory word. The meaning 'male child' does not
occur before 1400. Apparently, ModE boy is a blend of an
onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit (*boi) and a baby
word for 'little brother' (*bo). The latter may be extant in
the proper name Boia (OE). Both words have numerous
counterparts in and outside English and Germanic. They
are not related to boy but belong to the same
onomatopoeic and sound symbolic sphere. Hence the
similarity between boy and words for 'child' in the
languages of the world. A French etymon has been
suggested for boy; however, the adduced evidence is ei-
ther incorrect or inconclusive.
The sections are devoted to 1) the proposed
etymologies of boy, 2) the relations between boy and the
proper name Boi(a), 3) boy and words for '(little)
brother,' 4) boy and words for 'frightening object; ghost;
devil'; E boy and G Bube, 5) boy in its Eurasian context; E
159
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at(t)aboy and oh, boy; boy as the result of a merger of

two meanings ('brother' and 'devil'), and 6) the
possibility that boy is a word of French origin.
1. The etymology of boy has been the object of much
speculation. In the literature on this word, the best-
known work is Dobson (1940), but it seems that we are
closer to the truth thanks to Dietz (1981a:361-405) and
Roelandts (1984). More tangential but also important
are Laistner (1888) and Mandel (1975). Three partly
overlapping theories on the origin of boy have been
offered.
1) Boy is a baby word. All over the world, we find
similar words beginning with b and p and meaning
'child'; boy is allegedly one of them. Consider the list of
look-alikes from W (1828; Greek words are given there
without accents): "BOY, n. Pers. bach, a boy; W. baggen,
from bag, little; Arm. buguel, a child, bugale, boyish; Sw.
poike, a young boy; Dan. pog, Fr[ench] page. See Beagle
and Pug. Boy is a contracted word, and probably the L.
puer for puger, for we see by puella, that r is not radical.
So the Gk παις probably is contracted, for the derivative
verb, ποαζω, forms ποαξω, παιχθείς. The radical letters
probably are Bg or Pg."
A few of the words cited by Webster occur in the
earliest etymological dictionaries of English, for example,
in Minsheu and Skinner, and most of them can be found
in books published two centuries later. Kilianus
160
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compared Du boef 'knave, rogue' and boy. Junius derived

boy directly from the vocative of Gk παις 'boy, servant'
(παί = boy), while Skinner thought of βαιός 'small,
insignificant.' The idea that G Bube comes from L pupus
enjoyed such popularity (see Pott [1833:193] and
Wackernagel [1874b:287], first published in 1861) that as
late as 1892 Franck (EWNT, boef) had to refute it. A list
nearly a page long (examples, like those in Webster,
from five continents) appears in Gottlund (1853:61), and
a list from the Paleo-Siberian languages in Daa
(1856:270). See also Thomsen (1869:273 = 1920:92). In
the revised 1864 edition of Webster's dictionary, the
original list is corrected and rearranged but, in principle,
remains the same: "BOY, n. Prov. Ger. bua, bue, M. H.
Ger. buobe, N. H. Ger. bube, M. D. boeve, N. D. boef. Cf.
Lat. pupus, boy, child, and L. Ger. pook, Dan. pog, Sw.
pojke, a young boy, Arm. bugel, bugul, child, boy, girl, Ir.
& Gael. beag, little, W. back, id., Per. batch, child, boy,
servant; A-S. & Dan. pige, Sw. piga, Icel. pika, a little
girl." Although trimmed, the first part of the 1864 list can
be found in numerous modern dictionaries. Sometimes
Bube, boef, and so on are cited as cognates of boy,
sometimes we are expected to "compare" these forms
with the English word. The entry in Klein's CEDEL is
characteristic: "BOY, n—ME. boi, rel. to the OE. PN. Bofa,
OFris, boy, 'a young gentleman', MDu. boeve, Du.
boef, 'knave, villain', the OHG. PN. Buobo, MHG.
161
Adz(e) Adz(e)

buobe, G. Bube, 'boy', and in vowel gradational rela-

tionship to E. babe, baby (qq.v)."
Kluge related babe and baby to G Bube by ablaut. In
EWDS1-3, he called boy a borrowing from Dutch (boy <
boef), but in the fourth edition he said more cautiously
that it reminds one of boef. Gotze (11th ed) listed boy
"alongside" Buobo. Only Mitzka (16th ed) expunged
reference to ablaut. E. Klein (CEDEL) may have reasoned
that if babe is allied by ablaut to Bube and if Bube is a
cognate of boy, the vowels in boy and Bube must be
related. C. Ball
(1970:69) was surprised to find no mention of Dob-
son in E. Klein's dictionary. But Klein apparently did not
read Dobson, for otherwise he would have known how
inadequate the gloss 'young gentleman' given in OED for
Ten Doornkaat Koolman's EFr (that is, LG) Junge, Knabe
is (Dobson [1943:71], with reference to William Craigie).
In Fick3 (214-15), E boy and G Bube are said to be
related to G beben 'tremble, shake'; supposedly, Bube
originally meant 'coward.' This bizarre etymology has
never been repeated. It is the opinion of many that Bube
is a reduplication of boy or of
some form like boy. Thus Markey (1980:178):
"MHG buobe, probably a reduplicated hypocoristic,
cf mama... while boy is... employed as both an ap-
pellative and a personal name. Its further etymology is...
obscure." However, he soon changed his opinion and
162
Adz(e) Adz(e)

related buobe to boy "by virtue of what appears to be an

important and typically Ingwae-onic samprasarana," that
is, by the rule of vocalization: b >f/v > y > zero (Markey
[1983:104-5]).
According to another etymology of boy, the names
of the young "are inseparably involved with the terms,
denoting the lumpy, swelling out form, when considered
either as in a little, small state, or as of larger
dimensions, by whatever process it may have arisen,
that their union has been effected" (Whiter [1825:171]).
Likewise, Wedgwood1 (an abridged version of the same
appears in the later editions) believed that G Bube
(which he compared with SwiG bub ~ bue and Swabian
buah, "showing the passage of the pronunciation to E.
boy"), is related to "Lat. pupus, a boy, pupa, a girl, a doll,
which last is probably the earlier meaning. The origin
seems the root bob, bub, pop, pup, in the sense of
something protuberant, stumpy, thick and short, a small
lump." He cited Russ pup 'navel,' Bavarian Butzen 'bud,'
and so forth. Hilmer (1918:52) gives the same examples.
Whiter, Webster, and Wedgwood promoted the idea
that words for 'boy, child' depend on the notion of
universal baby talk. Richardson, at boy, says: ".the
natural voice of children, asking for drink". Later,
etymologists eliminated most of the spurious cognates.
Even the connection boy ~ Bube ~ boef needs proof
despite references to reduplication and samprasarana,
163
Adz(e) Adz(e)

but it is undeniable that in numerous languages, a

similar sound complex is used to denote a male child.
From the most ancient languages, Hurrian purame 'slave;
servant' and Urartian b/pura 'slave' can be added
(Ivanov [1999b:161]). The baby talk theory depends on
the phenomenon that bilabial sounds appear early in
language acquisition and for that reason complexes like
mama, baba, papa are used widely for naming children
and those who look after them. Yet each word—boy,
Bube, puer, pojke, and the rest—has its own history that
must be traced in detail.
2) Boy is allegedly the same word as the Old English
proper name Boi(a), which has a cognate in East Frisian,
so that boy turns out to be of Low German origin. This
theory, forcibly put forward in Skeat1 (less so in Skeat4),
was expected to explain why the common name boy
emerged so late (its first occurrence goes back to 1260;
see Dobson [1940:126]) and offer a persuasive
etymology of the Low German word. The family name
Boy(e) is still common in North Frisian (Arhammar
[2001:349]; Timmermann [2001:386, 393]). A modified
version of this theory sets up OE *boia. It faces the same
questions.
3) Boy is traced to an Anglo-French word with a
Romance etymon, namely Late L boia 'fetter.' If this is so,
the entire corpus of facts connected with baby talk and
OE Boia has to be explained away.
164
Adz(e) Adz(e)

4) Makovskii (1999a:70; 2000a:141) compares E

boy with PIE *bha - 'burn,' for male firstborns were
often sacrificed and burned on sacrificial pyres, and with
OE boian 'speak' and a-boian 'keep silent' (this form
does not appear in dictionaries, while bo ian means
'boast' not 'speak') and comes to the result that boy (an
aphetic form of *aboi?) mirrors L infans 'unable to speak'
(< in + the past participle of fari 'to speak'). These
etymologies need not be discussed here.
2. The central issue in the etymology of boy is the
relationship between ME boi and OE Boi(a). Boi(a)
violates Old English phonotactics, for Old English did not
have the diphthong oi (the three examples in Dietz
[1981] are also from Middle English), and in a native
form one expects umlauted o
before i (Dobson [1940:148]); the same holds for
Old Frisian. But although oi looks like a foreign body
in any ancient Germanic language, it was not
unpronounceable in Old English, as seen from the weak
verbs of the second class boian* (= bogan) 'boast,' go
ian* 'lament, groan,' and sco ian* (= scogan) 'put on a
shoe' (SB, sec 415a; see the preserved forms in A.
Campbell [1959:sec 761.7] and discussion in Dietz
[1981a:392-93]). Goian* has a reliable etymology (Jordan
[1906:27-29]), scoian* was derived from sco(h)* 'shoe,'
and boian is, most likely, onomatopoeic: see sec 5,
below. All of them had o in Old English, with the syllable
165
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and morpheme boundary between o and i. This seems to

be the reason Boia is also supposed to have had o
(Kluge [1901b:944, 1050]; AeEW; HL, 376). However,
J. Zupitza preferred to reconstruct a short diphthong in
Boia (reported in O. Ritter [1910:473]), and Ritter agreed
with him. If oi were short and monophonemic, the
absence of umlaut would probably need no explanation.
But the fact remains that oi, mono- or biphonemic, does
not occur in any native Old English word, and the same is
true of Middle English (Jordan3 [1968:sec 131, note]).
However, expressive words sometimes have marginal
phonemes, a circumstance usually disregarded in dealing
with the early history of
boy.
The existence of oi is less obvious even in Middle
Dutch than is sometimes believed. See the discussion of
the element Boid- in place names (Mansion [1928:93]),
the nickname Boidin (Tavernier-Vereecken [1968:198]),
and Boeye (Haeserijn [1954:133]). (Similar difficulties
occur in modern languages. E ruin, Bruin, and Ewen can
be pronounced with [ui]. Fuel and gruel have the
variants [fjuil] and [gruil]. Yet no phonological
description of English recognizes the diphthong /ui/.)
NS (130-31) gave some attention to the distribution
of the proper name Boi(a); Dobson (1940:148-49),
Tengvik (1938:238-39), von Feilitzen
and Blunt (1971:189-91), and Dietz (1981a:279-82,
166
Adz(e) Adz(e)

361-405) investigated it in detail. Many men were at

one time called Boi (a strong form) or Boia (a weak
form). Whether all of them were immigrants from
northern Franconia, as Dobson believed, or whether
some of them were native-born but had a (partly?)
domesticated foreign name cannot be decided. Nor can
the existence of the common Old English noun *boi(a),
with whatever meaning, be taken for granted. However,
its reality will become more probable if we assume that
*Boi(a) was at one time a nickname. The vast and varied
vocabulary of Old Icelandic shows that numerous
nicknames have not come down to us in any other
capacity: they must have been too vulgar, conver-
sational, or evanescent for occurring even in the sagas,
and from Old English we have no texts resembling the
saga literature of medieval Iceland. The meaning of a
large number of Icelandic nicknames remains unclear
today. The same holds for some names of mythological
and legendary beings. Sublime or low, they were once
semantically transparent and widespread. Yet they
existed at the edges of Old Scandinavian vocabulary and
disappeared the way much of modern slang does. Dietz
(1981a) confines his discussion of nicknames to a few
remarks on pp. 378 and 390.
Conflicting views are held on the origin of the English
family name Boys. Some language historians think that it
comes from F bois 'wood' and compare De Bosco,
167
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Dubosc, De Bois, Bois, Boice, and the like, so that Boys

acquires the status of an etymological doublet of Wood
(Charnock [1868]; Lower [1875]; Bardsley [1884:154];
Ewen [1931:204, 306], though on p. 204 Boys appears
among
Dutchmen in Essex; McKinley [1990:80]), while
Reaney (1976) explains Boys, and the rest as boy's.
Matthews (1966) seems to imply that all family names
like Boys and Bois go back to boy. H. Harrison glosses
Boy(e)s as 'dweller at a wood' and thus supports the
French derivation of that name. The name Boycott was
first recorded in 1256 (Re-aney [1976]) and means
'woodhouse'.
The oldest place name containing the element
Boi is Boiwici. It is dated to 785 (Dobson [1940:149];
von Feilitzen and Blunt [1971:190]; Dietz [1981a:375,
376, 378]), which means that either the
name or the word boi had some currency in England
before 1066. The early Middle English charter
mentioning Boiwic is a fake (King Offa did not deliver
such a charter), but regardless of the false ascription, it is
based on reliable facts.
3. Kluge EWDS6 traced G Bube, Du boef, and E boy to
some ancient word for 'brother.' His idea became known
to English etymologists from KL: "BOY ME. boie OE
*boia, perh. dimin. of a lost OE *bo 'brother' = Flem. boe
'brother': childish abbreviation of E brother, as G bube.
168
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OHG buobo is a reduplication of *bd 'brother'?"

Reference to boy later disappeared from the entry Bube
in EWDS, but the idea that Bube and boef go back to a
word for 'brother' has stayed. E. Zupitza (1900:237) and
Vercoullie (1920:790-91) supported it; see a summary of
Vercoullie's talk on pp. 779-80 of the same volume; p.
780 on boy. Later it made its way into IEW (164). Only J.
de Vries (AEW, Bofi; NEW, boef) calls it "improbable" and
"highly improbable," but his opinion is unfounded, as
Roelandts (1984) made clear (first indicated in Roelandts
[1966:271,
279]; cited in von Feilitzen and Blunt [1971:19091]).
Roelandts (1984) listed numerous Germanic names
beginning with Boi— Boy- and compared them with
Dutch and Frisian words for 'little brother' and by
implication, 'fellow.' He showed that Boio, Poio, Boiadus,
Boiga, Boigea, Boga, Boye, and even Scandinavian Bo
may once have meant 'little brother' rather than
'dweller' (from OE buan, OI bua 'live') or 'crooked' (from
OE bugan, OI bjugr 'bent'). (See the most important com-
parative material on such names in Schonfeld's
dictionary [Boio] and in Much [1895:31-35].) Forms like
Boio have probably always been slangy. See the
etymological part of the entry bully in OED: here again
we find attempts to connect the designation of an adult
man and a brother. Boy and Boi(a) can be the same word
with the ancient meaning '(little) brother,' but the
169
Adz(e) Adz(e)

problem is that boy 'little brother' has not been recorded

in English texts or living speech and that even the
meaning 'male child' is not original in it.
4. Dobson (1940:126-47) distinguished the following
meanings of boy in Middle English: 1) 'servant' or applied
to persons engaged in some clearly indicated service of a
humble sort, 2) applied without any specifically
contemptuous intention to persons of the lower orders
of society, often in clear or implied contrast to
gentlefolk, 3) used more vaguely as a term of contempt
or abuse, 4) various transitional uses, 5) the modern
sense of 'male child.' He concluded that the ordinary
Middle English meaning of boy was 'churl,' which should
gloss all the examples under headings 1-3, except those
for which 'servant' is required. Boy "never means 'male
child' before 1400. The transitional and modern
meanings are not substantiated until the 15 th century"
(p. 145). ODEE accepts Dobson's chronology of meanings
(which is different from that in OED) without comment
(see W. P. Lehmann [1966-67:625] on On-ions's dogmatic
style, with regard to boy). Makovskii (1977:69) gave the
late Old English gloss boi : diaconus, but this is a mistake.
He must have miscopied O. Ritter's reference (1910:472)
to Iago (1903). The relevant place reads boia diaconus
and means that one of the witnesses was a "diaconus"
called Boia. Mandel (1975) cited several cases of boy
'devil' in Chaucer. His findings are correct, but they
170
Adz(e) Adz(e)

passed unnoticed. The meaning ('devil'), which goes

beyond "contempt or abuse," has parallels in continental
West Germanic and in Scandinavian languages. Here Du
boef and G Bube, even though they are not cognates of
boy, should again be mentioned.
Du boef means only 'scoundrel; criminal'; MDu boeve
also meant 'servant.' Norn bofi is used in curses, in which
it can be understood as 'devil' (EONSS). The recorded
history of G Bube (see E. Müller [1968]) almost mirrors
that of E boy. Like boy, Bube, a Southern German word,
first appears as a personal name (OHG Buobo). In its
Latinized form (Bobo) it was recorded as early as the 7th
century: Zimmermann (1961:520-21); MHG buobe means
'young fellow' and 'libertine, gambler.' The meaning
'male child' does not appear until the 16 th century. Bub is
extant as a gross insult in some German dialects, and just
as E boy 'servant, hired man' has survived in non-British
usage (see the history of Indian boy in Vermeer [1971])
and in the compounds bellboy, cowboy, and potboy, the
low status of Bube is obvious in the card name Bube
'jack, knave' and in the compounds Lausbube, Spitzbube
'villain, rogue,' and Bubenstück, Bubenstreich (= Büberei)
'knavish, villainous act.'
With the extinction of chivalry, knights' servants
degenerated into urban riffraff (gamblers, beggars,
thieves, pimps) or day laborers. The distance from a
cnafa (the Old English for 'boy, youth; servant') to a
171
Adz(e) Adz(e)

knave has always been short, and the story of ribald

shows how many turns one can expect on this road:
from 'prostitute' (OHG hriba) to 'retainer of low class'
(OF ribaut ~ ME ribald) and further to 'rascal'; E. Müller
suggests that Bube 'boy' is an innovation with its roots in
casual every day speech but admits that buobe always
meant 'male child.' If so, 'boy; servant' later developed
into 'scoundrel.' We are faced with the same puzzling
situation as in English: a derogatory meaning ('scoundrel;
devil') coexists and seems to have coexisted for centuries
with an affectionate one
('boy').
The striking parallelism in the recorded history of
boy and Bube poses several questions. From 'little
brother' one can perhaps get to 'a person of low status,'
'servant,' and 'knave' (in varlet from valet we have part
of the same semantic development), but hardly to
'criminal' and especially to 'devil.' Nor is the path from
'devil' to 'little brother' probable. At most, one can
expect the development 'devil' > 'imp' > 'little rascal;
romp, scamp,' as in G Nickel. It is also odd that the
meanings 'ruffian' and 'male child' did not get into each
other's way, for even if the second meaning emerged
later, the time interval was not long (in English, about a
century and a half). Two different sets of words seem to
have coexisted in (West) Germanic: one denoted little
boys and the other devils and rogues.
172
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5. All over Eurasia, the combination of b with a back

vowel is used to frighten people, especially children. For
many words designating a male child one can find
homonyms or near homonyms designating devils,
ghosts, and the like. Open syllables and the bug- ~ bog-
group predominate in this sphere. In English, we have bo
and boo, as in say bo (or boh, boo) to a goose (in Scot-
land, to your blanket, and several other variants; DOST)
and in the verb boo 'hoot.' Bo was first recorded in 1430.
Although the earliest version of "Little Bo-peep" goes
back to 1810, a game (or an amusement) called bo-peep
was known as early as 1364. Bo-peep, a counterpart of
peek-a-boo, is the simplest variant of hide-and-(go)-seek:
a nurse would conceal the head of the infant and then
remove the covering quickly, crying: "Bo-peep!" (AMG,
96, note 87).
Phonetically close to E boo is Du bui 'gust, squall,' the
etymon of LG Böj(e) ~ Büj(e) and G Bö. Russ boiat'sia 'be
afraid' (the root is boi-, stress falls on the syllable -at-)
has cognates in Baltic and Indo-Iranian (ESSI II:163-64).
The similarity between Du bui and Russ bui- 'violent,
bold' was noticed long ago (Van Wijk [1909:30-31]). OE
boian* 'boast' (see it in sec 2, above) is more probably a
formation like boo than a cognate of L fari 'speak'
(suggested by Holthausen [1918b:238] and taken up by
WP I:123-24). The heroic meaning of boasting was 'assert
arrogantly one's superiority (before a battle).' Laistner
173
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1888:153, 156) put together a list of bo(o)-words from

the Schweizerisches Idiotikon: bauwi, baui, boi, boy,
böögk, bögk, and bök. He also thought of E boy as
traceable to *bo + g and of the name Beowulf as
containing this root (see also Kögel [1892:56] and
[1893:272-73; however, Kögel believed that the root of
Beowulf's name meant 'grain, cereals'] and Schönfeld
[Boio] on Be ow-). Widdowson (1971) investigated the
same material. German dialectal dictionaries contain
many words like boboks, boboz, Bögge, Bok, and
Bokes(mann) for 'scarecrow; object of dread; term of
abuse.' Laist-ner was aware of the English words bug
'demon' and bogle. One can add booman, boggard,
buga-boo, boggle, bog(e)y, bog(e)yman, boodyman, and
so forth. Words with initial p- exist too; E Puck,
mentioned at BEACON, and possibly spook are among
them.
Almost the identical words have been recorded in
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic, and Celtic. It is not easy to
decide whether each noun is a product of parallel
formation or a borrowing, because the concept of
borrowing becomes hazy when one deals with migratory
words. G Butz(emann) 'bogeyman' is apparently native
(see especially Webinger [1937a]), and so may be E Puck,
but G Popanz 'bogeyman' seems to be a borrowing from
some Slavic language. Russian has buka 'bogeyman' and
its semantically depleted variant biaka 'bad or dirty
174
Adz(e) Adz(e)

thing.' Slavic etymological dictionaries tend to explain

both as extended forms of bu-and bia- (though -ka has
no lexical meaning) and never mention their
counterparts elsewhere, for instance, E Puck, though
Wedgwood already saw the connection. Russ buka was
first recorded in the 18th century, but its occurrence as a
nickname (Mikhailo Buka) goes back to 1377 (ESRI), a
situation familiar from the history of Boia, Bofi, and
Buobo versus boy, boef, and Bube; compare the history
of
RAGAMUFFIN.
For each of the aforementioned words a more or less
plausible etymology has been offered. Princi Braccini
(1984:149-57) follows FT (Bus(s)emand) and treats G
Butz(emann) and many other b-t words as related to
OHG bozan, OE beatan, OI bauta 'beat' (a solution
accepted half-heartedly in KS), while Alexander
Johannesson (IsEW) referred Bofi to onomatopoeic
words like E babble, G babblen, and Gk PcxP&Cco, and in
the demonic sphere, Berneker (36) offered the same
etymology for Polish zabobon 'superstition' and its Slavic
cognates. Puck, spook, bug, bogey, boodyman,
Butzemann, buka, biaka, and the rest seem to be
onomatopoeic baby words, and one etymology will
probably be valid for all of them.
Both bo- series ('little brother' and 'evil spirit') are
onomatopoeic or sound symbolic, and both originated in
175
Adz(e) Adz(e)

baby talk. The same is true of some extended forms like

Bube. The two sets must have interacted for a long time.
In some cultures, they stayed apart, in others they
merged. G Bube 'boy' and G Bube 'scoundrel' (from
which we have Boofke, a synonym for the 'ugly German':
Stave
[1965:134-36], Kaestner [1970:10]) are, historically
speaking, two different words even if the form of the
one influenced that of the other and if at a certain stage
Bube 'boy' was understood as a euphemism for Bube
'scoundrel, ?devil, ?imp.' The same is true of E boy and
ME boi 'devil,' but in English, boy 'devil' did not continue
into the postmedieval period, unless the exclamations
oh, boy! and at(t)aboy are the last traces of the extinct
word (see below).
In any version of the history of boy, one has to
account for either the amelioration of meaning (whether
one starts with 'churl' or with 'devil') or an unbelievable
zigzag (from 'little brother' to 'churl, devil' and back to
'boy'). It is not improbable that 'object of dread, devil'
gradually developed into 'scoundrel,' whereas its
homonym 'little brother' acquired the meaning 'servant,
person of low status.' At this stage, the two senses
reached the points equidistant from 'churl,' though with
opposite signs. 'Churl' and 'servant' coexisted for some
time, then 'servant' won out and went a step higher to
designate 'male child,' though words like bellboy and
176
Adz(e) Adz(e)

perhaps colonial boy have retained the meaning

prevalent in the 14th and 15th centuries.
As far as the exclamation at(t)aboy and oh, boy! are
concerned, some facts from Early Modern Dutch seem to
point to their original status as (mild?) curses. At the end
of the 15th century, youngsters in the streets of
Amsterdam used to throw stones at one another and
shout: "Boye, boye, egellentier" (B. Van den Berg
[1938]). Egellen-tier has been identified by all
contributors to the discussion as egel 'hedgehog'
(anonymous [1939: contains statements by Schonfeld
and Th. H.
d'Angremond] and Muller [1938-39:183-84];
-tier means 'animal'), but boye remained partly un-
explained. We are dealing, it turns out, with two
"generic" gangs. Apparently, one was called The Devils
(or The Daredevils) and the other The Hedgehogs (bold,
fierce, and prickly). The rock-throwing youths
encouraged their comrades by shouting their gang's
name. The examples from VV that Van den Berg quotes
(het heeft mi boy 'I've had enough, I am sick and tired of
it' and hem boy maken 'get angry') make sense if boy
means 'devil.' Perhaps E boy 'devil' found its last resort
in hunters' language in which it acquired the meaning
'hunted animal.' Can at(t)aboy go back to a tout a boy!,
considering that a tout, a call to incite dogs, was well
known? (See Russ atu in Vasmer I:96.) Other calls to the
177
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dogs are hoicks a boy! and yoicks a Bewmont! In any

case, "the male-intimate affectionate sense" (Pinkerton
[1982:40]) was hardly the original one in the imprecation
at(t)aboy and oh, b°y.
Dietz (1981a) endorses O. Ritter's hypothesis that E
boy is a modern reflex of OE Boi(a) (the same in AeEW)
and implies that the origin of Boi(a) is either beyond
reconstruction or of no interest. He points out that
Boi(a) was probably a native name, while the existence
of *boia cannot be proved. However, without the
common name boia the proper name (rather the
nickname) Boia would hardly have arisen. Whether OE
*boia meant 'brother,' 'devil,' or both will remain
unknown. The two words may have been homonyms in
the 8th century, as they were in the 14th, or *boia may
have meant 'brother' and *boi may have been the word
for an evil spirit. A popular name meaning 'buddy' is
easier to imagine than a name meaning 'devil,' but
consider such German surnames as Teufel and
Waldteufel (with their phonetic variants).
Sw pojke 'boy' is probably related to E boy as E boy is
related to bogey. It is far from obvious that pojke was
borrowed from Finnish (poika 'boy, son'), as stated in
SEO. Nor does Rocchi's 1989 article settle the argument
(he believes that both OI pika 'girl' and Sw pojke reached
Scandinavia from Finland). Thomsen (1869:40 = 1920:92)
equated Sw
178
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pojke, Dan pog, and hesitatingly E boy with Finn

poika but did not elaborate on their relations. Ahlqvist
(1875:210) derived -ka in poika from Swedish, but -ke is
also the most common diminutive suffix in Frisian and
Low German. Consider Fr boike, poaike, and poalke
(Brouwer [1964]) and the enigmatic -ka in Russ buka ~
biaka. Estonian poeg, Livian puoga, and their cognates,
all meaning 'boy' (see especially Sauvageot 1930:28/34),
testify to the stab i l ity of the velar in Finno-Ugric,
thereby contradicting Ahlqvist's suggestion. SKES lists
two pages of cognates but offers no etymology of poika
and only notes that some Lapp words for 'boy' may have
been borrowed from Scandinavian. On one hand, we are
confronted by self-sufficient word clusters in every
language group; on the other, boi ~ poi- 'male child' is a
widespread Eurasian word. This is why it is so difficult to
say anything definite about -ke in pojke and -ka in poika.
The best work on the diminutive -k suffix is D. Hofmann
(1961), but it contains no discussion of related forms or
of -k outside Germanic.
6. With such a solid Germanic background for E boy,
strong arguments are needed to show that boy is an
Anglo-French loanword. An opinion to this effect exists,
however. The first to suggest the Romance origin of boy
was Holthausen
(1900:365, 1903b:35). He remarked that words for

179
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'child' often go back to the names of inanimate ob-

jects and offered the hypothesis that boy 'male child;
servant' is the same word as ME boie 'executioner,
hangman' and ModE buoy. Dobson (1940:150-51)
suggested that every time an executioner is called boi in
Middle English texts, reference is to a churl performing a
hateful job (see also the end of the entry BEACON).
However, the parallelism with the Romance words for
'hangman,' Walloon boie, OSp boya, and Ital boja, is
astounding (more is said about devils, hangmen, and
boys in connection with RAGAMUFFIN). The solution of
this problem is of no consequence here. Of importance is
only Holthausen's suggestion that L boia 'fetter; collar
worn by slaves and criminals' is the same word as E boy.
To reinforce his argument, Holthausen cites LG kniaval
(cognate with G Knebel) 'handle' and 'ill-mannered
person' and Sw knavel 'devil; hangman.' That 'hangman'
and 'devil' complement each other in people's minds and
that a lout can be called a piece of wood ('door handle')
is understandable, but why should 'male child' come
from 'fetter' and 'hangman'?
Dobson, who, judging by his references, was
unaware of Holthausen's idea, discovered the same late
Latin word (boia) and offered his own etymology of boy.
His main argument was that ME boy had been recorded
with the pronunciations [oi], [uoi], [we:], and [ui] and
spelled boige, boye, bwey, bway, bye, bey, and bai. In his
180
Adz(e) Adz(e)

opinion, "[v]ariants comparable to these occur only in

words adopted from French which in Anglo-Norman and
standard Old French should normally have ui" (Dobson
[1940:124]). He assumed a formation *un embuie 'man
in fetters,' from the verb embiier (whence 'slave, serf'),
"which with Anglo-French aphesis of the em- would give
the form *un buie'" (pp. 124-25).
Dobson examined the distribution of the name Boia
(his corpus was much smaller than Dietz's) and
summarized his findings as follows: "If then we are to
explain boy from Boia, we must assume that a foreign
personal name came to be used as a common noun, or
that a foreign common noun was introduced in addition
to the personal name. Neither alternative is at all likely"
(p. 149). Dob-son's article was received with great
enthusiasm. SOD3 (with some hedging), OD, and ODEE
repeat his etymology, and so does KD. But the entry in
COD reflects the sorry plight in which etymologists
working for great dictionaries find themselves. 5th ed:
"...the origin of [ME boi, boy], subject of involved
conjectures, remains unascertained"; 6th ed: reproduces
Dobson's etymology; 8th and 9th eds: perhaps ultimately
from L boia 'fetter.' Finally, in the 10th edition, boy is said
to be a word of unknown etymology. The same state of
uncertainty characterizes popular books on etymology.
Ciardi (1980) copies from Dobson, while Pinkerton

181
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1982:48-49) cites two possibilities—from OF em-buie or

from a word for 'brother.'
Critical voices were not wanting. William Craigie
pointed out (in a letter to Dobson) that insufficient
attention had been paid to the Frisian evidence (Dobson
[1943:71]). Dobson devoted a special article (1943) to
that problem and concluded that MDu boye, wherever it
occurred, was a phonetic variant of bode 'messenger,'
which could not be the etymon of ME boi. He followed
VV (bode), but boye and bode, though close synonyms
('servant,' 'messenger'), seem to be different words.
Leendertz (1918:270) observes that the regional form
booi, the modern reflex of boye, is always pronounced
with an open o, while booien = boden has closed o.
However, Dobson's main argument concerned the
development of OF oi in Anglo-French. In this area, his
first critic was Bliss (1951-52:23-27). He had no quarrel
with Dobson's results but found many mistakes in his
exposition and offered improvements. "Dr. Dobson,"
says
Bliss (1951-52:22, note 12), "asks me to say that he
has long been conscious of errors in his article." A
slightly revised version of Dobson's derivation of boy
appears in Dobson (1957:817, sec 256, note 1).
Diensberg (1978 and 1981) subjected the recon-
struction by Dobson and Bliss to devastating criticism. He
showed that the phonetic base of their etymology is
182
Adz(e) Adz(e)

untenable and noted the obvious thing that oi of any

origin could be expected to have the same development
in Middle English. (See also Luick [1964:sec 544, note 3
and sec 803.3, note 1], who considered w in forms like
bwey as intrusive after b.) In addition, Diensberg pointed
out that OF embuiier 'fetter' (v) was all but unknown in
Middle English: only OF buie ~ boie 'fetter' has been
attested: a hapax legomenon in Barbour's Bruce
(Diensberg [1978:346-47; 1981:80]). Yet he believes in
the French origin of boy, which he traces to OF boesse ~
baiesse 'woman servant'; see
also Diensberg [1985a:331]. Dietz (1981a:400-02)
adds a few more phonetic arguments against Dob-
son's theory and calls into question the development
'chained' > 'man in fetters' > 'slave' > 'serf.' Nor is he
supportive of Diensberg's bridge from 'female servant' to
'male servant.' Diensberg's latest conclusion (1994:213)
is: "Recent and early attempts at providing a Dutch, Low
German, or even a Frisian etymon for boy... failed to
solve the problems connected with the Middle English
phonological variants of boy." Even if one accepts it, the
French etymologies of boy do not become more
attractive.
7. Boy remains 'a word of uncertain etymology.' Yet
unless some version of the French hypothesis again wins
the day, it makes sense to recognize boy as an early
semantic blend of *boi(a) '(little) brother' and *bo 'evil
183
Adz(e) Adz(e)

spirit' on Germanic soil. The concept of ablaut is vacuous

in dealing with such a word, so that babe and baby are
better kept out of the present discussion. Bube and boef
are not akin to boy, for boy has no cognates more or less
by definition, but they belong to the same stock, and
their development should be taken into account in the
reconstruction of the English
word (Liberman [2001a:201-13]).

A Note on the Eurasian Background of the Old

English Name Boi ~ Boia Many names sound like Boi(a).
One of them is Ostrogothic Boio. Schonfeld shares the
common opinion that Boio is a contracted form
corresponding to OE Beawa and OS Boio. His
reconstruction is acceptable but not necessary. A name
like Boio, a baby word, could arise in many places
independently and lack cognates in the sense in which
Zeus or father have them. In citing Bojo, Schonfeld refers
to Forstemann, but Forstemann (1900:324-25) lists
Boia, Baia, Beia, Beio, Peio, Beya, and so on,
including some names that end in a velar (Beic and
Boiko), exactly as they have been recorded: vowel length
(ö) is the product of Schönfeld's view of the name's
origin. OS Beowa is not a perfect fit for *Bauja because
the expected form is OE *Be awa. Old English had beow
'barley' and beaw 'gadfly.' Beaw is akin to LG bau and L
fucus 'drone' (WP II:164; AeEW). The etymology of beow
184
Adz(e) Adz(e)

is less clear. AEW traces OI bygg 'barley' to *bewwu. The

history of the mythological name Be aw, which, for some
reason, alternates with Be o(w), is lost (see the details in
Klaeber [1950:xxiv-xxviii]). This name could have been
understood as meaning 'barley,' whereupon it aligned
itself with Sce af 'sheaf' and thus formed the 'nature
mythological' genealogy of the Danish kings that has
been preserved in the opening section of Beowulf. Be
owulf, contrary to what is usually believed, is probably
an expansion of Be ow(a).
The Celtic proper name Boio has also been recorded.
In its Latinized form it is extant in the place name
Bavaria (G Bayern). Schönfeld says that Celtic Boio is
undoubtedly different from Gmc Boio. Here he refers to
Holder, but this reference, like his previous one, is
misleading. At the beginning of the entry, Holder (1896:
463-71) quotes his predecessors who think that og in L
Bogii does not represent the diphthong [oi] and that
Boio is related precisely to the Slavic and other words
usually given in connection with Russ boi- in boiat'sia 'be
afraid.' This opinion (which Holder seems to share), far
from separating the Celtic and the Germanic names,
connects them.
Words (roots) like E boy, bug, Puck ~ Russ boi-, buka,
pug- and names like Boia ~ Boiko are spread over the
same areas. Among Slavic proper names, ORuss Boian is
of special interest, because its bearer is mentioned
185
Adz(e) Adz(e)

several times in the poem The Lay of Igor's Host as a

singer who followed a different manner of composition
from that adopted in the Lay. The prevalent trend in the
discussion of Boian is that its meaning reflects the man's
profession or character. If Boian was the singer's given
name (Bojan is still current among the southern Slavic
people), it cannot shed light on his later occupation or
temperament, for the boy's parents had no way of
knowing what would become of him. If, however, Boian
is a nickname, it can mean 'singer' or 'narrator' (Russ
baiat' means 'narrate'). At present, most students of The
Lay of Igor's Host believe that the name Boian in it is of
Eastern origin (see Mik-
losich's glossary, Korsch [1886:487-88], Melioran-skii
[1902:282-83], Menges [1951:16-18], and Baska-
kov [1985:143-46]), but disagreement remains over
its place of origin and meaning: 'warlock,' 'rich man,' or
'singer.' Only Vasmer I:203 traces Boian to the noun boi
'battle,' but he adduces no proof that his conjecture is
better than any other.
The history of proper names of the Boi(o) type is
similar to that of the common names homony-mous with
them. Their original meaning was 'make a noise,
frighten,' and a brave man could bear it with satisfaction.
In different languages they evoked different
associations: in some places with barley, in others with
battles and impetuosity (which is what their etymology
186
Adz(e) Adz(e)

must have suggested in the first place, as seen in Russ

boi 'battle' and bui 'hero') or performing skills, in still
others with wealth (so in the Turkic languages) or with
dwellers (farmers).
The last possibility offered itself to those who had
the verb búa 'to live, dwell; cultivate land' (OI) and its
cognates. Dictionaries explain the Scandinavian name Bo
as 'dweller, inhabitant.' Dietz (1981a:384-85) interprets
Ostrogothic Boio in a similar way, but Roelandts, as
already stated, may be right that not only Boio but also
Bo belongs with the words related to E boy. Nor should
borrowing be excluded. The Lay of Igor's Host shows
familiarity with skaldic poetry. Of the two singers, Boian
is particularly reminiscent of a Scandinavian skald; see
Sharypkin (1973; 1976). Consequently, the name Boian
could be of Germanic origin. When one is confronted
with such names, the direction of borrowing (from
Scandinavian? from the East?) and the fact of borrowing
cannot be demonstrated with desired persuasiveness.
BRAIN (1000)
Brain has established cognates only in West
Germanic. Despite the support of many authoritative
dictionaries it is probably not connected with the Greek
word for 'top of the head,' and there is no need to trace
initial br- in it to *mr-. OE brego 'ruler' and OI bragr 'first,
foremost' should also better be left out of the picture.
The evidence of place names is inconclusive; in any case,
187
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OE brasgen must have been a different word from

*brasgen 'hill.' It is suggested below that OE bragen and
Ir bran 'chaff, bran' go back to the same etymon
meaning 'refuse.' Apparently, those who coined the noun
bragen associated brain with 'gray matter,' that is, slush.
They gave no thought to its function in the organism or
the role of the head as the seat of the brain.
The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest and
fanciful attempts to explain the origin of brain, 2)
Graßmann and Johansson's hypotheses (which have
been reproduced with minor modifications by all later
dictionaries insofar as they venture any etymology of E
brain and G Brägen), 3) the idea defended in this entry
(brain and bran), and 4) other words for 'brain'
that can be understood as 'refuse, waste, gray
matter.'
1. Brain (OE brxgen), first recorded in 1000, has
cognates in Frisian, Dutch, Low German, and Rhenish
Franconian (see brain, Brägen ~ Bregen, and brein in
etymological dictionaries of English, German, and Dutch
and also Ten Doornkaat Koolman
[1879-84: Brägen]; Stapelkamp [1950a], and
Lerchner [1965:48]). The hypotheses on the origin of
those words are not many. Minsheu compared brain
with Gk fpf|V, a noun used predominantly in the plural
and having several meanings: 'diaphragm; chest; heart'
and 'mind; thought.' Brain and fp0v sound alike, so that
188
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the gloss 'mind' in Greek dictionaries may have

suggested to Minsheu a link between them. His idea
irritated Junius (who called its author vir minime
indoctus), yet as late as 1839, Kaltschmidt mentioned
fp0v in the entry Brägen.
Helvigius was evidently the first to relate G
Brägen, which he knew in the form breeam (=
[bre:sm]?) to Gk ßpeyiia 'top of the head; fontanel.' He
wrote: "breeam / cerebrum, ab humidi-tate sortitum
nomen. Bpeyco enim est humenectare, irrigare. Hinc
ßpeyiicx synciput vocatur." His idea goes back to
antiquity. The Greeks thought that ßpeyiicx and its
doublet ßpeyiiöc; were akin to ßpeyiicx 'wet, moisten'
because in infants the fontanel is wet or moist (the
association is due to folk etymology: see Frisk and
Chantraine). Skinner, possibly independent of Helvigius,
also traced brain to ßpeyiicx. Many influential
philologists, Junius, Wachter
(Bregen), Diefenbach (1851:325), Webster,
Kaltschmidt (Brägen), and Richardson among them,
supported Skinner or shared his view.
However, a few other conjectures have been offered
from time to time. Schwenck (Bregen) pondered the
derivation of G Bregen from G Brei 'mush, paste;
porridge' (not a bad idea, considering what the brain
looks like), though he stressed the tentative character of
his derivation. Kaltschmidt rejected the Bregen ~ Brei
189
Adz(e) Adz(e)

connection; however, Mueller found it worthy of note.

Richardson, inspired by the Greek etymology of ßpeyiicx,
put forward the hypothesis that brain is a development
of *be-rxgn, with ber- being pronounced br- and -rxgn
standing for OE regn 'rain.' MacKay, who believed that
most English words are traceable to Gaelic, offered Gael
breith 'judgment, wit, imagination, decision' as the
etymon of brain (only Stormonth copied his etymology).
May (Brägen) cited OI brynn, which he mistranslated as
'forehead' (brynn is an adjective; the Icelandic for
'forehead' is brün) and OI brogööttr 'cunning' (it would
have been easier to refer to bragd 'deceit') and
wondered whether G (sich) einprägen 'impress' could be
a variant of *(sich) einbrägen from Brägen. The last
conjecture is ingenious but indefensible despite the
obscurity that envelops the origin of prägen. Mueller,
who gave Brei and ßpeyiicx as uncertain cognates of
brain, added G Broden 'foul-smelling vapor' to his short
list of possibly related words (Broden is akin to E breath).
Those suggestions are now forgotten.
More recently, Makovskii (1986:47-48 and 1999a)
has offered a string of fantasies regarding the etymology
of brain. He begins by saying that in the
anthropomorphic picture of the universe the brain is a
symbol of the World Reason, which is related to the
concept of a rising flame. He cites the roots *bhreg-
'burn, shine' and *bha - 'to burn' and obtains OE brxgen
190
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'brain' from the sum *bha- (< *bhu - 'to be') + *arg-,
*areg- 'burn, shine' (so in the 1999a work). In 1986, he
gave *bhreu- 'boil; ferment (v); violent, passionate' as
the etymon of brain. Both entries contain E brag,
brochan 'gruel, thin porridge,' bragget 'honey and ale
fermented together,' and many other words from
Sanskrit, Greek, and Lithuanian among others, as related
to brain. According to Makovskii (1986), E marrow (< OE
mearg) has the same root as brain (his sole supporter in
this respect appears to be Jay Jasanoff; see
Katz [1998: 211, note 77]). Partridge's hypothesis
(1958) is at a comparable level: "IE r[oot] ?*breg(h)-;
r[oot] * bherg(h) would also account for G (Ge)hirn, OI
hiarni [Patridge means OI hjarni], brain, for hirn, etc.,
may well be metathetic for *hrin-."
2. Major events in the investigation of brain ~ Brägen
~ brein were the appearance of Graßmann's and
Johansson's works. Graßmann
(1863a:93, 118; 1863b:121; the main statement is on
p. 93). Graßmann could not have been ignorant of
the dictionaries everyone consulted in the middle of the
19th century, so that his comparison of OE brxgen with
Gk ßpeyiiöc; was not his discovery, but he added a
semantic justification for bringing the two words
together. In his opinion, the meaning of their root was
'enclose, cover,' as in Go bairga- (the first component of
bairgahei* 'mountainous region'). The alleged parallel
191
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Go Hairnei* 'skull' ~ OI hjarni 'brain' allowed him to

conclude that the word brxgen got its meaning from the
name of the head or skull.
After the publication of Graßmann's article,
references to Skinner disappeared, which is unfair, as the
history of Webster's and Skeat's dictionaries makes
especially clear. Webster (1828) cited ßpeyiicx among
the cognates of brain (see above). His editors left the
etymological part of the entry intact;
only in 1890 perhaps was added to it and in 1961
deleted. Continuity was restored, but the seemingly
uninterrupted tradition consists of two periods: from
Helvigius and Skinner to Graßmann and from Graßmann
to the present. Although the Germanic / Greek
connection has survived, the substance of the old
etymology has changed, and, as will be shown later,
more than once. Skeat1-4 also mentioned ßpeg|J,cx and
ßpeym'j and created the impression that no progress
had been made in the study of the word brain between
1882 and 1910.
In the year in which perhaps was added to the entry
in Webster's dictionary, Johansson (1890:448)
reexamined the pair OE brxgen ~ Gk ßpeymiÖC, and
decided that the original sense of the root underlying
them was not 'enclose, cover' but 'jut out, project.' He
interpreted ßpeym'j as something protruding, sticking
out and gave Gk KÖpoT| 'cheek, temple,' Skt sirsan
192
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'head,' and (in a different grade of ablaut) Gk &p%co

'begin; go forward' as cognates. According to Johansson,
another line leads from brxgen to OE brego 'ruler.' He
also mentioned OI bragr 'poetry' but left open the
question of its origin.
Several of Johansson's predecessors believed that
Greek and even Germanic br- could go back to *mr.
Johansson was of the same opinion and reconstructed
*mrgho- as the etymon of ßpeymiöj and brxgen (but he
did not combine brxgen and mearg 'marrow'). Osthoff
(1890:92) endorsed Johansson's reconstruction and
devoted a long article to the putative reflexes of PIE
*mr-. Johansson-Osthoff's etymology of brain is a
familiar part of many post-1890 dictionaries, including
Fick4, 279; WP II:314; and IEW, 750 (severely abridged in
comparison with WP). See also E. Zupitza (1896:136 and
1900:242), Kluge (EWDS5, Brägen, and 1913:80, sec 68,
where brxgen is given as the only example of the change
br < ?mbr), and Wood (1913-14:316/9). The only small
addition to this etymology is Benveniste (1931), who
cited Av mrzu- 'occipital bone, nape of the neck,' a form
presumably related to brain.
Judging by the surveys in GI (1984:I, 813, note 1 =
1995:I, 712, note 24, continued on p. 713) and in a 1981
dissertation on the Germanic names of body parts (Egger
1981:35-36), no one has offered new ideas on the origin
of brain since 1890. Wyld (UED) gives a lucid summary of
193
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the problem: "OE brxgen, bregen, M. E. brain, O. Fris. &

Du. brein ; cp. also O.E. brego, 'prince, king'; prob. cogn.
w[ith] Gk. brekhmös, bregma, 'top of the head,' if this, as
is suggested, stands for earlier *mreghmö, Pr. Gmc.
*mregn-, of wh[ich] the full form w[oul]d. be
*mereghn-. It is further suggested that from a form
of the same base w[ith] different gradation in both
syllables *mrogh-, the Gk. arkhos, 'leader, chief,' drkho, 'I
begin,' arkhe, 'beginning, cause' &c. are derived."
Watkins (AHD1, 1530, mregh-mo-) reproduces
Pokorny's etymology. A few dictionaries (CD and
Weekley among them) list the Germanic cognates of
brain and venture to go no further. The Oxford
dictionaries, which follow OED, and the dictionaries
derivative of Webster are satisfied with Skinner and
ignore the br- ~ mr- relationship. Persson (1912:35) did
not object to Osthoff's treatment of brain, traced OE
brego and OI bragr 'first, foremost' to the root (or basis,
as he called roots) *bheregh-'jut out, project' but
admitted that they could "have been influenced" by that
root, which is tantamount to saying that the association
between bragr, brego, and brxgen with *bheregh- might
be due to secondary processes. Polome (1986b:185/21),
in criticizing Johansson-Osthoff's etymology, pointed out
that no examples testify to the change *mr- or *mbr- to
*br- in Early Germanic.

194
Adz(e) Adz(e)

A side product of the brxgen - Ppeyu-oc etymology is

the suggestion that OE brxgen also meant 'hill,' even
though that meaning is now preserved only in place
names. Ekwall (1960: Brafield on the Green) says that the
first element of Brafield is probably brain 'the crown of
the head'
and "in transferred use" 'hill.' A. Smith (1956, I:46)
did without probably. Wakelin (1971 and especially
1979) pointed out that OE brxgen had a rare doublet
bragen. He also believed that Bragenfeld, Braufeld,
Brahefeld, Bramfeld, and so on contained the element
*bragen 'hill.' His conclusion is unobjectionable, but it
does not follow that *bragen- 'hill' has anything to do
with bragen 'brain.' Several Old and Middle English br-g
words may have served as the etymon of Bragen-. For
example, Ekwall gives Bray < OE breg 'brow'; see also Sw
Brdviken and Brdvalla, discussed by Adolf Noreen and
cited in AEW, at brd 1. Holthausen (1942b:36/32)
wrongly, as it appears, adduced OSw Bragnhem (>
Bragnam, a modern Swedish place name) as proof that E
brain does have a Scandinavian cognate after all. The
only justification for ascribing the meaning 'hill, elevated
place' to OE brxgen ~ bragen is the almost universally
accepted etymology of brain, but that etymology is
hardly correct. *Bragna-, a word that must have existed
before the Anglo-Saxon colonization of Britain, had no
currency outside the northern German-Frisian area
195
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(whence its reflexes in Low German, Dutch, Frisian, and

English), and its kinship with Gk Ppeymcc ~ Ppeyu-oc, is
unlikely.
3. Otkupshchikov (1961) devoted an article to the
Irish word bran 'chaff, bran.' Its conclusions can perhaps
be used for the clarification of the origin of brain. E bran
is a borrowing, but its source has not been determined.
Old French had bran 'bran,' whereas Modern French has
bran 'excrement, muck, filth.' The earliest meaning of OF
bran seems to have been approximately *'refuse,
rejected matter' because in Modern French bran is
usually called bran de son rather than simply bran (son
also means 'bran,' a synonym of bran from a different
part of the French-speaking area, so that bran de son is a
tautological phrase, 'bran of bran'). Bran de scie means
'saw dust' (scie 'saw'). Otkupshchikov contends that bran
'bran' and bran 'excrement' are different words (their
forms allegedly coincided in later French), but he may be
mistaken.
A synonym of OF bran was bren, whence ModF
breneux 'soiled with feces.' Old Spanish and Provencal
also had bren. Sp brana 'summer pasture' developed its
meaning from 'leaves or pieces of bark on the ground.'
The Breton cognate of Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic bran is
brenn. In Anglo-Latin, brenn(i)um and brannum, with the
same alternation /e/ ~ /a/, have been recorded, and, as
Wakelin showed, a rare Old English doublet of brxgen
196
Adz(e) Adz(e)

was bragen. The Romance words and E bran may have

been borrowed from Celtic, and this is what most
dictionaries say, though von Wartburg (FEW) points out
that the Celtic etymology of bran does not answer all
questions. On the other hand, the source of E bran may
have been Old French, and the Celtic words may have
been borrowed from French or English. Otkupshchikov
reasons that in Romance neither bran nor bren has even
a tentative etymology, whereas the Celtic forms can be
explained without any difficulty. He reconstructs PIE
*bhrag-no- '(something) broken,' with the specialized
meaning *'flour together with bran; grain ground by a
millstone,' later 'bran.' In his opinion, bran is a native
Celtic word; the phonetic development of *bhragno- to
bran is parallel to that of *ueghno- to Ir fen 'cart' and of
at least two more words.
Otkupshchikov did not realize that the Germanic
etymon of brain had been reconstructed as *bragna-, a
form identical with his PIE *bhragno-. Apparently,
despite von Wartburg's doubts, Celtic *bragna- existed.
It was a "low" word for 'refuse,' perhaps 'rubbish.' Its
expressive character must have made it popular among
the Celts' Germanic and Romance neighbors. Those who
borrowed *bragna- had often seen heads split with a
sword, with the brain, the refuse of the skull, as it were,
oozing out. They had also seen the inside of animals'
heads and got the same impression: an unpleasant
197
Adz(e) Adz(e)

looking gray mass, whose function in the organism did

not bother them.
4. Glossing the etymon of brain as 'refuse' may seem
unlikely, but a few other words for 'brain' confirm this
reconstruction. One of such words is G Hirn (< OHG hirni
~ hirn). On the strength of MDu hersene Seebold
(EWDS21-24) gives the protoform of Hirn as *hersnja- or
*herznja-. OHG hirni and OI hjarni (with ja < *e)
supposedly lost z between r and n (see also NEW:
hersenen), but it is equally probable that -z-, or rather -
s-, was a suffix hirni and hjarni never had. Mitzka
(EWDS20) cites G Hornisse 'hornet,' alongside Du horzel,
both allegedly going back to *hurzu-, as another example
of a spirant in rzn ~ rsn from *r(r)n. Seebold expunged
reference to Hornisse in the entry Hirn. He also has
doubts that OI hjarsi ~ hjassi 'crown of the head' are
related to Hirn and hjarni.
Only one point has not been contested, namely that
Hirn acquired its meaning from a word meaning 'skull,'
judging by its apparently unshakable cognates L
cerebrum 'brain' and Gk Kpcxviov 'skull, cranium.'
Despite the consensus, that etymology may be less
secure than it seems. G Harn (< MHG < OHG harn) means
'urine,' but its original meaning was at one time *'bodily
waste,' as suggested by MHG hurmen 'fertilize, spread
manure over a field.' Its likely cognates (with s-mobile)
are OI skarn, OE scearn 'dung, muck,' and L ex-cer-mere
198
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'to separate' (akin to ex-cre -mentum 'excrement'). Hirn

(with i < *e) - Harn - hurmen form a perfect triad.
OI hjarni had a synonym heili. Its origin is unknown.
The cognates proposed by older etymologists are
unconvincing (AEW). Magnusson suggests its kinship
with OI hdrr 'gray' (< *haira-; he traces heili to *hailar- or
*hailia-) and glosses the protoform as 'gray matter.' The
Germanic words for 'marrow' (OE mearg, OI mergr, and
so on) have been shown to derive from the root
*mozgo-, whose Proto-Slavic reflex was *mozgu- 'brain.'
If Peters-son's comparison of *mozgo- with the cognates
of E mast 'fruit of forest trees as food for pigs' is right
(1915:125-6), the original meaning of *mozgo- was *'fat.'
Marrow looked like fat (gray substance) to those people.
Some etymologists gloss Gmc *mergh- as 'mass, lump,
bunch' (Arnoldson 1915:6/2.03, with references).
(However, Sverdrup [1916:41] perhaps went too far in
believing that the existence of so many words related to
mearg ~ mergr testifies to the early Indo-Europeans'
proficiency in cooking meat.)
Baskett (1920:50, no. 39 A1) cites E reg pash
'brain,' a word defined as 'rotten or pulpy mass; mud
and slush.' The idea of the brain as a mass is sometimes
emphasized by the use of the corresponding words in
the plural. In Russian, only the plural (mozgi, stress on
the second syllable) denotes the dish brains, which is
also the case in English. In German, the situation is
199
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different: the dish is Hirn, while the organ is more often

Gehirn, a collective noun. Ten Doornkaat Koolman was
wrong in connecting Brägen directly with brechen, but
his idea that the brain was at one time understood as
something broken into small pieces or something
squeezed together testifies to his sound linguistic
instinct. He also quoted the saying Er hat keine Grütze im
Kopfe (literally 'He has no porridge in his head'), said
about a stupid, brainless person. Grütze in this context is
not unlike E reg pash and G Brei, which Schwenck offered
as a cognate of Brägen.
Buck (1949:213/4.203) states: "Most of the words for
'brain' are cognate with words for 'head' or 'marrow'."
Germanic words do not confirm the first part of his
generalization. No common Indo-European name of the
head and no common Germanic name of the brain
existed. In the Scandinavian area, hjarni competed with
heili ~ heilir. The usage in the mythological poems of the
Elder Edda suggests that heili was the most ancient or
most dignified word for the gray mass in the head. The
primordial giant Ymir had a heili (the sky was made from
it), not a hjarni. Perhaps the home of the etymon of
hjarni should be sought to the south of the Scandinavian
peninsula. Gmc *mazga- probably also first meant
'brain.'
Learned coinages and local words must have existed
at all times. One of them was OE ex(e) 'brain,' the origin
200
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of which is unknown (from *axe, a variant of asce 'ashes'

- 'ash-colored substance'?). When synonyms meet, they
clash and narrow down their meaning, unless one of
them disappears. Thus heili is lost in the continental
Scandinavian languages (N and Dan hjerne, and Sw
hjärna are reflexes of *hjarni) but survives in Modern
Icelandic, in which hjarna- occurs only in a few com-
pounds; there is also hjarni 'skull.' In addition to mergr,
Old Icelandic had mcena (> ModI mxna), related to menir
'ridge of the roof' and E mane, the original sense being
evidently *'spine.' It is now a term used in describing
vertebrates.
Fr harsens and Du hersens suggest that the pro-
spective invaders of Britain also had a similar word. A
late (1137) Old English hapax hxrn 'brain' is hardly
native, and E reg harns, as well as ME hxrnes, harnes,
and hernes, is from Scandinavian. Early in their history,
speakers of northern German and Frisian seem to have
borrowed a "low" Celtic word that with time lost its
slangy character. In Frisian and Dutch, it edged out the
inherited name of the brain, whereas in Standard English
it ousted the cognates of harsens ~ hersens. The doublets
OE brxgen ~ bragen may owe their origin not to some
vagaries of Old English regional phonetics but to the
existence of a similar pair in the lending language. To
sum up, brxgen and bragen seem to have been taken
over from the Celts with the meaning *'refuse, waste
201
Adz(e) Adz(e)

matter,' acquired the meaning 'brain,' competed with

*harn-, and eventually won out, but they never meant
'elevated place, hill' (Liberman [2004a]).
CHIDE (1000)
Chide (< OE cidan) has been compared with verbs of
similar form and meaning in languages as remote as
Sanskrit and Finnish, but it can hardly be related to any
of them, and no reason exists to treat it as a migratory or
onomatopoeic word. Although modern dictionaries
characterize chide as isolated and etymologically
opaque, OE cidan 'scold' and gecid 'strife' are probably
related to OHG *kfdal 'wedge' (MHG kfdel, ModG Keil).
The early meaning of *kfdal must have been *'stickfor
splitting or cleaving.' If this suggestion is right, gecid
started from 'exchange of blows,' whereas cidan
probably meant 'brandish sticks,' with 'scold, reprove'
being a later figurative use of the same.
Section 1 discusses the existing derivations of chide,
and section 2 contains the proposed etymology.
1. The verb chide is of unknown origin, though it has
existed in written English since the year 1000 (it first
occurs in ^lfric). OE cidan, a weak verb of the first class,
meant what it means today. The morphological variants
—chode and chidden for chided—appeared later. Old
English had the noun gecid 'strife, altercation; reproof,'
and some dictionaries say that cidan was derived from
this noun (see, for example, W3 and AHD). Even if gecid is
202
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the etymon of cidan rather than a back formation from

it, the etymology of the root ci d-remains opaque.
The oldest dictionaries offer many putative cognates
and parallel formations of chide: G schelten 'scold,' Du
kijven 'quarrel, wrangle' (Minsheu, he calls both words
Belgian, that is, Flemish or Dutch; Skinner), Gk καίω
'burn, singe' (also Minsheu) and κυδάζω 'scold,
vituperate' (Casaubon [1650:293]; still so Townsend
[1824:81]), OI kifa 'strife, wrangle' and possibly L cave re
'be on one's guard' and cavillor 'jeer, taunt' (Ihre, kif; he
also mentions "Belgian" kifwa), Finn kidata and kitista
'creak; shrink; press together' (Wedgwood: he mis-
spelled the second verb), and Skt hid 'be angry' (Leo
[1877:286/39; he gives hit 'vociferavit'). The Finnish
verbs are too remote from chide semanti-cally to be of
interest, and all the others have initial consonants that
do not match OE k.
The complex kid or kud hardly renders the sound of
creaking, shrieking, screaming, and so forth; yet both
latest etymological dictionaries of Finnish (SKES and SSA)
call kidata, as well as kitista ~ kitistaa, onomatopoeic. G
schelten may be related to E scold and OI skald 'poet'
('the author of vituperative verses'), but l belongs to the
root in all three of them, so that the basis of comparison
between skeld— skald- and cid is absent. Initial h- in Skt
hid is incompatible with Gmc k-, and the origin of hid is
unknown (G Geist 'spirit,' E ghost, and so on are its
203
Adz(e) Adz(e)

possible cognates, KEWA III:60). Du kij-ven is related to G

kabbeln, kibbeln, and keifen 'scold, wrangle' and to OE
caf 'quick, strenuous, bold' (a proper name Cifa also
existed). Sw reg skvappa, together with E reg swabble
and E squabble, appear to belong to the kabbeln—keifen
group. Their onomatopoeic or sound symbolic origin is
not improbable, but, as l in schelten is part of the root,
so is the labial in kijven and the rest.
Since positing the root *ki- 'wrangle, quarrel; scold'
with the enlargements -d and -b (f, p) is an unappealing
proposal, we can assume that none of the words listed
above has anything to do with chide, even though the
correspondence of sound and meaning between OE
cidan and Gk KuS&Cco, to which ORuss kuditi 'scold' and
Skt kutsayati 'vituperates, scolds' should be added, is
curious.
The onomatopoeic nature of OE ci dan cannot be
ruled out. Compare G kitzeln, L titillate, and Russ
shchekotat (stress on the final syllable), all meaning
'tickle.' Russ reg shchekatit' (stress on the second
syllable) 'quarrel noisily and indecently' (Samuel
Johnson's definition of btawl) sounds almost like
shchekotat' 'tickle.' The sound shape of OE citelian
'tickle' is not particularly suggestive of the action it
designates. For more words of the structure k + vowel +
d, t, or s meaning 'battle, fight, press,' from Welsh to
Chaldee, see the early editions of Webster's dictionary
204
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1828; only Mahn expunged this array of words in the

1864 edition). An example of an onomatopoeic kud is
Russ kudak-htat' 'cackle' (stress on the second syllable).
Wedgwood compared OE c dan and SwiG kiden
'resound.' The Swiss verb appears in Stor-month and
Mueller1 as a tentative cognate of c dan, but is was soon
realized that Swi kiden is a reflex of *qvidan (Go qipan)
'speak' (Mueller2). Regel
(1862:111) believed that at one time the verb cidan
had exact correspondences in most Germanic languages
and treated Go qipan, OE cwedan, and OI kveda as
closely related to Gmc *cidan. Thomson cited "Gothic" (=
Swedish) kuida [sic] and Saxon (?) ciden in his dictionary.
Bosworth (1838) reproduced Regel's etymology at cidan,
but Toller (BT) deleted it. Pott (1859-76:IV, 838/1852)
referred to Regel's article; however, he admitted that the
problem had not been solved.
Skeat, in Skeat1, hesitatingly compared chide with OE
cwedan, and in the Errata and Addenda he cited, also
with hesitation, Sw reg ke(d)a 'hurt, sadden' and Dan
kiede (its modern spelling is kede) 'bore one,' which he
found in Rietz and which Rietz compared with Skt khid
'hurt, sadden.' The Danish adjective ked, occurring in
such phrases as vxre ked (af noget) 'feel irritated (by
something),' gore nogen ked af noget 'hurt, sadden,'
goes back to OD keed and has close parallels in Swedish
and Norwegian. According to DEO4, -d in ked may be
205
Adz(e) Adz(e)

secondary, perhaps added under the influence of its

synonym Zed, as in the tautological binomial led og ked.
DEO4 compares ke(d) and LG keef, N reg keiv 'crooked,
twisted,' and so on. They lead either to *kib 'split, turn
aside' or to the root represented by OI keikr 'bent
backward' and possibly by OI keipr 'rowlock, oarlock' and
Dan kejte 'left hand.' See more on kejte and the rest at
KEY and KITTY-CORNER. Although the adjectives and
nouns united by the meanings 'bent, twisted, left-
handed' form a rather cohesive group despite the
variations in the postradical consonants, the words
whose referents are 'strife, noisy quarrel; scold, wrangle;
sadden' cannot be shown to belong to it. Rietz's Sanskrit
verb (see khidáti 'he tears, presses' in KEWA I:309) is not
related to OE c dan.
Conjectures on the origin of chide gradually
disappeared from dictionaries. Two more etymologies—
by W. Barnes (1862:103, from the mythical root k*ng
'stop back anything') and Partridge (1958; chide:
allegedly related to -cid- in L occ dere 'slay')—may be
dismissed out of hand. Dictionaries of Old and Modern
English, including Holthausen's (AeEW, cidan), agree in
stating that chide is isolated and that nothing can be said
about its history. Jellinghaus (1898a) listed 106 English
words going back to Old English but having no cognates
in Low German. Chide is one of them (p. 464). Attempts
to find some traces of this verb in place names have
206
Adz(e) Adz(e)

failed. In Kent, in a village called Chiddingstone (formerly

Chidingstone), near the church, a certain stone is
popularly known as Chiding Stone. "The village tradition
is that on it the priests used to chide the people, whence
the name" (Lynn [1889]). But Ekwall's explanation (1960;
probably from a personal name) destroys local
etiological legend. In the later dictionaries of Germanic
languages, chide turns up only once. Modern Icelandic
has kida (first recorded in the 17th century) 'rub, scratch,
move with short steps'; the corresponding noun is kid.
Exact parallels are wanting. Nynorsk kjea (< *kida) 'work
negligently, bungle; wrangle' and OE cidan are listed
tentatively as its possible cognates and referred to the
Germanic root *ki- (< PIE * gei- 'split'; ÁBM). Ties
between 'rub, move with short steps' and 'quarrel
angrily' are hard to detect even if one takes kida and
cidan for the full and zero grades of ablaut of the same
root.
2. It is not surprising that all hypotheses on the
etymology of OE ci dan revolve around the roots *kid—
*kid- or *ki- followed by some other postradical
consonant. However, stringing words with ki-is a formal
procedure that can easily get out of control. For instance,
Wortmann offers numerous words, supposedly related
to G keimen 'germinate' (Go keinan*, OS kinan, OHG
kinan 'germinate'; OE cinan 'gap, yawn, crack' is believed
to have retained the original meaning of that verb).
207
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Chide is allegedly one of them (Wortmann [1964:57]).

The semantic basic of chide would then be 'split of
friendly relations.' This is a shaky bridge between *ki-
and chide, for kinan and its derivatives consistently refer
to the process of bursting forth, shoots, and branches,
while cidan with equal consistency denotes scolding and
altercation rather than severance of friendship. The
solution offered below is not different from some of
those mentioned above, but it aims at reconstructing the
semantic ties between the recorded meaning of cidan
and the postulated meaning of its ancient root.
One of the words traced to the base *ki- is G Keil
'wedge.' Middle High German had kil (< OHG kil) and
*kidel 'wedge, peg.' If Keil is connected with *kinan, its
original meaning must have been 'tool for splitting or
cleaving.' Kidel apparently goes back to OHG *kidal (<
*ki-8la), a doublet of *ki-pla by Verner's Law. That
etymology, offered by Sievers (1894:340), has never
been contested and has found its way into works on
Indo-European
(Birgit Olsen [1988:15-16, sec 2.20]), though the re-
lationship between kil and *kidal is not clear. This
question has been discussed in connection with the
enigmatic change pl > hl in Germanic and especially with
the history of G Beil (< bihal) 'ax.' All of it is of little
consequence for the etymology of chide if we disregard
the suggestion that *kidal is a secondary formation or kil
208
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with a syllable inserted, like 15th-century G meder for

mehr 'more'; G Speil and Speidel, both also meaning
'wedge' and resembling Keil ~ Keidel, are words of
obscure history (DW, Keil). MHG kidel must be an
ancient word. It survived in German dialects and has
been preserved as a family name (Keidel), whatever the
nature of the reference to 'wedge' may be (Gottschald
and Brechenmacher give different explanations). E.
Zupitza (1904:397) compared kil (< *kidl) and Skt kilah
'wedge, peg,' but WP I:544 and IEW 355-56 rejected his
idea of initial consonantal doublets (kin Sanskrit and k- in
Germanic).
The root kid- probably meant 'stick,' and it seems to
underlie both OE gecid 'strife' and cidan 'scold.' The
original meaning of gecid would then emerge as
'exchange of blows,' while ci dan could be glossed
'brandish sticks,' with 'scold, reprove' being a later
figurative use of the same.
E haggle from 'mangle with cuts' to 'wrangle in
bargaining' and especially rebuke 'chide severely,
reprimand' < AF rebuker = OF rebuschier provide a close
semantic parallel. The verb bushier (OF buchier, buskier)
meant 'beat, strike,' properly 'cut down wood,' for
busche meant 'log' (ModF buche 'log, cudgel'); see Skeat4
and ODEE (rebuke). The development is obvious: from
'beat back' to 'reprove.' Rebuff and upbraid have come
approximately the same way as rebuke and chide. One
209
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can also cite E trounce, assuming that it is related to

truncheon, and Go beitan* 'bite' versus andbeitan*
'rebuke.' In the extensive recent discussion of F chicane
and chicaner (the etymons of E chicane / chicanery),
Littre's idea (he traced chicane to a Persian word for a
club or bat used in polo - via Medieval Latin and
Medieval Greek) has not been mentioned. It must have
been given up as untenable, though Skeat, OED, and CD
mention Littre's derivation as a distant possibility. Yet
the reasoning in this case is instructive: from the game of
mall, to a dispute in games, dispute in general, and to
sharp practice in lawsuits, pettifogging, trickery, and all
kinds of wrangling.
If the etymology proposed here is right, the verb
chide owes nothing to onomatopoeia or sound
symbolism. Nor is it related to any of the verbs in
Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Welsh, Finnish, Dutch, and
German, mentioned above. Even ModI kida does not
look like a cognate of chide. It would be tempting to
connect cidan and E kid 'tease,' but no recoverable tie
seems to exist between them.

CLOVER (1000)
Clover has cognates in all the West Germanic
languages;
the corresponding Scandinavian words ate
borrowings from Low German. The Old English forms
210
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were clafre and cl^fre. In Old English, several plant

names had the suffix -re. The protoform need not have
had *i or *j after -r-, for a= in clafre was probably not the
result of umlaut. WGmc *a < *ai and *a= < *a (the latter
corresponding to Go e1) could apparently alternate in the
same root. However, the conditions under which that
alternation occurred remain unclear. The etymology
connecting clover with cleave 'stick, adhere' seems to be
right. Clover is sticky because its thick juice is one of the
main sources of honey. Several European plant names
with the root pap and its equivalents, as well as the
meanings of E honey-suck(le) confirm that idea.
The sections are devoted to 1) the arguments behind
reconstructing *klaiwarjon and *klabr(i)on, 2) the
existing etymologies of E clover and G Klee, 3) the origin
of a= in OE clafre and the origin of the suffix -re, and 4)
the semantic history of clover (clover as a sticky plant).
Section 5 is the conclusion.
1. Clover is a word with broad connections in West
Germanic. It is current in Frisian (klaver), Dutch (klaver),
and German (the Standard form is Klee < MHG kle < OHG
kle ~ kleo). In its Low German form (klever) it spread to
Scandinavia and Russia: Dan klover < kleffuer, N klover,
Sw Mover < klever, Russ klever. Yiddish also has klever.
Alongside OHG kle (m), OE clafre and clxfre (n and f) oc-
cur. The protoform of kle must have been *klaiwa-. Final
-a was lost in Germanic, and ai became e before w in
211
Adz(e) Adz(e)

German (as in Schnee 'snow' < *snaiwa-) and a in all

positions in Old English; -o in OHG kle o is ancient w
vocalized word finally.
The earliest Old English glossaries have cla bre and
clafre, later West Saxon has clxfre and clxfra. Still later
forms are clouere (13th century), cleure (15th century),
claver (15th-17th centuries), and clover (16th century).
Clover is rare before 1600 and did not prevail much
before 1700. OED sets up *clabre ~ clafre (weak
feminine) as the oldest form in English. Clover continues
ME cla ver. Claver goes back to clxfre with shortened x.
ODEE abridged and repeated the information given in
OED but added that claver may represent OE clxfre, with
shortening of the stem vowel, or may be of Low Dutch
origin.
The unfortunate term Low Dutch is old; in modern
scholarship Llewellyn (1936) used it for Flemish, Dutch,
Frisian, and Low German. Onions does not explain why
he suggested the "Low Dutch" origin for ME claver; the
vowel in the Dutch reflexes of cla ver(e) is almost always
long. His idea
is original. See De Hoog (1909), Toll (1926),
Llewellyn (1936), and Bense, none of whom men-
tions clover. Nor is reference to shortening (OED and
Mayhew [1891d:452]), apparently before two
consonants, sufficient in this case. OE clxfre developed
an epenthetic vowel (clxfre > clxfere, clXvere), after
212
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which x lost length in a trisyllabic word and the short-

lived epenthesis was dropped: clxvere became clxvre,
spelled claver (Luick [1964:secs 387.2
and 457.1]).
The presence of x in OE clxfre made ety-
mologists reconstruct *i in one of the postradical
syllables, whence the asterisked forms
*klaiwarjon and *klaibr(i)on in most modern dic-
tionaries: accounts for umlaut (*a > x), and
the variation *b ~ *w takes care of the difference
between w in Old High German and f, that is, [v]
in Low German and Old English. Most etymolo-
gies of clover and its cognates are based on the as-
sumption that this word is of Germanic origin and
can be traced to some other Germanic word (see
also Sauer [1992:386]). If clover goes back to an un-
known substrate language (an idea acceptable to
both J. de Vries [NEW, claver], Polome [1986a:666,
1987:232], and Schrijver [1997:305]) the search be-
comes futile.
2. The proposed derivations of Klee ~ claver ~ clover
are as follows: 1) Since L trifolium 'trefoil, clover' refers
to the 'cloven' form of the leaf, the same must be true of
clover, which appears to be related by this twist of logic
to E cleave 'split,' Du klieven, G klieben (OE cleofan, OS
klioban, OHG chliuban). Such was the nearly unanimous

213
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opinion of early lexicographers, for example, Minsheu,

Ihre (klofwer), Wachter (Klee), Todd (in Johnson-
Todd), M. Höfer II:140-44, Kaltschmidt (Klee),
Wedgwood, Leo (1877:360/26), Chambers, and May
(Klee). Weigand's contemporaries disregarded his
warning that Klee is not akin to klieben. Only Mueller
took heed of it, and Schwenck observed that some form
related to klieben 'cleave, split' rather than klieben must
be a cognate of Klee. A connection between *klaiw-, the
base of the plant name, and *kleub -, the base of cleave
'split,' cannot be made out, because ai and eu belong to
different ablaut series, and Schwenck's side form
(Nebenform) has not been recorded. Skeat, in Skeat1, did
not reject that connection (he called it probable but not
certain). However, in his CED, published in the same
year, the corresponding phrase is "very doubtful." In
Skeat4, "very doubtful" is replaced with "impossible,"
and the idea is dismissed as being "inconsistent with
phonology."
2) In the pre-1864 editions of Webster's dictionary,
clover is associated with L cla va 'cudgel' and with Du
klaver, which allegedly means 'club.' *Klaver 'club' must
have been extracted from Du klaveren 'clubs' (at cards)
or from compounds beginning with klaver-. Although E
club does not turn up among its cognates, clover is said
to mean 'club-grass, club-wort' (which is wrong in
respect of both clover and clubmoss). Prior gave an
214
Adz(e) Adz(e)

especially interesting comment along these lines. He

preferred the form claver to clover: "It is evidently a
noun in the plural number, probably a Frisian word, and
means 'club,' from Latin clava, and refers to the clava
trinodis of Hercules. It is in fact the club of our cards,
French trèfle, which is so named from its resemblance in
outline to a leaf with three leaflets." Du klaveren, a
translation of F trèfle (< L trifolium), is of no help in
elucidating the etymology of clover (EWNT2), but the
history of the English name of the suit clubs is more
complicated: "The suit of clubs upon the Spanish cards is
not the trefoils as with us, but positively clubs, or
cudgels, of which we retain the name, though we have
lost the figures; the original name is bastos" (CD, quoting
from Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes).
3) The expression in clover evidently refers to
cattle's delight in eating clover. Mackay (1877) arrived at
the conclusion that the word clover was derived from
this expression, glossed E clover as 'happiness,' and,
following his preconceived idea that most English words
are of Gaelic origin, suggested that its etymon is Gael
clumhor ~ clomhor 'warm, sheltered, snug.' His
etymology of clover stands out even among his other
fanciful reconstructions.
4) Kluge thought that, whatever the origin of Klee
might be, OE clœfre and all the related disyllabic forms
were compound words, but he could not identify -fre. In
215
Adz(e) Adz(e)

EWDS1-3, he tentatively compared -fre with -fre in OE

heahfre 'heifer,' possibly a syncopated variant of
heahfore. (The origin of this -fore is still a matter of
debate; see HEIFER.) Kluge also cited the German
disguised compounds Kiefer 'pine tree' (< OHG
kienforaha) and Wimper 'eyelash' (< OHG wintbrâ(wa)).
In the fourth edition, he expunged reference to heifer,
Wimper, and Kiefer but retained the idea that clover was
a compound word (the same in EWDS 5-10). His successors
gave up that idea altogether, but it survived in OED, Ver-
coullie's dictionary of Dutch, and Weekley (1924).
Two attempts to etymologize -fre are known.
Pogatscher (1898:97-98) suggested that OE clœfre
consisted of *klaiwaz and some word like Icel smart
'clover,' with or without s-. By a series of phonetic
changes *klaiw(s)mdri allegedly became clafre. Since OE
clafre competed with clœfre, Pogatscher reconstructed
*klaiwaz and *klaiwiz, an os/es-noun. Although
Pogatscher cited several words in which br supposedly
goes back to *mr, his reconstruction found no support.
The bulky form he proposed is not improbable, as N reg
klover-smxre shows (Nilsson [1984:201]). However,
kloversmxre is a late word, for klover, as pointed out
above, came to Scandinavia from Low German. More
importantly, cognates of smári or its doublet *mdri,
which Pogatscher compared with the obscure Greek
plant names a|mr|pécx or |mrpú;, have not been
216
Adz(e) Adz(e)

recorded in West Germanic; smeer 'clover' occurring in

some English dialects is not a native word in them.
Bjórkman (1901:227-28) summarized Pogatscher's
etymology without comment, and etymological
dictionaries never take it into consideration. The same
holds for Walther's etymology (1893:135-36), who
believed that the flower of clover resembles a berry and
detected -bere in clavere. Foerste (1954:395) tactfully
dismissed Wal-ther's and Pogatscher's conjectures as
indefensible.
5) The etymology of Klee ~ klaver ~ clover that most
modern dictionaries accept hesitatingly goes back to FT
(klover), who connected those words with cleave 'stick,
adhere' (Du kleven, G kleben; OE cleofian and clifian, OS
klibon, OHG chlebén), citing the sticky juice of the plant
when it blooms as the reason. WP I:620 and IEW, 364
(with a question mark), endorsed that hypothesis,
though Kluge implicitly and Van Wijk (EWNT, klaver)
explicitly rejected it. In German lexicography, reference
to the sticky juice first appeared in Gótze's rewording of
Kluge's dictionary (EWDS11) and stayed there until
Seebold (EWDS22) took it out. The usual objection to FT's
etymology is that the juice of clover in bloom is not
stickier than any other flower juice or sap. However, the
feature chosen as the basis of the names of plants and
animals need not be unique. For example, not only

217
Adz(e) Adz(e)

asters are radiated flowers resembling stars, and not

only daisies are 'day's eyes.'
Yet the problem remains: What is so sticky about
clover? The reasons for naming differ from plant to
plant. Proto-Slavic *lipa 'linden tree' was, most likely,
called sticky (*lipati 'stick, adhere') in consideration of its
highly valued bast (ESSI [XV:114-16]). Foerste (1954:408-
09) revived the idea developed by Ten Doornkaat
Koolman (klafer) that clover is 'sticky' because it takes
root and grows in almost any soil. The tenacity and in-
eradicability of clover hardly justify a name meaning
'clinger.' Clivers and cleavers are 'sticky' because they
cling to the objects that come into contact with them,
not because their roots are so sturdy. It is a curious fact
that W. Barnes (1862:117), who worked with a set of
imaginary bases, assigned clover to cl*ng 'cling.' He did
not explain how he had arrived at his idea.
6) According to Van Ginneken (1941:363),
Gmc *klai-ja comes from a word meaning 'clay'
(cf Du klei and G Klei), because clover prefers
sandy and loamy soils, that is, from the word clay.
His etymology has never been discussed. Baader
(1953:39-40) traced the West Germanic name of
clover to the "East European" root *gel— *gloi-
'bright, shining.' It is not sticky juice but intense
color that is typical of clover, he said. Clover
comes in several colors, but their intensity is about
218
Adz(e) Adz(e)

average, and the distance from *gel— *gloi- 'bright,

happy, shining' to MHG kleine 'shining, dainty'
hardly leads to *'white, reddish,' as Mitzka (KM,
Klee) points out. Seebold (KS, Klee) mentions
Baader's article without comment, and no one ex-
cept Cohen (1972b:2/26) shared Baader's opinion.
7) B. van den Berg (1954:186-87) did not offer a
new etymology of Du klaver but suggested that its
protoform was *klawaz, an es/os-stem, with
*klawira as its plural. The word for 'clover' often
occurs in the plural (see Prior's etymology above),
and Pogatscher assigned *klaiwaz (not *kla waz) to
the es/os-stem long before Van den Berg, who may
have been unaware of this fact.
3. The traditional reconstruction of the proto-form
*klaibr(i)on shies away from the question of why two
forms—with and without i—existed. Of interest is
Foerste's observation (1954:405-08; first, very briefly, as
in 1955:3) that x in clxfre does not have to be the umlaut
of a, for it can go back directly to Gmc x (Go ey WGmc
*a). Instead of *klaib ron and *klaib rion, with i posited
only to account for an allegedly umlauted vowel, he ob-
tained the doublets clafra (< *klaibron) and clxfre (< *kla
b ron). Foerste cited several other word pairs in which
old *ai seems to have alternated with *a; Weijnen
(1981:136) gave two more examples. None of those
forms is fully convincing, and no reasons for the
219
Adz(e) Adz(e)

alternation have been offered. Yet Foerste's

reconstruction has potential and can perhaps be
accepted as a working hypothesis. Dutch and Low
German dialects also have klever and klaver. Previous
explanations of a were of two kinds: that it is of Frisian
origin (an improbable hypothesis in light of OE clafre) or
that it is an Ingvaeonic feature. In addition to the works
already mentioned, see Heeroma's discussion (1937:262-
63, 265) of the "a map" in the linguistic atlas of Dutch
(1949:30) and the bibliography in Brok's edition of
Heukels (Heukels [1987:LXI]).
Foerste did not address the problem of monosyllabic
forms (like G Klee) versus disyllabic ones
(like Du klaver and E clover). According to Van den
Berg (1954:191-92), *-wr- became *-vr- in klaver, and
some examples in Dutch dialects bear out his statement.
But -fr- in the Old English forms needs another
explanation. For this reason, Foerste rejected Van den
Berg's etymology (likewise,
Lerchner [1965:143]).
The Germanic suffix *-dro was used in the naming of
various trees. Such are OE apuldre (OHG affoltra or
apaldr) 'apple tree,' mapuldre 'maple,' and many others.
A reflex of *-dro shows up in G Holunder 'juniper' and
possibly Flieder 'lilac.' Not only tree names have this
suffix or a complex that came to be associated with it: it
is also present in E dodder and madder (ME doder; OE
220
Adz(e) Adz(e)

mxdere). The meaning of *-dro (perhaps 'bearer') was

forgotten early, whence such creations of folk etymology
as OE xppeltre (xppeltre ow), MLG mapeldorn, and so
forth. After Sievers (1878:523-24) clarified the
meaning and origin of *-5ro in plant names, no one
added anything new to his reconstruction. Only Wyld
(UED, heather) pointed out that in Old English, the
formative element of plant names -re had come into
being, as in OE ampre 'dock, sorrel' and clafre 'clover'
(ampre is a reshaping of an adjective meaning 'bitter';
compare G Ampfer < OHG ampfara ~ ampfaro). His
observation seems to be relevant also for Frisian, Low
German, and Dutch, but it need not be assumed that -re
is a continuation of *-dro. The most natural etymology of
OE clafre ~ clxfre would be *claiw- ~ *clXw- with the
formative element -re. The suffixed forms *claw- ~ clx w-
+ -re (ra) would also explain parallel forms with -b-: the
group wr- was preserved in Old English intact (contrary
to German and Dutch), but in the middle of the word it
did not occur and was transformed into -fr- (pronounced
[vr]) or -br-.
4. An equally difficult part of the etymology of clover
is the semantics of this plant name. FT's idea that clover
is akin to cleave 'adhere' can be accepted. Some
property of clover made people associate it with a sticky,
adhesive mass. A semantic parallel to clover is Icel smdri
'clover.' Smdri, along with its doublet smxra, surfaced
221
Adz(e) Adz(e)

only at the end of the 17th century, but it must be old, for
its cognates exist in Faroese and in the dialects of
Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish (Nilsson [1984]; ABM,
smdri, smxra). The etymology of smdri has been
discussed sporadically and insufficiently. Jacob Grimm
(1865:121) looked on it as a borrowing from Celtic: he
cited Ir seamar, seamrog and Wel samrog, the etymon of
E shamrock, Icel (he erroneously said "Old Icelandic")
smdri, and Dan (Jutland) smxre (his spelling is smäre).
Bugge (1899:455-56/30) could not imagine that
smdri is a Celtic word and traced it to *smdirhon (<
*smar\kon-). He reconstructed the Proto-Celtic form as
*sembrako- (< *semrako-). *Smar- and *semr-emerged
as different grades of ablaut of the same base. The Irish
word appears in FT(N), but later Falk and Torp concluded
that seamar, like OE sym-mering-wyrt 'violet' or
'anemone' (Förster [1917: 139/2] thought it was a
variety of malva), is related to the Germanic word for
'summer' and expunged it from the German translation
(FT(G), see smxre in both editions). However, they never
shared Bugge's view of the origin of smdri and compared
it with OE smx ras 'lips' (pl). They explained the name
smdri as 'leppeblomst,' that is, 'lip flower' (the same
gloss in NEO, smxre), allegedly because of some
similarity between clover flowers and lips. FT's later
etymology of Ir seamar 'clover' also seems to have been

222
Adz(e) Adz(e)

abandoned. WP II:624-25 and Pokorny (1949-50:135)

derive seamar from PIE *stembros 'stalk.'
FT's etymology of smdri is even less credible than
Walther's ("clover is like a berry"). Reference to L
laburnum does not help, for laburnum is a tree whose
bright yellow, pear-shaped flowers do not resemble
clover. The origin of the Latin word is unknown, and its
association with labia 'lip' is due to folk etymology.
Charpentier (1912:140-41) supported enthusiastically the
idea that smdri is related to OE ga lsmx re 'jocose,
frivolous,' a word mentioned in FT. He noted that the
root *smei- ~ *smi-(as in E smile) meant both 'laugh' and
'bloom.' His observation is correct (see also Petersson
[1916:290]), but the connection between laughter and
flowers goes much deeper than he thought, for laughter
was considered in many cultures to be a giver of life. The
motif is too broad to be invoked in any etymology. See
Propp (1984: no 9, esp p. 137 "Flowers That Bloom at
Someone's Smile"; first published in 1939). Charpentier
may have missed Benfey (1875), and Benfey was
apparently unaware of the Icelandic word. In his
discussion of the names of the plant hop (1875:213-16),
Benfey mentions Gk oiiilcxX 'convolvulus, dodder' (as
well as 'yew tree') and considers the possibility of the
pro-toform *smaila or *smaira in view of the Sanskrit
plant name smera-. He notes that smera seems to be a
derivation of *smi- 'smile, laugh' and refers to the bright
223
Adz(e) Adz(e)

blossoms covering many climbing plants ('smiling' = 'in

bloom'). "This would indeed be a very poetic
designation," he says (pp. 215-16), but adds that some
poetic names may be taken back to Proto-Indo-
European. He would have been puzzled by Icel smdri,
another 'smiling' name of a plant not famous for its
brightness and not a climber.
Both etymological dictionaries of Modern Icelandic
(IEW, 909; ABM, smdri) copied from FT, though a
reasonable conjecture on the derivation of smdri has
been known for a long time. Holthausen (AeEW) pointed
out that ga lsmx re should be kept away from smx ras
and that the source of x in OE smxre 'lip' is WGmc *x
(corresponding to Go e1) rather than the umlaut of a
from *ai, as follows from the Anglian dative plural sme
rum, and cannot be related to a in smdri (see also
Holthausen [1941:81] and Foerste's discussion of clxfru,
above; Knobloch [1959:41] disagrees with Holthausen
without giving reasons for his disagreement). The
cognate of smdri is, according to Holthausen, OI smjor ~
smor 'butter.' E cleave 'adhere' is archaic, but in German,
kleben and schmieren are not only synonymous but
sometimes interchangeable. Smor and schmieren are
closely related words.
Another semantic parallel to clover as a sticky flower
is Russ kashka, the popular name of klever 'clover.'
Kasha means 'porridge, hot cereal'; kashka 'pap' is its
224
Adz(e) Adz(e)

quasi-diminutive. According to the current explanations,

kashka got its name either from its flowers collected into
dense heads of short spikes resembling porridge (Dal'
II:100) or from the fact that when it is ground in the
hand, it feels like fine grain (Merkulova [1967:90]; ESRI
II/8:105-06; ESSI IX:159-60 lists cognates but gives no
etymology). Who grinds clover in the hand and why?
With a word denoting pap (mash, pulp) we are not too
far from kleben and schmieren.
The Russian word is in no way unusual. Among the
popular names of German plants, we find Pappel and
Käsepappel; G pap- is a cognate of E pap (Stech
[1959:154-55]). Stech notes that all those plants, when
squeezed or broken, excrete thick juice, which is, or was
in the past, used for medicinal purposes. It is noteworthy
how often various authors writing in German use the
phrase dicker Saft 'thick juice.' FT and their followers
refer to thick juice in their etymology of klover and Klee.
Stech says dickflüssiger Saft, and in WHirt Latwerge
'electuary' (= dicker Heilsaft, a medicinal powder mixed
with honey or syrup) is defined as durch Einkochen
dicker Saft.
Medieval pharmaceutical books regularly mention
clover, but its role in healing ailments is not prominent.
The thick juice of clover is associated, even if vaguely,
with honey. The missing link between clover and
stickiness (Klee and kleben, klaver and kleven, clover and
225
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cleave 'adhere') is the English word honeysuckle (its

doublet is honeysuck), which until the end of the 17th
century meant 'red clover, Trefolium pratense.' This
meaning is still alive in dialects (EDD). Honey stalks
mentioned in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (IV:4, 90)
are stalks of clover. Not only the cattle appreciate the
sweet taste of clover.
Although the cultivation of clover started in Europe
in the 16th century (first in Brabant), neither bees nor
beekeepers had to wait so long. In Ki-lian's 1599 Dutch
dictionary, klauern honigh 'clover honey' is defined 'mel
optimum & candidissimum, ex trifolio pratensi' ('good,
very clear honey from purple clover'); the association
between clover and honey was natural to him. Wherever
clover grows, children chew it (as they chew honeysuckle
and sometimes lilac) and enjoy the taste of this 'pap.' As
recently as at the end of the 19 th century, poor people in
Iceland put clover into their milk and ate this 'cold
cereal' (Nilsson 1984:202). Clover is 'sticky,' because its
thick juice is one of the main sources of honey. Other
examples illustrating the connection between the juice
of a tree and the product made from it include Welsh
bedw 'birch; birch grove,' called for the juice it excretes.
Bedw is a rather secure cognate of E cud, OI kvdda
'resin,' and G Kitt 'putty.' G Weichsel (OHG wihsila) 'bird
cherry' is akin to L viscum 'bird lime'; bird lime was made
from these berries.
226
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In popular botanical nomenclature, the same name

is often applied to several different plants, and,
conversely, one plant may have many names. The Old
English glosses in which clafre and clxfre turn up are
confusing because copyists could not know the exact
meaning of cirsium, crision, calta,
and other Latin words (BWA, I:35, II:23, III:52;
Cockayne [1861, II:276]). That is why Skinner based
his etymology of clover on the meaning 'violet,' arguing
that clover and violets have a similar smell (the same, as
always, in Gazophylacium), and the pre-1864 editions of
Webster's dictionary emphasize that "[t]he Saxon word
is rendered also marigold and violet." In the dialects of
many Germanic languages, words like E hare's foot, Sw
rod-fikor, ro-tastar, Icel hrutafifl, each denoting a dif-
ferent kind of clover, are widespread. So many
compound words have clxfre as their second element in
Old English, including some exotic ones like punor-clxfre
'bugle,' that clxfre became the name of almost any grass.
Yet the main meaning of clxfre ~ clafre was probably the
same as today, which did not prevent them from having
synonyms. The word clxfre is still discernible in nu-
merous place names beginning with Clare-, Clar-, Claver-,
and Clover-. Clarendon may be one of them
(Ekwall [1960:113], A. H. Smith [1956, I:96]).
5. In sum, the history of clover and its West
Germanic cognates looks as follows: 1) West Germanic
227
Adz(e) Adz(e)

had the form *klaiwaz, most probably, an a-stem. Its

direct continuation is High German Klee (< kleo(w)). 2) In
English, Frisian, Dutch, and Low German, -re, a formative
element of plant names, possibly extracted from < *-pro,
was added to *klaiw-, and *klaiwre yielded *klaifre [-
vre] and *klaibre. The first variant won out. *Klaifre
developed into OE clafre (> ModE clover). 3) In early
West Germanic, *ai sometimes alternated with *x (< *a),
whence OE clxfre (> ModE claver) and all continental
forms with -e-. 4) Clover got its name from its sticky
juice, its nectar, the base of the most popular sort of
honey. The sound complex *klaiwaz must have meant
'sticky pap.'
COB (1420?)
Cob, in its various meanings, refers to animal names,
the names of round and lumpy objects, and the head. It
is often confused with cop, but, as a rule, cop means only
'head.' The history of cop is as obscure as the history of G
Kopf, L caput, and their cognates. Late convergences and
ancient ties are impossible to distinguish in this group.
Possibly, cob 'animal name' (related to cub) and cob
'round ~ lumpy object' are historically distinct from cob ~
cop 'head.' Of the animal names, only cob 'male swan'
can be understood as 'the head (swan).' Cob is not a
borrowing from Scandinavian or Celtic in any of its
meanings. Cob 'basket' is perhaps related to
cubby(hole). Cob 'fight' (v) is of unknown origin; it is not
228
Adz(e) Adz(e)

necessarily a continuation of the rare Middle English

verb cob 'fight' (from French?). Cob 'mixture of earth and
straw' is so called from its having been made of heavy
lumps of clay. Cob 'harbor at Lyme Regis' may also have
received its name from cob 'roundish mass, lump' (<
'rounded skerry'?).
The sections are devoted to 1) the range of meanings
of cob and the relations between cob and cop, 2) cob as
the name of various containers, 3) cob (v) 'fight,' 4) the
treatment of cob by Makovskii and Abaev, 5) cob
'mixture of earth and straw,' 6) (Sea) Cob, and 7) the
family name Cobb(e). Section 8 is the conclusion.
1. OED classifies the meanings of cob as follows: 1)
containing the notion 'big' or 'stout,' 2) containing the
notion 'rounded,' 'roundish mass,' or 'lump,' 3) with the
notion 'head, top.' In addition, several compounds like
cob-house 'house built by children out of corncobs, etc'
and seven other nouns spelled cob or cobb are known.
OED gives them as homonyms of cob. Du kobbe,
apparently related to cob, is equally polysemous:
Heeroma
(1941-42:51).
For etymological purposes it is more advantageous
to divide the meanings of cob into
1) those referring to animals, 2) those referring to
round and lumpy objects, and 3) those referring to the
head. Old dictionaries derived cob from cop, a word of
229
Adz(e) Adz(e)

regional origin with the principal signification 'head, top.'

Wood (1920/97) also chose not to differentiate cob and
cop. OED treats cop 'vessel' as a homonym of cop 'head.'
About two dozen words in Germanic mean 'cap,' 'cup,'
and 'cop' (that is, 'head') with synonyms in Romance and
in non-Indo-European languages—not counting variants
with final -b (as in cob) and initial g- (as in goblet). They
may show no evidence of the First Consonant Shift
(compare, for example, ML cuppa and E cup); sometimes
only one stop is shifted (as in G Kopf 'head').
In all probability, they are migratory words that
influenced one another's sound shape and semantics. H.
Kuhn (1962) spoke of the Pre-Germanic substrate, and
Reinisch (1873:201-02) cited similar-sounding words in
African languages. Cowan's discussion (1974:247-49) is
reminiscent of Kuhn's. G Kopf has been traced to sources
as remote as Finno-Ugric and Mongolian. See a short
survey in Augst (1970:167-172), Sapir (1937:73-75;
Hebrew), and Ulenbrook (1967:536; Chinese).
English cop and cob must also have interacted.
However, there is no compelling reason for calling
*kobbi ~ *kubbi a sound symbolic variant of *kopi ~
*kuppi, as Liihr (1988:276) does. Similar solutions have
been offered in the past. ODEE understands flabby as an
expressive alternation of flappy, though it is unclear why
flabby is more expressive than flappy. Gaby (reg)
'simpleton' may be related to Icel gapi 'reckless man' or
230
Adz(e) Adz(e)

E gape, and -nap in kidnap is believed to be the same

word as nab. None of those etymologies is safe.
Attempts to unravel the history of cobweb (< ME
coppeweb(e)) bring out the confusion of cop and cob
with especial clarity. OED cites Westph cob-benwebbe
(at cobweb) and cobbe 'spider,' also with -bb- (so Woeste
[1930]) and Fl koppe, kobbe 'spider' (at cob4), with -pp-/-
bb- (De Bo, koppe). Woeste (1871:356-7) identified -cob
and -cop and glossed attorcopa as 'gift sucker' (as though
from keep < *kopjan). He referred to the belief that
spiders suck poison from the air. This is a fanciful
etymology.
Kaluza (1906-07, II:330, sec 402/f) mentions three
English words with b < p: cobweb (< ME cop-pewebbe),
lobster (< OE loppestre), and pebble (< OE papol(stan)).
Jespersen (1909:sec 2.11) gives the
same words. Luick (1964:1109, sec 799.1b) lists
cobweb among such forms as jobardy (a 16th-century
variant of jeopardy), but he admits that in cobweb the
group bw may have developed from pw. Most of his
examples are borrowed from Wyld (1920:312-13). See
also Jordan (1974:sec 161) and Wakelin (1972:153). In HL
(1017), copweb is said to have become cobweb by
distant assimilation: p-b > b-b (cf Horn [1950:1691]).
The Old English for spider was (xtter-)coppe,
probably 'poison head' (Dan edderkop, N edderkopp;
only A. Noreen [1897:47] glosses the second element as
231
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'lump'). The spider's other Old English names were

gange-wifre 'weaver as it goes,' hunta 'hunter,' possibly
spipra, (xtter)loppe, and lobbe (E. Adams [1859],
Cortelyou [1906:103-11]; Schlutter [1907:303]; Bradley
[1916: no 5]; Stuart [1977]; Liberman [1992b:132-33 =
1994c:211]). Lopp- was related to lobb-, as copp- to
cobb-, and all of them covered the same semantic
territory: lopp— lobb-'flea'; 'spider'; heavy object.
Hor(e)cop 'bastard' is probably *hor(e)cob, that is,
'whore child.' OED (horcop) gives examples from 1430 to
1578, hesitatingly compares -cop with cop 'head, top'
and admits that "the analytical sense is not clear."
Yet cob and cop, though close, are not identical. The
main difficulty in deriving cob from cop is the fact, noted
in OED, that cob has meanings irreducible to 'head,'
while in cop the meaning 'head' predominates. Two
words, possibly going back to the same etymon, seem to
have merged in cob: one referring to animal names, with
the original sense being 'round, lumpy object,' and the
other referring to 'head.' Only the second one is a variant
of cop (the first word is discussed in detail at CUB).
Neither possessed expressive connotations and must
have arisen along the lines suggested by Wyld and Luick,
with certain dialects choosing the -b form and others the
-p form. No animal name recorded at cob appears to
have genetic ties with words outside Germanic.

232
Adz(e) Adz(e)

2. In addition to being an animal name, cob can

designate 'great man' (probably 'the head'). 'Testicle,'
'nut,' 'stone of the fruit,' 'piece of coal,' 'loaf of bread,'
and 'coin' look like extensions of 'head' (= 'little head').
Since most of those meanings surfaced late, their history
cannot be reconstructed with sufficient clarity. W.
Barnes (1862:101) compared cob 'wicker basket' and kib,
kibble 'basket used by miners'; OED suggests that kibble
(sb3) was borrowed from German (G Kübel 'large
container').
It seems safer to separate all the words designating
containers (including coves, baskets, and sheds) from
words for 'bunch, bundle, tuft, haystack, hair,' and the
like. Cob 'tuft of hair, haystack, etc,' may be related to E
sheaf (which is akin to G Schober 'haystack,' Schaub
'bunch of hay,' and Schopf 'forelock, tuft'), with s-mobile,
while E cove, G
Schuppen 'shed,' and G Schober 'barn' belong to the
'container' group. None of them is related to E cob
'head,' though here, too, the semantic distance would be
easy to bridge: 'hair' —» 'hairy head' or 'head' -»
'container' (cf E cup ~ G Kopf, E hogshead, LG Bullenkop
'measure of beer': see KM, Oxhoft). See also AEW (kubbi)
and NEW (kobbe1). Cob 'head; round object' hardly
experienced a foreign influence. Nearly all Scandinavian
words sounding like cob are animal names (see them at
CUB). Wedgwood and Skeat1 (also Skeat [1887 =
233
Adz(e) Adz(e)

1892:451]), among others, treated Wel cob 'top, tuft' as

the etymon of E cob, but the meanings of the English
noun are more varied than those of its Welsh
counterpart, so that borrowing from English into Welsh
seems incontestable.
3. OED labels cob (v; 1400) 'fight' (a single
citation) as a possible onomatopoeia. ModI kubba (v)
'chop,' mentioned in Wedgwood2 and CD as a cognate of
cob 'fight,' belongs with the words discussed at CUB. E
cob (v) 'strike,' especially 'strike as a punishment'
(nautical use), was first attested in 1769, but cobbing is a
word not confined to sailors' life (it was widespread
among schoolboys; see the examples in OED and EDD
and a note on Cob Hall 'prison' in Peacock [1889]). Davies
(1855:228; 1880b:24/5, 48; 1885:14) derived cob (v) from
Wel cob 'blow' ~ cobio 'thump' and treated F reg cobir
'fight' (in Roquefort, according to Davies) as a borrowing
from Celtic. Whitaker (1771-75:298), likewise, argued for
the Celtic origin of E cob (v), but he traced thousands of
English words to Celtic. See a survey of early opinions on
the Celtic etymon
of this verb in W. Hudson (1950-51:291).
The French verb apparently continues OF cobiri ~
cobbir. Only two citations with cobir appear in Godefroy,
who also cites coffir (from Menage?). Sainte-Palaye gives
coffir and cotir ~ cottir as variants, but cotir is a separate
verb (Littre). TL mention only the noun cobe 'blow.' ME
234
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cobbe may have been of French origin (MED), but insofar

as the history of the English verb is undocumented
between 1400 and 1769, it seems that ModE cob (v) does
not continue ME cobbe. (A similar difficulty occurs in the
history of FAG and FILCH.) Since Wel cobir 'beat, strike,
buffet, thump, peck (said about hens)' is first recorded
for 1455-85 (GPC), it need not be considered the etymon
of OF cob(b)ir. Wel cobio and ModE cob (v) are so close
in meaning that one of them might be a borrowing.
However,
the use of ModE cob in sailors' language makes it
unlikely that this verb is from Welsh. See the Celtic
material in WP and in Falileyev and Isaac
(1998: 203).
4. Cob, in its several meanings, has been an object of
Makovskii's speculation for years. He referred to the
alleged syncretism horse ~ mountain and derived cob
'horse' from PIE *keubh-, *koubh-, *kubh- 'hill, peak'
(1995:135), bypassing the problem of the initial
consonant (k- in non-Germanic and k- in English).
According to another hypothesis (Makovskii [1992b:51,
86, 115]), bird names and words for 'give birth' and
'genitalia' are often related. He thus combined cob 'sea
mew,' 'testicle' and the verb cob 'like one another' (and
further, Skt gabha- 'vulva'). That verb was never current
in English dialects; it appeared in only one of Wright's
sources from Suffolk (EDD). A word of such low
235
Adz(e) Adz(e)

frequency and not recorded in Middle English is the most

unlikely etymon of cobber 'friend,' once current in both
Australia and New Zealand, though for want of a better
etymology, both AND and DNZE derive it from cob 'be
fond of one another.' It is a word of "opaque ancestry,"
as Gorlach (1996:77) puts it. Yet Makovskii (1964:48)
connects cobber and cob (v).
In Australia, cobber appeared in print in 1893 and in
New Zealand, in 1897. It seems to be obsolescent in both
countries (see Wilkes). According to Gold (1984:205),
cobber is of Hebrew origin: Hebr Ί3Π (chaver) 'friend' >
Yiddish khaver 'friend,' and further to English through
the language of the German underworld. Cob 'be fond of
one another' is then a back formation from cobber. The
other cobber 'great lie, prodigious falsehood; thumber,
whopper' (slang) is equally or even more obscure.
Likewise, the meaning 'sea mew' is not central to the
noun cob.
In his first attack on this word (1971:22), Makovskii
compared E cob 'small stack of hay or grain; bunch or
knot of hair; chignon' and SwiG Chober (SI III:110), but he
glossed Chober as 'haystack,' when in fact Chober means
'container for hay kept behind a pigsty' and is therefore
the same word as G Kober 'handbag, food basket, weir
basket, fish trap' (see also G Koben 'pigsty, cage': KM, KS,
DEW). Turning to cob 'beat,' Makovskii (1992b:52, 115)
compared it with Gk κιβωτός 'box arch,' L cibus 'food,'
236
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and L cubo 'lie' (v). Again we have a string of arbitrarily

chosen words with initial k-. None of them is related to
one another. See similar fantasies in Makovskii
(2000a:140).
One of Makovskii's ideas is that some common
words well represented in Germanic are due to scribal
errors in old glosses (1980:53-123). Consider the
following passage (translated, with forms as given in the
original and minimal abbreviations): "Our data show
that, in the Middle High
German period, glossators often confused the
meaning of the Latin lemmata pellex, particularly in the
form pellice 'concubina' and pellicium, pellifex, pellicule
(< pellis). Thus, we read in Middle High German glosses:
pellicium 'i. vestis de pellibus facta l. deceptio
(Diefenbach, p. 421); pellacia i fallacia l. pellis 'deceptio'
(ib.). The lemma pellicula is glossed in MHG as hut,
among others, whereas G hut also corresponded to the
lemma tugurium (Diefenbach, p. 601...). Finally, the
lemma tugurium corresponded to G cubisi, chubrisi,
chupisi (Schade, s.v.). Confusion of the above-mentioned
Latin lemmata resulted in the acquisition by that German
word of the meaning 'concubina' in late glosses, and this
meaning entered both Modern German (Kebse) and the
related languages: OE cyfes (along with cebisse, cebisae,
caebis), OI kefsir, and so forth. As the result of the
confusion of the Latin lemma dolium (= OE cyf, OHG
237
Adz(e) Adz(e)

kuyp, koffe) and dolosus, dolos (= OE cyfes, caebis, OHG

chebis), their meanings were also confused. See
Diefenbach, p. 187: dulus. list, betregunge and ain zuber.
Of interest here is the modern argotic German word
Kübbe (cf E reg kip 'a house of ill-fame'—EDD III:498)
'Hurenhaus,' kobern 'dem Dirnengewerbe nachgehen,'
sich kobern lassen 'sich geschlechtlich preisgeben' (Wolf,
p. 2806). Cf E reg to cob 'take a liking to anyone' (EDD
I:675; and Lith kekse 'Hure' and Pol kochac 'love,' Czech
kochati 'love,' kochati se 'enjoy'; see BB 2:157 [= Bezzen-
berger 1878]; KZ 41:287 [= Ehrlich 1907]). Cf also German
argotic Kipper 'Betrüger' and E reg keb 'a villain' (EDD,
s.v.). Cf a similar semantic development of E cullion 'a
base fellow' < couillon < L coleus 'testicles'; cf E to cob 'to
deceive' (slang). Cf also German argotic Kibitz 'vulva' (S.
Wolf [1956:2590]) and E reg cob 'a sowing-basket' (see
SED IV:199). As Fraenkel [LEW] and Vasmer
[I:698] have shown, the notion of 'concubina' is often
connected with the names of animals and especially
birds. One cannot help juxtaposing E cob 'seagull,' Late L
coppa (R. Latham, p. 115) on one hand and E cub on the
other..." (pp. 64-65).
The last statement recurs in Makovskii (1988a:103),
where he says that words meaning 'give birth to, bring
into the world' can acquire the meaning 'dog, cub;
cattle.' Makovskii compared E cur and Russ kuritsa 'hen'
versus Bulg kuritsa 'vulva,' E cob 'seagull,' cub, and (reg)
238
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cobs 'testicles,' and all of them with the verb cob 'take a
liking to someone.' This is Makovskii's idea of what he
calls linguistic genetics.
Nor does calling cob onomatopoeic (or rather sound
symbolic) solve the problem. It is a fact that the complex
k-b is used in many languages to designate round
objects, a circumstance important to Abaev (IESOI [330-
35, esp 331-32]), but one wonders whether Gk κύβος, L
cubus, E cup (from Old English), and many other similar
words in the languages of Asia and Africa are
ideophones, that is, words without a past, words that
arose as a result of primitive formation all over the world
only because the combinations k-b, k-p, g-b, g-p (and k-
d) evoke in the human mind the idea of plumpness. Russ
kub 'cube,' unlike Russ kub(ok) 'goblet,' was borrowed
from German, L cubus was taken over from Greek, and E
cup came from Latin. They are not spontaneous
formations. None of the English words spelled cob was
recorded before 1420. Are we to assume that a series of
phonosemantic eruptions in late Middle English and
Early Modern English produced clones of Gk κύβος? If
such an assumption has any merit, it has to be discussed
in detail rather than being brought forward as an
etymological master key (see the discussion in Vo-ronin
[1997:145] and Liberman [1999b:98-100]).
5. Cob 'mixture of earth and straw' (Southwestern
England) is a word of debatable origin. According to
239
Adz(e) Adz(e)

anonymous (1857: 14), "[t]he etymology of cob has long

puzzled the lexicographers," but the existing conjectures
are few. OED (cob sb2) rejects Cope's idea (1883) that cob
in this meaning derives from cob 'lump.' But Cope did
not offer an etymology; he gave only a definition: "Cob 'a
lump of clay, such as those with which walls, houses, &c
are built." It was Wedgwood who tried to find a common
origin for cob in all its meanings. He said: "Cob a blow,
and thence as usual a lump or thick mass of anything"
and beginning with the second edition, also "cob (for
walls) from being laid on in lumps." He may have
borrowed part of his explanation from Chapple (1785:
50, note), who suggested that cob was "possibly from
the British [that is, Welsh] Chwap (Ictus) [that is, 'blow,
thump'], a Gk Κοπτός 'contusus' because the earth and
straw ought to be well beaten, trod, or pounded to-
gether." A similar suggestion appears in Fraser (1853): "a
cob-wall... is so called from its having been made of
heavy lumps of clay, beaten one upon another." Boys
(1857:65), who quotes Chapple, cites "the old French
verb, cobbir (said to be borrowed from the nautical
English), to bruise, bump, or break into pieces." Although
OED hands down the verdict that identification of cob
'mixture of earth and straw' and cob 'lump' "is otherwise
improbable," the meaning of cob 'muddle, mess, badly
executed work' (EDD: cob, sb2) makes the old ideas

240
Adz(e) Adz(e)

about cob not wholly untenable. The derivation of cob

from Spanish (Boys [1857]) or Arabic
(White [1858]) has no foundation in fact. See further
discussion in Collyns (1857).
6. Equally hard is the Cob ~ Cobb ~ Sea Cob, the
names of harbor or pier at Lyme Regis (Dorset).
OED (under cob sb7) believes the Cob to be related
to cobblestone. According to Ekwall (1960), Cob is
identical with E cob 'roundish mass, lump' and
seems to presuppose OE *cobb or *cobbe, which
would be akin to Sw reg kobbe 'rounded skerry.'
Other similar place names (for instance, Cobhall,
Cobham, Coventry) are more likely traceable to OE
cofa 'cave, den; small bay, creek' or to the proper
name Cofa. Longman2 derives cob 'mixture of earth
and straw' tentatively from cob 'lump,' and refers
all the other meanings of cob to the root of E cot ~
cottage. No further explanation appears at cot. The
main part of this etymology is copied from W3.
WP I:559 and IEW 394 compare L guttur 'throat,'
which W3 mentions too, with OI koddi 'pillow, tes-
ticle' and list the other, extended variants of the root
*geu-, *gau-, *gu-, namely, *guga, *gupa, and so forth.
From the point of view of the history of English, cob and
cot have nothing in common. Their relatedness hardly
makes sense even at the level of Proto-Indo-European.

241
Adz(e) Adz(e)

7. The origin of the last name Cobb ~ Cobbe is

also disputable. Several homonymous names may
have converged in the modern form. Lower's
derivation of Cobb from Cobb of Lyme Regis
(1875:I/71) did not meet with approval in his time
(Cobbe occurs in Old English [Ewen (1931:88)]; all
the Cobbs could hardly have been descendants of
one small group of people in Dorset). E. C. Smith (1956)
accepted that etymology as possible and offered the
formulation: "Dweller near the roundish mass or lump."
The blurred line between cob and cop is the cause of
Bardsley's attempt to trace
both Cobb(e) and Copp to cob 'head' (1884:124; the
same in the earlier editions). The two most fre-
quently offered etymologies of Cobb(e) are from Jacob(s)
(Long [1883:95, 274; H. Harrison [1912];
Ewen [1931:271, 332, 334]; copied by E. C. Smith
[1956; 1969:64]) or from OE Cudbeald 'famous-bold'
(so Matthews [1966:327]), though it is unclear whether
Cobb can be viewed as an abbreviation of Cobbald ~
Cobbold, whose origin (< Cu dbeald) is not in doubt.
According to RW, in the eastern counties of England,
Cobb may go back to OI Kobbi.
8. Despite the vagueness of the general picture,
certain conclusions can be drawn, even if cau-
tiously. Two distinct words seem to have existed:
cob 'head,' alternating with cop and probably be-
242
Adz(e) Adz(e)

longing with cup and the other words of this

group, and cob 'round lumpy object,' a variant of
cub (kab ~ kub ~ kib ~ keb). The animal names discussed
above, with the possible exception of cob 'male swan,'
go back to the second word. Cob 'mixture of earth and
straw,' cob at Lyme Regis, and cob 'round lumpy object'
are not incompatible, but cob (v) 'fight' is a different (in
all likelihood, native) word. Cob 'be fond of one another'
is from Hebrew. None of those homonyms is the etymon
of the family name Cobb(e). See Liberman (1997:97108)
and CUB.
COCKNEY (1362)
Middle English seems to have had two words. One of
them was cokeney (-ay)1 'cock('s) egg' (= 'defective egg'),
that is, cok-e-ney, with intrusive -e- (like -a- in cock-a-
doodle-doo) and n that arose by misdivision of an ey > a
ney. It occured in some dialects and soon acquired the
meaning 'the poorest meal.' The second was cokeney
'milksop, pet child, simpleton, effeminate man,
inhabitant of a town, Londoner.' Cokeney2 may be an
Anglicized variant of the aphetic Old French past
participle acoquiné 'spoiled,' whose root is probably cock
(as in cocker), but this etymology is uncertain. No direct
connection exists between cockney and L coquina
'kitchen.' An association with Cockaigne is late.
The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest
etymologies of cockney; cockney and Cockaigne, 2)
243
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cockney and L coquina (and its derivatives), 3) cockney

and cock, 4) cockney and cock's egg; the controversy
over this derivation, and 5) the putative etymology of
cockney.
1. The word cockney surfaced in two meanings
almost simultaneously. Langland (1362) used it in an
alliterative phrase whose interpretation remained
unclear until J. Murray (1890a) explained ME cokeney as
'cock's egg.' In Chaucer (1386), cokenay means 'fool' or
'simpleton' and is pronounced without syncope, in three
syllables. The post-Langland attestations of the meaning
'egg' are few and late (1568 and 1592), though a 1377
passage, cited in OED, may belong here too. Cokeney (-
ay) 'egg' occurred only in descriptions of poor meals as
part of set phrases (be served a cockney, not have even a
cockney, and so on). By contrast, the meaning 'fool' has a
long and uninterrupted history from 'milksop, pet child'
to 'simpleton' and further to 'Londoner.'
Casaubon (1650:218, 308-9) traced cockney to Gk
oiKOyevfje, 'born and bred at home.' His fanciful
etymology, which even Casaubon's contemporaries
rejected, turns up as late as 1868 (anonymous
[1868b:137-38]). Mackay (1877; 1887:87-89), who
believed that most English words have Gaelic roots,
explained cockney as a combination of Gael caoch
'empty' + neoni 'nobody' (= 'ignoramus'). Around the
same time, two other equally improbable Celtic sources
244
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of cockney were offered: Wel coeg 'silly' and Corn cok

'folly' (Douce [1807, II:156], cf GAWK and see Skeat1 in
sec 2, below; the nonexistent Corn cok must have been
contrived on the basis of goc 'foolish'). Thomson related
cockney to "Gothic" kauptona 'emporium' and gawken
'jack sprout, coxcomb.' His Gothic usually means
'Swedish' and sometimes 'Old Icelandic'; here probably
OI kauptün was meant. Gawken is a blend of some
Scottish word and an Icelandic article (see GAWK and
GOWK in OED). Thomson also mentioned several
Romance forms, including cockagney (= Cockaigne). His
reviewer (anonymous [1826: 111]) did not know enough
to question the ghost forms but doubted their relevance
(except for cock-agney) in tracing the history of cockney.
The best-known old etymology of cockney goes back
to Minsheu. According to his anecdote, a Londoner took
his son for a ride in the country. The youngster had never
seen animals before and when he heard a horse, he
asked what it was that the horse had done and received
the answer: "The horse doth neigh." Soon he heard a
cock crow and asked: "Doth the cock neigh too?" Hence
cockney ('cock-neigh'), a person "raw and unripe in coun-
trymen's affairs." That story (recorded in OED and CD)
was of course told tongue in cheek, for no Londoner
could have grown up without seeing horses. More than
two centuries later, J. Taylor (1818:36-37) explained the
origin of cockney according to Minsheu, without
245
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mentioning any other hypotheses. He probably knew

none.
Blount referred to Camden's derivation of cockney
from the alleged ancient name of the Thames and
added: "Others say the little brook which runs by
Turnbole and Turnmillstreet, was anciently so called."
(Camden says nothing similar in Britannia... or
Remaines..., and the passage in Blount is absent in
Förster [1941: 498], who discusses Camden's ideas in
detail. An earlier search also failed to confirm Blount's
reference: Curtis [1852].) A river name Cockney does not
turn up in the books consulted, but the hydronyms Cock
Beck, Cocker, Coker, and Cocken exist (Ekwall [1928;
1960],
Förster [1941:158, 409, 425]). Only Phillips and
Coles, whose dictionaries depend on Blount's, took
that etymology seriously. Later (for example, in the 1696
edition), Phillips removed it but left the "absurd mis-
expression" cock neigh.
Beginning with Hickes (1703-05: Institutiones
Grammaticx Anglo-Saxonicx & Moeso-Gothicx, p. 231,
note 1), cockney has been seen as the name of someone
living in the land of Cockaigne (Hickes writes cokayne), a
fabulous country of abundance and, by inference,
London. That was Bell's opinion (BPW, 230-31), and
Cockaigne is still sometimes considered to be the
etymon of cockney, though Skeat1, in contradistinction to
246
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Mueller1, denied the connection. And indeed, the

meaning 'pet child, simpleton' hardly developed from
'inhabitant of the land of plenty' (Hickes explains: 'one
fond of drinking and eating' —» 'ignoramus' —» 'one not
versed in the affairs of country life'). Popular articles that
set out to explain the "archeology" of cockney (like Carey
[1822] and anonymous [1845]) usually end up describing
the joys of E Cockaigne ~ F Cocagne ~ Ital Cocagna.
Cocknei in the King of Cocknei does not mean 'London'
(OED).
2. Another cluster of hypotheses centers on
Medieval L coqui na 'kitchen.' The name Cockaigne,
which is of Romance origin, probably means something
like 'cookieland.' Since E cook and kitchen go back to
coquina and its derivatives, the two etymologies (from
Cockaigne and from coquina) share some ground. The
intermediate stages were supposed to be: coquina -»
coquinator 'cook, scullion' —» a general term of
contempt —» cockney (see, for instance, Tyrwhitt
[1775:253-54, note on line 4206]). F coquin 'rogue,
scoundrel' and acoquiner 'seduce; deprave' appeared to
provide an additional link.
The first to suggest the French past participle
*coquine or acoquine and coquin as the etymons of
cockney was Thomas Henshaw, who was the editor of
Skinner's posthumous dictionary in 1671. Henshaw took
for granted that F coquin had at one time meant 'person
247
Adz(e) Adz(e)

fond of cookery' and that it was a cognate of L coquina.

His idea found wide acceptance. Webster adopted it (W
[1828]), and even Ker (1837, II:131-32), who traced
cockney to the nonexistent Dutch word kokene-jong (=
koksjongen) 'scullion,' mentioned it in his book.
Skeat returned to Henshaw's etymology. In the 1882
edition of his dictionary, where he despaired of finding
the origin of cockney, he listed ME cokes 'simpleton,' Wel
coegynnaidd 'conceited, foppish' and Wel coegennod
'cocquette' (-aidd and -od are suffixes), as well as Corn
gocyneth 'folly' and gocy 'foolish' (< coc 'empty vain'),
but in the Errata and Addenda he disclaimed his Celtic
hypothesis (because coegynaidd is stressed on the
second syllable) and instead accepted Wedgwood's
opinion. Wedgwood started from the verb cocker
(cockney was thus supposed to signify 'a cockered child')
and compared it with 16th-century Du kokelen ~ keukelen
'cocker' (Kilianus; see kokelen also in VV) and F
coqueliner 'dandle, cocker, pamper' (Cot-grave). Skeat
rejected that comparison, but
Wedgwood never gave it up. However, he did not
contest Skeat's etymology (he could have done it in
Wedgwood [1882]) and communicated his new idea,
which is really Henshaw's, to Skeat. He now suggested
that cockney was formed from OF (*)coquiné (< VL
*coquinatus) 'vagabond who hangs around the kitchen'
or 'child brought up in the kitchen.' Skeat cited F
248
Adz(e) Adz(e)

coquineau 'scoundrel,' but the French word appeared in

this reconstruction as a parallel to, not as the etymon of,
cockney.
Skeat2-3 reproduces the format of Skeat1, though the
third edition (1899) was published long after Skeat had
abandoned his old etymology of cockney (see SKCW-5,
125, note on line 4208). He says, in Skeat (1885:576),
that cokeney means 'cook's assistant, scullion, inferior
cook' from VL co-quinatus and explains: "It is easily seen
how co-quinatus might mean either (1) a person
connected with the kitchen, as in M.E. cokeney, a
scullion; (2) a child brought up in the kitchen, or
pampered by servants, as in E. cockney, often used in
this sense; and (3) a hanger-on to a kitchen, or pilfering
rogue, whence F. coquin, as in Cotgrave." The same gloss
'cook's assistant, scullion, undercook, petted child,
cockney' appears in Mayhew and Skeat (1888, cokeney).
In more recent scholarship, Holthausen traced
cockney to Old French and thence to L *adcoquinatus
(EW). Weekley (1907-10:213-16; 1909:107) originally
explained cockney and coquin as coming from acoquiné
'self-indulgent frequenter of the kitchen, unfit for manly
doings, loafer,' hence 'milksop.' He considered the
meaning 'child that sucketh long' secondary, whereas in
milksop the process allegedly went in the opposite
direction. He pointed out that in the eastern dialects of
Old French, L -atum and -atem had usually become ei(t)
249
Adz(e) Adz(e)

rather than é. The loss of a- did not bother him. Thus ME

cockney turned out to be OF acoquiné adopted with "the
Burgundian pronunciation." Words like country, valley,
and attorney were said to show the same development
of the final vowel. But in his dictionary, 'frequenter of
the kitchen' (that is, *adcoquinatus) is absent. There he
assumes an Old French form with -ei that was "made
into" both OF coquin and ME cokenei and prefers to
leave the etymology of acoquiné undiscussed. He also
mentions Cotgrave's coqueliner 'dandle,' a verb known
to Wedgwood (see above) and relevant only as the
etymon of or a form similar to E cocker.
Klein (CEDEL) misunderstood and remodeled
Weekley's entry. He referred to the northern (not
eastern) French past participle acoquine, without a
diacritic over -e (this is the form in Skeat's glossary to
Piers Plowman, but is it not a misprint there?), derived
the verb acoquiner 'make fond of' from coquin, and
tentatively traced coquin to coq 'cock.' Since *coquine
has not been attested, ME cokenei can be only a reflex of
the aphetic form of the past participle. Weekley's
etymology goes back to Hen-shaw and partly Cotgrave,
who glossed coquine (f) 'a beggar-woman; also, a
cockney, simperdecockit, nice thing' and thus posited a
connection between cockney and coquin(e).
3. Some etymologists have tried to derive
cockney not only from cook but also from cock. In
250
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the few passages in which cokenay (-ey) seems to

denote some kind of food, it was taken for 'a
young or small cock, which had little flesh on its
bones' and by transference 'weakly fellow' (WPP
II: 580; WPW, 609). In DOPE, the first gloss of
cockney is 'young cock,' but it is based on conjecture,
not fact. The same holds for Skeat (1867:VIII, note 2;
disclaimed in Skeat [1885:576]), Child (1860:295), and
Matzner (1878-85, I: cokenei).
Folk etymology connected cockney and cock long
before philologists did that. Cocknel(l) (< VL coconellus),
first recorded in 1570, meant 'cockney' and 'cockerel.'
But if cockney is some sort of cock, what is -nay (-ney)?
In early studies, only one suggested etymology tries to
explain the final syllable (if we disregard the "cock
neigh" anecdote). Cot-grave glossed niais (or niez)
'neastling, a young bird taken out of a neast; hence, a
youngling, novice, cunnie, ninne, fop, noddie, cockney,
etc.' OF niais denoted any bird of prey taken from the
nest, as faucon [that is, falcon] niais; 'dunce, dummy' is a
later meaning. That idea also found a few adherents. The
reviewer of Nares (anonymous [1822b:616]) asserted
that the second part of cockney is niais. J. Marshall
(1890; published before J. Murray [1890a]) suggested
that a slang phrase *coq niais (or *coq niez) had been
applied to London apprentices in early time. We almost
return to Minsheu, but instead of *cock neigh obtain
251
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*coq niais, with after n- left unaccounted for. Pegge

(1803:22-29; 1814: XI, 21-28; 1844: V-VI, 16-26), Todd in
Johnson-Todd, anonymous (1889b), and the works
dealing with Shakespeare's use of cockney (see the end
of this entry) give the most detailed surveys of the early
etymologies of cockney.
4. Between 1882 and 1890, many dictionaries
and books repeated Skeat's version of Wedg-
wood's etymology. CD1 called the derivation of
cockney from *coquine phonetically satisfactory but
historically unsupported, a statement J. Murray
(1890a) used for a violent attack on CD. K.M.E.
Murray (1977:266-67) touches briefly on this epi-
sode, and Liberman (1996a) recounts it in detail. J.
Murray destroyed the phonetic base of
Wedg-wood/Skeat's (and CD's) reconstruction by reject-
ing the postulated change of OF -e to ME ay (ei).
Mayhew (1890) cited numerous words of the attorney
type, allegedly with -ey < e, but J. Murray's rejoinder
(1890b) leaves no doubt that Mayhew was wrong.
Manuals of Middle English give no examples of a
diphthong from OF e(e). See Jordan (1925:sec 25; the
same in later editions), Weinstock
(1968:34), and Luick (1964:442; only OF fee yielded
ME feie 'fairy'). However, the reverse process—OF -
ee corresponding to ME ei (ay)—seems to have occurred

252
Adz(e) Adz(e)

in F haquenee < ME Hakenei (AF hakenei) 'hackney'

(from Hackney in Middlesex).
J. Murray also offered his own etymology of cockney.
He interpreted cokeney as coken-ey 'cocks' (gen pl) egg.'
Cock's egg and its German counterpart Hahnenei have
some currency in Modern English and German dialects
and folklore and mean all kinds of defective eggs, as in
cock's-egg 'a small abortive egg' (Holloway), 'a small egg
without a yoke; an abortive or wind egg' (EDD, cock, sb1).
J. Murray concluded that 'defective egg' had yielded
figurative uses: 'milksop, pet child; weakling, effeminate
man; townsman; Londoner.' Even the attacked
Americans hailed his discovery, though not without
reservations (let it be remembered that the provocation
for J. Murray's article [1890] was Scott's etymology of
cockney in CD). In both countries, the origin of cockney
aroused a good deal of public interest. The relevant
literature is as follows. In England (in the order of
appearance,
after J. Murray [1890a]): Chance (1890a), Earle
(1890), Mayhew (1890), J. Murray (1890b), Cook (1890),
J. Murray (1890c and d), Wedgwood (1890a), F. Müller
(1890), Chance (1890b), Wedgwood (1890b), Hales
(1891). In the United States:
anonymous (1890), Scott (1890; 1892:206-11, 220;
1894:107). Murray's gloss ('defective egg') explained
the passage in Langland and in two similar later
253
Adz(e) Adz(e)

passages: the authors, it appeared, spoke not about

'diminutive cocks,' 'lean fowls,' 'lean or common meat,'
'chickens,' or 'scullions' but about small eggs. Perhaps
only one example of the meaning 'small egg' needs a
note. Florio cites cac-cherelli 'hens-cackling. Also eggs, as
we say cockanegs.' Scott (1892:220) showed that Florio
had misunderstood Boccaccio's 'hens' droppings' as
'hens' eggs.'
Murray's second conclusion, namely that cokeney
'defective egg' and cokeney 'spoiled child' are the same
word is not persuasive. The meaning 'defective egg' was
rare in Middle English and did not continue into later
periods, whereas cokeney 'spoiled child, etc,' occurred
often, so that its putative etymon could likewise be
expected to have greater frequency. Since no one
thought of a pun on 'defective egg' and 'spoiled child,'
the two words hardly interacted. The semantic distance
to be covered was not from 'bad egg' to 'bad child' but
from 'bad egg' to 'beloved, overprotected child.'
Murray's French example — coco 'egg; pet name for a
child; contemptuous designation of a grownup man'—
shows that the same word can designate an egg and a
nestling, but who would call one's darling a cock's egg? A
pet child did not have to be a weakling; the meaning
'weakling' developed from the idea of overindulgence
and the child's ineptitude as the result of foolish

254
Adz(e) Adz(e)

upbringing (Chance [1890a]). Cooke (1988:116) noted

that
a word meaning 'small or misshapen egg' was ap-
plied to men thought to have small or misshapen testes
and hence to any man who lacked virility. The sense
'milksop' or 'codling,' he says, was an obvious further
development through 'effeminate fellow.' But he cites
no examples of 'small egg' = 'small testis' and adduces no
evidence that cockeney ever referred to male genitals.
OED gives all seven passages in which cokeney 'bad egg'
occurs in Middle English and Early Modern English.
Also, some morphological difficulties have to be
taken into account. Coken- is an odd genitive plural of a
strong native noun. Murray's other examples (clerken-
and the like) are from Romance. Coc (or cok) may have
been borrowed from French, but by the 14 th century it
had lost all traces of its foreignness (if it ever had any).
Cocks' in the gloss 'cocks' egg' is equally odd. In G
Hahnenei 'cock's egg' and Gänsebraten 'roast goose,'
hahnen- and gänse- are old genitive singulars that were
reinterpreted as plurals later and on which Hühnerei
'hen's (hens') egg' and so forth were modeled. Consider
G Mausefalle 'mouse trap': the first element of that
compound is obviously not a plural form, because the
plural of Maus is Mäuse. In 14th-century English, such
models of word formation did not exist (Chance [1890a],
Scott [1892:209]).
255
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Scott (1892:206) suggested the division coke-nay, in

which nay = ay 'egg.' He also noted that the genitive
plural of cok (if weak, though the type of declension did
not bother him), would have
been cokken-, not coken- (Scott [1892:208]). Tyrwhitt
(1778:IV, 239) guessed that Chaucer's piggesnie is
pigges-n-ie 'pig's eye' (used at that time as a term of
endearment), and Douce (1807:II, 154-55) thought that
cockney was its vague synonym. He almost anticipated
Murray, though -ney in cockney is n-ey, not n-eye. CD2
explains cockney as "a form arising by misdivision of an
ay ~ an ey, as a nay ~ a ney." But by dismissing Murray's
cocken-ey, Scott stayed with an unetymological middle
vowel in cok-e-ney and could only refer to similar cases:
black-a-moor = 'black Moor,' pink-a-nye 'small or narrow
eye,' and mold-e-warp 'mole.' Another English
compound obscurely connected with -ei 'egg' is kidney,
but it provides no help in explaining cockney.
Murray's etymology that initially took English
lexicographers by storm has lost much ground since
1890. As stated above, Holthausen did not recognize it,
and Weekley agreed that cokeney may mean 'cock's egg'
when it refers to something edible. The post-1890
dictionaries are divided between Murray's etymology
and several alternative variants. Skeat4 and all the
Oxford dictionaries repeat the interpretation of OED.
ODEE and SOD3a cite cocker as a possible influence on
256
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cockney, which is not a new idea: Junius already

mentioned it at cockney, and Murray at cocker. All
the editions of FW, UED, RHD1-2, EB (through the
fourteenth edition, 1971), and AHD1 copy from OED.
ED (in the volume that appeared in 1894) offers the old
etymology (by Wedgwood-Skeat) and the new one (from
OED) as equally probable.
W1 follows CD (that is, OED with Scott's correction),
but W2 prefers Weekley's explanation ("prob. fr. a reg
form of OF acoquiné in sense of idle, pampered,
luxurious, from coquin rogue, rascal, perh. <
MLG kak 'pillory'").
The origin of coquin is debatable, but its derivation
from MLG kak, offered in EWFS, is the least probable of
all. W3 returns to the cocks' egg theory, while Partridge
(1958), CEDEL (in principle), and Barnhart copy from
Weekley (Barnhart repeats the old hypothesis of the
influence of cockaigne on cockney). NWD suggests
tentatively that coquin interacted with coken ey 'cooked
egg.' Since cook has always been a weak verb, the past
participle coken is a ghost word. WNWD no longer repro-
duces that etymology. MED distinguishes between
cokenei 1. 'a hen's egg, ?a bad egg' and 2. 'a pampered
child; an effeminate youth, weakling.' It explains the first
word as probably a facetious blend of chicken ei and cok,
and the second as either a derisive use of the first or as
adaptation of F acoquiné 'degraded.' Ernst (1894)
257
Adz(e) Adz(e)

referred to L cokinus, a 13th-century word that in England

meant 'royal letter carrier of inferior rank,' and
concluded that the cokinus (or cockney) "had something
to do with the king's kitchen." Skeat (1894) disapproved
of this attempt to return to an etymology he himself
once embraced. Indeed, even though initially cokini
"were simply a pair of hands from kitchen, used as
casual messengers," (DMTP, cokini), this fact has no
bearing on the origin of cockney. The equation cokinus =
cockney is wrong. Someone who like Ger-son (1983:1)
will try "to learn quickly" the etymology of cockney from
a dictionary will be lost among the conflicting
hypotheses.
5. The conclusions that can be drawn from the
foregoing are either negative or tentative. ME cokeney
'cock('s) egg' and 'milksop; simpleton' are probably
different words. Both were first recorded toward the end
of the 14th century. Cokeney (reg) 'egg' is the older of the
two and should be explained as cok-e-ney, with intrusive
-e- and n-added by misdivision of an ey as a ney. That
etymology is nearly faultless. Intrusive -e- is not unusual
in compounds. One can cite (in addition to Scott's
examples) chickabiddy and refer to a certain rhythmic
model. Thus, the incomprehensible Dutch phrase ter
kaap varen 'go privateering' became the English
compound cap-a-barre 'misappropriate government
stores' (anonymous [1912]), and in words beginning with
258
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cock-, intrusive -e- is especially common: cockagrice 'a

cock and a pig cooked together' (obsolete), cock-a-leekie
'soup made from a fowl boiled with leeks,' cock-a-hoop
'in a state of elation,' cock-a-bondy 'fly for angling' (reg),
along with its near homonym cock-a-bendy 'instrument
for twisting ropes,' cock-a-rouse 'person of distinction,'
and cock-a-doodle-doo. Cockalorum 'whipper-snapper'
and some words borrowed from Dutch and French, for
example, cockatiel 'a kind of parakeet,' cockatoo 'a kind
of parrot,' the humorous word cockamamie 'ludicrous,'
and cockatrice also have -a- after cock. Finally, many
words have 'organic' -e- ~ -a- like jack-a-napes and vis-à-
vis; see more at RAGAMUFFIN. If cockenay was stressed
on the last syllable, it belonged with the jocular ana-
pestic formations of the type known elsewhere in
Germanic (Brondum-Nielsen [1924]).
Cokeney (-ay) 'milksop, simpleton' should probably
not be traced to cokeney 'cock('s) egg,' because their
meanings are hard to reconcile and because cokeney was
a rare word limited to dialects and even there just to a
few set phrases. Slang and obscenities are often
borrowed, and cokeney2 may indeed have come to
Middle English from French, but its source is elusive.
*Cock niais has not been attested in Old French or in
Anglo-French. Coquin 'rogue, rascal' is a strong term of
abuse, and coquin 'beggar' cannot have developed into
'milksop, etc.' Nor is OF acoquiné 'spoiled,' though a
259
Adz(e) Adz(e)

good semantic and rhythmic match for ME cokeney

'spoiled child,' without problems as the etymon of
cockney2. The derivation from acoquiné presupposes a
(highly frequent?) past participle changing into a slang
noun in the borrowing language. Reference to an eastern
variant of the Old French form with -ei is a bold attempt
to save an otherwise shaky reconstruction. Native
sources of cokeney2 are absent: neither cokeney1 nor
cocknell is a viable possibility. An association with
Cockaigne is late.
Since OF coquin and acoquiner probably have the
root coq 'cock' (the basis of many humorous,
depreciatory, and obscene words), coquin, coquiner ~
acoquiné, cocker, and cockney may in the end be related
to one another and to cockney 'egg,' but even if so, we
would still not know the mechanism by which cokeney2
came into being. Those speakers of Middle English who
did not use cokeney1 must have noticed that cokeney2
sounded like cock('s) egg, but, apparently, this fact did
not bother them. In similar fashion, we use cocktail and
cockroach without associating them with cock, tail, or
roach (the name of a fish).
A Note on Shakespeare's Use of Cockney
Cockney occurs in Shakespeare twice: in King Lear II.
4, in the Fool's mocking speech (123ff; the numbering of
the lines differs from edition to edition), and in Twelfth
Night, also in the Fool's (Feste's) speech (IV. 1, 12ff).
260
Adz(e) Adz(e)

When Lear, stung by his daughters' ingratitude, exclaims:

"O me! my heart, my rising heart! but, down!" the Fool
retorts: "Cry to it, Nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels
when she put 'em i'th'paste alive; she knapp'd'em
o'th'coxcombs with a stick, and cried 'Down, wantons,
down!' 'Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his
horse, buttered his hay."
The passage given above is partly responsible for the
fact that cockney has sometimes been glossed 'cook' in
several obscure passages (for instance, in Langland) and
elsewhere. It has been suggested that the Fool alludes to
some popular story, for 'numskulls attempting to cook
animals alive' seems to have been a widespread motif in
(late) medieval folklore. In Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff
[The Ship of Fools] (1494), an engraving shows two fools
with clubs pushing a resistant pig into a kettle, and a
proverbial line is quoted (Wut-tke [(1994:10]). The
proximity of the alliterating words (cockney, knapped,
and coxcombs) suggests an old song or poem. The
woman in the Fool's speech was too tender-hearted to
kill the eels before putting them into a pie, and her
brother, too, had the best intentions, but, like Lear, both
made fatal mistakes.
Although those characters may have been Londoners
ignorant of the ways of fish and horses, this is not the
point, for the Fool's tale is part of the international
folklore of stupid people. It is similar from China to
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Norway, and its protagonists can live anywhere. Mackay

(1887) was right that the cockney and her brother are
first and foremost fools, even if the woman also happens
to be a cook. FH (998, note on line 227), in discussing the
sentence from The Tournament of Tottenham: "Every v
and v had a cokenay," insisted on the translation 'Every
five had one cook' (instead of 'they had one poor egg to
every five'), with reference to King Lear, in which
cockney allegedly means 'cook.' The editors were here
mistaken, and revisers did not repeat their gloss (see
Sands [1966: 321, note on line
227]).
In Twelfth Night, Feste meets Sebastian whom he
takes for Cesario, that is, for Viola and addresses him.
Sebastian does not understand what Feste wants and
finally says: "I prithee vent thy folly somewhere else, /
Thou know'st not me." Feste, amused by Sebastian's
phrase Vent thy folly, answers: "Vent my folly! He has
heard that word of some great man, and now applies it
to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubber, the
world, will prove a cockney." Commentators know that
Florio glossed cocagna as lubberland and they
occasionally mention that circumstance in discussing
cockney and the land of Cockaigne, another name for the
legendary lubberland (H. Allen [1936:911 and note 18]),
but they have missed the connection between the two in
Feste's comment, in which lubber and cockney occur in
262
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the same short sentence. Cockaigne is not the etymon of

cockney, but since with time, both came to designate
London and sounded so much alike, they were seen as
variants of the same name. Feste may have meant to
say: "This great lubber [that is, Sebastian] will prove a
cockney [that is, an idiot]"; lubber suggested lubberland,
and he added the world in parenthesis. The sentence is
obscure, but the aside can be understood as a blend of
"My interlocutor is a fool" and "This land of fools is, after
all, among us, cockneys, in our own land of Cockaigne."
Many annotated editions of Shakespeare, glossaries, and
special works on Shakespeare's plays tell the history of
the word cockney in greater detail than it is
told in dictionaries. See MSh 10 (116-17), W.
Wright (1877:156-57), Furness (1880:148-49), ASh 17
(124; Henry N. Hudson's note), Muir (1952:84-85),
Craig (n.d.:104); Furness (1901:250-52), Luce (1937: 134-
35), LC (1975:116-17); Nares (cockney), Douce
(1867:151-56), and also Herrtage (cockney).
CUB (1530)
Cub is one of many Germanic words having the struc-
ture k + vowel + b and designating lumpy (round) objects
and animals. It belongs with E cob 'lump,' E keb 'ewe
that lost its lamb,' late MDu kabbe 'young pig,' Sw reg
kib 'calf,' and so on, but is not related to any Celtic word
for 'whelp' or
'dog.'
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The sections are devoted to 1) the existing

etymologies of cub, 2) cub, cob, and other animal names
having the k-b structure, 3) the putative Proto-Indo-
European etymons of cub, and 4) cub among other
obscure words of a similar phonetic shape.
1. Cub was first recorded in the form cubbe, which
remained in use for two centuries. Cub 'bring forth
young' appeared only in Johnson. We do not know
whether cubbe was ever pronounced in two syllables, for
similar forms in related languages can be mono- and
disyllabic: thus, OI kid and OHG chizzi, ME kid and kide
'kid.' The closest cognate of cub is LG kubbelken 'the
weakest nestling' (Woeste [1876]). Cub ousted the native
noun whelp from several spheres. Disregarding the un-
grounded comparison of cub with F cheau 'bud on an
onion sprout' (Thomson), the hypotheses about the
etymology of cub are of three types.
1) According to Minsheu (cubbe), the word
cub derives from L cubo 'lie, repose' because the
cub "lies in his hole, and goeth not forth for prey as
the Reynard, or old Fox doeth." He fortified his
conjecture by citing Hebr gor 'young lion,' from gor
'dwell, abide,' and referred to the Hebrew text of
Is. XI: 6 "the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,"
in which he took wolf and dwell for derivatives of the
root ~\g (dl). Minsheu's etymology, without the parallel
from Hebrew, occurs as late as 1880 in Webster and is
264
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given with or without reference to its originator in

Skinner, Gazophylacium, Bailey (1721; 1730), Lemon,
Richardson, Oswald (1866:156; likewise in later editions),
DDEL, and Webster (in the editions between 1864 and
1880). Mueller2 and Mackay (1877) do not reject it out-
right. Mahn (in W [1864]) adds an alternative: cub < L
incubare 'brood, hatch' (found for the last time
in W [1880]).
The derivation of cub from cubo is fanciful, for cub
does not look like a coinage from a Latin root by an
educated sportsman. Cub as the name of a young whale
(1687) should also be taken into account in the
assessment of this word's etymology.
2) W (1828) says: "Allied perhaps to Ir. caobh
'a branch, a shoot,' but the origin of the word is
uncertain." Webster's Irish etymology stayed in
dictionaries until 1864. ID (1850) reproduced it
verbatim. Mackay (1877) suggested Gael cu beag 'puppy'
(a free collocation, literally 'dog little') as the etymon of
cub, and Skeat1 cited Ir cuib 'whelp,' and Wel cenau
'whelp,' Gael cuain 'litter of whelps or pigs,' from *cu
'dog,' Wel ci 'dog,' which are related to L canis, E hound,
and so on. In Skeat (1887 [= 1892]:451), cub appears
among words of Welsh origin. Stormonth, ED, and W 1
followed Skeat. While CD emphasizes that ModIr cuib
'cub, whelp, dog' is from English, W 1 compares cub and
cuib, and OED mentions "a rare OIr. form cuib" but adds
265
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that no historical connection has been traced between

cuib and E cub. Yet UED states: "[P]rob. fr. or cogn. w. Ir.
cuib 'whelp'; cp. Gael. cu 'dog'." The Celtic hypothesis
survived all the editions of FW and reemerged in
Partridge (1958), Barnhart, and KD. The vowels in the
two words (u and ui) are irreconcilable. In OIr cuib, even
the consonants did not coincide with those of cub, for it
was pronounced with a final fricative (LE, cuib). The
same arguments militate against the idea that the Irish
word was borrowed from English. The history of OIr cuib
seems to be beyond reconstruction. The origin of Celt
*cu 'dog' is, by contrast, clear: see
Fick3 III:78 (hunda), WP I:466, IEW 633, and LE.
Extracting cub from Wel cu beag (Mackay) is an un-
tenable procedure. Cub was not borrowed from Irish,
and it is not related to the Celtic root *cw, for both begin
with k (a Germanic cognate of *cu would have had h-).
Despite Drexel's statement to the contrary (1926:110), a
similar form in a non-Indo-European family is of no
interest for E cub.
3) Wedgwood1 (and only here) compared cub and OI
kobbi 'young seal.' His comparison recurs in R.G. Latham.
Icelanders understand kobbi as a pet name of kopr with
the same meaning. See CV and later dictionaries,
including IsEW and ABM, though Johannesson (1932:6-7,
8, at kobbi; further discussion at kjabbi and kubbi)
admits the possibility that kobbi is related to kubbi.
266
Adz(e) Adz(e)

According to AEW, kobbi is usually derived from kubbi

'block of wood' because of the animal's round head,
which is also the etymon of E cub and cob. However, the
picture is more complicated because a borrowed word
for 'block' or even 'young seal' would hardly have
acquired the meaning 'young fox' and 'young bear.'
In some form the idea that cub is related to E cob
and to OI kobbi 'seal' ~ kubbi 'block of wood' appealed
to Chambers, Johansson (1900:375),
Skeat4, Persson (1912:76 and 102-03), Weekley, EW,
L. Bloomfield (1925: 100), WP I:395-96 (IEW, 561
does not mention cub), Schroer, CEDEL, W2, and
RHD. Mueller1, Mackay (1877), Stormonth, Partridge
(1958), and Barnhart mention that etymology as worthy
of consideration. Weekley (following FT, kobbe and
kubbe), SEO (kobbe and kubb), and others, reconstruct
the original meaning of cub as 'lump, shapeless object.'
Since borrowing does not explain the way from 'block' to
'whelp,' a Germanic root meaning 'lump' should rather
be posited. OI kobbi is probably a word with this root
and coined independently of kopr. Kobbi, which existed
as a pet name of Kolbeinn and Kolbrandr (later also of
Jakob), must have been connected with kopr through
folk etymology or as a deliberate joke. In words of such
phonetic structure, it is difficult to separate a common
name from a hypocoristic proper name; consider, for
example, E cuddy 'donkey,' allegedly from Cuthbert, and
267
Adz(e) Adz(e)

see Strandberg (1993). Swabian ko b 'old nag' can be an

aphetic form of Jakob, unless it was borrowed from
Slavic (Rosenfeld [1947:74-75]). Russ and Pol koby-a
'mare' (stress on the second syllable), its posited
etymon, is also an etymological crux.
Germanic languages have a great number of
monosyllabic roots like kub ~ kob, supposedly meaning
'lump, round object, soft object, etc.' They are found in
all kinds of animal names, most of which were attested
late. Such names tend to have expressive geminates,
variable vocalism (secondary, or false ablaut), and
alternations of the bb ~ pp (voiced ~ voiceless). See
Bjorkman (1908;
1912:262-63, on cub) and Persson (1904:60, on Gmc
kubb- ~ kobb- 'block of wood' and several animal
names). Their referents are usually 'young ones.' Kub ~
kob words coexist with synonyms having the shape
mokk, as in G reg mocke 'calf' and 'little pig' (Liberman
[1988b:104-08]; some of the conclusions of that study
should be modified), lobb ~ lopp and rib ~ rabb ~ robb
(see further at RABBIT and ROBIN). NEO (at hun 'bear
cub' = OI hunn 'small piece of wood, young animal, boy,
etc') mentions E cub, possibly as a case of analogous
semantic development. Cub is one of many mots
populaires (see the discussion of their phonetics and
etymology in Seebold [1997]), and projecting it to Proto-

268
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Indo-European, where it was allegedly a borrowing (thus

Beekes [1996:225, 227]), is not necessary.
2. The main problem for English is the relationship
between cub and cob. E cob is the name of a male swan,
several fishes, a short-legged, stout variety of horse, a
gull, and a spider (but the latter is the same word as
xttor-cobbe, probably 'poison head,' with the first
element left out; see COB). Cob 'male swan' is especially
hard to explain: it may be a shorter form of cobswan
'head swan' (as explained in Nares, at cobloaf, and in
Toone), rather than containing the root cob- 'animal
name.' Cob 'stout horse' is also obscure. No traces lead
from it to L caballus 'pack horse,' the words derived from
caballus, or E hobby (as Cockayne [1861:sec 305]
suggested). Cub can also mean 'young whale,' 'young fox'
('bear, lion, tiger'), and 'small sea gull' ('gull' is a common
occurrence in Scandinavian; the same in the Orkney
dialect: EDD).
From the historical perspective, cob 'animal name' is
indistinguishable from cub. Consider the following
variants of cub ~ cob by false ablaut. Wedgwood2~4 cites
Du kabbe, kebbe, kabbelen 'little pig,' and kabbelen
'produce young.' Kabbe and kabbelen also appear in
WNT. Kilianus gives kabbe and kabbeken 'porcellus';
kibbe 'pig' is widespread in Dutch dialects (NEW, big).
Wedgwood's kebbe (which does not turn up in the
dictionaries consulted) must be the same word as E
269
Adz(e) Adz(e)

keb(b) ~ kebbe 'ewe that has lost her lamb or whose

lamb is stillborn,' known from written records since the
end of the 15th century. DW compares G kippe ~ kibbe
'ewe' with Sc keb, E kebber ('refuse sheep taken out of
the flock,' cited by Halliwell from a 1585 source), Dan
kippe 'small calf,' Sw reg kibb, kubbe, and the like 'calf'
(Rietz; Moller [1943-45:12-13] offers numerous such
forms for 'calf' in Scandinavian dialects), and the Dutch
words in Kilianus.
Almost identical words appear in earlier and later
recordings. Among them are kebbe 'old useless cow or
sheep' (similar to ME kibber 'block of wood tied to an
animal to prevent it from straying,' kible 'block of wood,'
cubbel = kibber) (MED) and keb 'sheep, any creature
small of its kind; esp. an infant' (EDD). See more
examples in von Friesen
(1897:52-53), Kruppa-Kusch, and Wortmann
(1964:38-42: the names of sheep in northern German
dialects). Davies (1855:234) cites Lanc kibble hound
'beagle.'
Unless the are 'primitive creations' lacking tie with
the rest of Germanic vocabulary, G kibbe ~ kippe, Sw reg
kibb, and others lead from kab- ~ kob- / keb- ~ kib- to E
chip 'small thin piece of wood' (< OE cipp, cyp 'beam'; OS
kip 'post,' kipa 'stave'; OI keppr 'stick, staff,' and so on),
within the framework of the syncretism 'child, little
creature' / 'block of wood, stick' (see more at PIMP), and
270
Adz(e) Adz(e)

suggest their relationship with chip ~ chap ~ chop. Torp

(1909) indicated that relationship in Fick 4 (III:43, kip), and
it turns up in AEW at kjabbi 'fat person,' but it escaped
English etymological dictionaries. Nor do they mention
the kab forms at cub. Likewise, although the proximity of
cub and cob has become commonplace, OED and ODEE
ignored it. OED calls English keb a word of uncertain
etymology;
however, it is safely ensconced in a group of similar-
sounding animal names all over the Germanic-speaking
world.
3. Sound complexes designating small animals,
useless animals, and whelps need not be ancient, and it
is doubtful that the Germanic root kab- ~ kob-with all its
variants has Indo-European cognates in the true sense of
this term. Regardless of whether OI keipr 'rowlock' is
akin to L gibbus 'hump' (Wood [1926:88/11.13];
Holthausen [1942a:272]; AEW), those words seem to be
unrelated to kab- ~ kob-. Wortmann (1964) offered the
most detailed discussion of the kub- ~ kab- ~ keb- ~ kib-
group, but he mentioned too many words allegedly
derived from the same hypothetical root with the help of
various consonantal enlargements for their unity to de-
serve credence. He could not decide whether all of them
go back to a root meaning 'split, sprout, put out shoots'
(as in Go keinan and G keimen) or to a root with the
basic meaning 'lumpy object,' and the difference is
271
Adz(e) Adz(e)

indeed far from obvious. See more on this root at CHIDE

and KEY.
4. Some lexicographers do not side with any
existing derivation of cub. Junius, Johnson (-Todd),
Barclay, and ID2 venture no hypotheses. The latest
dictionaries almost unanimously call the etymology of
cub uncertain or unknown (W3, Chambers
[1983], ODEE, SOD, FW [1971], Hoad, and all editions
of Longman). Klein's statement to the effect that cub is
related to ML cuppa 'bowl, vessel, cup' is unfortunate
(CEDEL). Some connection between cob and cup exists,
but it is hard to disentangle the skein of twenty odd
migratory words designating 'head,' 'cap,' and 'cup'; see
also COB. (Liberman
[1994a:11-14] and [1997:97-108]).

CUSHAT (700)
OE cusceote is a compound, but neither the length of
u nor the morphemic cut in it is immediately obvious.
Hence several conflicting etymologies of the word. Most
probably, u was long. The division cüsc-eote presupposes
an incomprehensible element -eote; also, cüsc- 'chaste'
as the first component is an unexpected epithet for a
bird, even for one whose fidelity to its mate has become
proverbial. Cü-sceote yields approximately 'cow darter'
(if cü- is 'cow'), and this is no less puzzling. Identification
of cu- with ModE coo is suspect because coo surfaced in
272
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English late, and the resulting whole 'coo darter' or 'coo

caller' (if -sceote is related to shout rather than shoot)
would have no parallels. However, two possibilities to
connect pigeons and cows exist. Birds regularly follow
cattle and feed on insects flying over the herds and are
therefore often jokingly called cow guards. More
importantly, doves and pigeons are the only lactating
birds in nature. Cu-sceote may have been an adaptation
of the Celtic name of the wood pigeon. Then the
connection between pigeons and cows led to the folk
etymological reshaping of the word. Cüsceote was
probably understood by the speakers of Anglo-Saxon as
'cow darter,' that is, 'cow-like darter' or 'swift-flying bird
following cows (cattle).' The first interpretation is more
specific and perhaps more preferable.
Section 1 is devoted to the existing etymologies of
cushat, and section 2 treats the connection between
pigeons and cows.
1. Cushat 'wood pigeon' has been recorded in
multiple forms: cuscute, cuscote, cusceote (in early 8th-
and early 11th-century glosses), then after a long interval
(1000-1483) cowscott, cowschote, cow-shut, and so on.
In Modern English, cushat is a North Country word, but
Robert Burns and Walter Scott popularized it in their
poetry. The length of u in OE cusceote is impossible to
reconstruct with certainty, for the spelling may be due to
folk etymology (Flasdieck [1958:389-90, sec 6.33]; see
273
Adz(e) Adz(e)

also a brief discussion of this vowel in Schlutter

[1908b:433] and Skeat [1909]). It is usually believed that
cü- had a long vowel because cüsceote is opaque. But
cusceote makes little sense even if cu- is understood as
OE cu 'cow.' Hence many attempts to separate reference
to the cow from the bird name.
Todd in (Johnson-Todd) divided the Old English word
into cusc- and -ote and identified cusc-with OE cusc
'chaste' "because of the conjugal fidelity of the bird." His
etymology recurs in Cockayne (1861:148/599) and
Smythe Palmer (1883:79-80, cow-shot; Smythe Palmer
corrects Bos-worth's cu s-sceote to cusc-eote). Skeat
(1886a), who missed Palmer's predecessors, pointed out
that the division cusc-ote involves an unknown suffix *-
ote; "moreover, cüsc is not clearly an Anglo-Saxon word,
being probably a borrowing from Old Saxon at a later
date than the occurrence of cüscote." The element *-ote,
unless it is a variant of -had, is indeed meaningless, and
the suffix of an abstract noun would be inappropriate in
such a word (Koch [1873:143]). Skeat was also right in his
assessment of the Old English bookish word cusc
'virtuous, chaste, modest.'
In German, in which OHG küski has continued via
MHG kiusch(e) into the present (keusch), it first meant
'proper in one's behavior, moral,' then 'showing restraint
in eating,' and only later 'chaste, abstinent in sexual
matters' (Frings and Müller [1951]). The etymon of the
274
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German word is believed to be L conscius 'sharing one's

knowledge, conscious (of),' though at least one other
hypothesis exists; see Kaspers (1945:151). Conjugal
fidelity is not synonymous with chastity, and the concept
of a chaste (restrained, moral) bird is incongruous.
The division cu-sceote presupposes the second
component sceot 'quick.' Koch (1873:143) cited OE
sceota 'trout' (='a quick fish') and OI -skjoti (which occurs
only in the compounds fararskjoti and reidskjoti 'means
of transportation, horse, donkey') and concluded that -
sceote referred to the cushat's ability to dart
precipitously into the air. He identified cu with cuc (=
cwic) 'living,' presumably used for reinforcing the
meaning 'darter.' He did not comment on the absence of
the form *cucsceote or on the change of cuc- to cu -.
Mueller included cushat only in the second edition of his
dictionary and halfheartedly accepted Koch's etymology.
The same etymology (cushat from *cuc-scote 'quick-
shooting, swift-flying') turns up as possible ("perhaps")
in CD and FW. Pigeons as 'darters' are credible; compare
OE -sc(e)ote and the Scandinavian regional words skuda
(Bornholm) and skuta (Faroese, Swedish) 'wood
pigeon' (Suolahti
[1909:208]), and Ebbinghaus's tracing of OHG
*attuba to *atar-tuba 'fast (flying) dove ~ pigeon'
(1989:137), but the loss of -c- in *cucsceote (dissimi-
lation?) has not been explained.
275
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Leo (1877:573) offered an almost irrefutable

derivation of cushat. He cited Wel ysguthan 'wood
pigeon, ring dove,' from Wel coed 'forest,' and suggested
that the form *cusguthan or *cusguddan had become OE
cusceote. Like the Welsh word, Corn cudon and Breton
kudon mean 'wood pigeon, ringdove,' which, in all
probability, excludes borrowing from English. Davies
(1880a:16; independently of Leo?) came to the same
conclusion. Skeat (1886a) admitted that cu -sceote could
be "an English adaptation of a British name." If Leo
guessed the origin of cusceote, in Old English we are
dealing with folk etymology. It would still be interesting
to find out what made early Anglo-Saxons connect
pigeons and cows, though folk etymology defies logic.
Leo's etymology has never been discussed except in a
short note by Skeat, who preferred to think that
cusceote was a native word. In his opinion, cu - has the
same meaning as ModE coo, and he glossed the whole as
'coo-darter' (likewise in Skeat4), an unattractive
compound.
OED expressed no enthusiasm for Skeat's etymology,
but it gained the support of ID2, Suolahti (1909:208; he
cites G Girr-Taube as an analogue of coo-darter),
Weekley (1924; he believed that cushat as 'darter' has a
parallel in dove ~ dive, but those words are, most likely,
unrelated), UED, and WNWD1-2. The verb coo was first
recorded in 1670, and its age cannot be ascertained. It
276
Adz(e) Adz(e)

need not have existed a thousand years earlier. More

often, and not only in Germanic, cooing is rendered by
the sound strings girr, kirr, garr, gurr, kurr, turr, and the
like. EDD cites coo in a poem and coo-me-door 'a term of
endearment for a wood-pigeon.'
Among so-called natural sounds, one can find entire
complexes like cushat imitating a bird's voice (for
instance, Sw kuish: Hellquist [1915:150]; similarly,
Hortling [1944:163] explains the Swedish bird name kusk
as onomatopoeia), but OE cusceote is hardly an
onomatopoeic word. Lockwood (1984) glossed cusceote
as 'coo-shouter,' that is, as 'coo-caller.' Shout surfaced in
English only in the 14th century. Its etymology is a matter
of debate, and projecting this verb to the earliest Old
English, along with coo, is a risky enterprise. Among
other forms, Lockwood mentioned queece, a regional
variant of cushat (a cross between some unknown word
and *squeece < sceote rather than from cusceote?) and
see quest and quist in Terry (1881). Such variants of
cushat beset us all the time. For example, coscirila, a 9th-
century German gloss, copied from an OE gloss, is a
(corrupted) form of cusc-with a diminutive suffix
(Suolahti [1909:208]).
2. Regardless of whether cusceote is native or
adapted from a Celtic word, its first element, if it is cu
'cow,' is not as incomprehensible as most sources call it,

277
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though even Kitson [1997:495] considered it as lacking

an etymology. Pictet (1859,
I:402-03; 495-60; II:58) devoted an illuminating
chapter to pigeons in his book and noted that all
over the Indo-European world words for 'pigeon' begin
with the syllable go- ~ ko- ~ gu- ~ ku- (L columba, E
culver, Russ golub', and so on). Birds, he went on to say,
regularly follow cattle, feed on insects flying over the
herds, and are often called ironically cow guards. (E
cowbird shows that irony is not indispensable in such
cases.) He cited G Kuhstelze (Stelze 'wagtail') and
Ziegenmelker. The latter is called 'goatsucker' in English.
Its etymon is L caprimulgus, a calque of Gk odyoBflcxc;
(Suolahti [1909:XIV and 17]). Similar forms occur in Slavic
(Russ kozodoi and its cognates). According to an ancient
legend transmitted by Aristotle, goatsuckers visit goats
at night and suck their udders. The bird's other German
name is Nachtschwalbe (literally 'night swallow'), and its
French name is tette-chevre (literally 'teat goat').
(Likewise, butterflies have the ill fame of milk thieves:
two 17th-century glosses on L papilio are G Molcken/dieb,
-stehler: Bierwirth [1891:389].) Pictet suggested that cu-
sceote meant 'cow darter,' a bird flying toward a cow. In
Old English, sce otan 'shoot' often occurs in religious
contexts with the sense 'injure.' One example is
ylfagescoten 'elfshot,' that is, 'injured by

278
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elves; sick' (see discussion in Ivanov [1999a:15, note

50] and at DWARF). Cusceote (if it was cusceote) may
have meant 'a quick bird following cattle (herds).' But if
the same idea underlay the names cusceote and
aiyoQ^laj, the implied meaning could be 'cow injurer;
milk thief.' Situations in which an animal is depicted as a
sky dweller (Majut [1963] and Liberman [1988c]), that is,
the opposite of the one discussed above ('from a bird to
an animal'), have no relevancy here.
Another possibility of connecting pigeons and cows
is more specific: doves are lactating birds. Lithuanian has
two words for 'pigeon,' namely balandis and karvelis;
they are roughly parallel to E dove and pigeon. Pictet did
not miss Lith karvelis and cited it among 'cow words' for
'pigeon.' Lith karve (f) means 'cow,' and karvelis, though
it is a masculine, seems to mean 'little cow.' By a
coincidence, balandis means 'wild dove' and 'hornless
cattle.'
J. Levin (1992:87-88) says the following about
pigeons and cows: "The pigeon is the only bird that feeds
milk to its young... The cock pigeon (in all species of
genus Columba) is the only male vertebrate which
normally produces... milk for his young... The hen pigeon
is the only female that lactates. This characteristic sets
pigeons and doves apart from all other feathered
bipeds... Contrary to one's reasonable assumption,
pigeon milk is not some regurgitated milky substance
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like milk. All pigeons and doves produce this creamy

substance, with a make-up very similar to rabbit's milk,
in their crops... Thus it is milk... that establishes a
connection between karve 'cow' and balandis 'pigeon'
that would support the metaphor, the parallelism,
implied in the epithet karvelis 'little cow.'" Since karvelis
also means 'a plant bearing blue flowers,' Karaliunas
(1993:110-11) seeks a color word behind karvelis
(balandis has long since been explained as 'a white bird';
see LEW and the references there). But karve 'cow'
cannot be separated from its Indo-European kin: Slav
korova 'cow,' L cervus 'deer,' Gmc *%erutaz 'hart,' and so
on. Nor is it desirable to divorce karvelis from karve.
Thus, pigeons could be considered 'cow injur-ers'
that steal milk to feed their young. If cu sceote is a native
word, some such idea probably gave rise to the name of
cow-like darters. If, however, cu sceote is a Welsh word,
a similar idea must have supported its folk etymological
adaptation. Ekwall (1960, Shotley) suggests that Shotley
goes back to *Scotta leah 'the lea of the Scots' or
perhaps 'pigeon wood,' but OE *sc(e)ota 'pigeon' does
not seem to have existed.
It is no wonder that cushat, a word without
cognates, poses almost insurmountable difficulties to
etymologists. Hardly any name of the wild pigeon, from L
palumbes to Russ viakhir', reveals its inner form without

280
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complications. In addition to Pictet's survey, see also

Edlinger (1886a, Taube).
DOXY (1530)
The most probable etymon of doxy is LG Dokke 'doll.'
If this is right, doxy has experienced the not uncommon
deterioration of meaning from 'wench, sweetheart' to
'whore.'
Two etymologies of doxy 'whore' exist. 1. From LG
dokken 'give quickly.' Partridge (1949a) traces doxy to
dock 'copulate,' known, according to him, since 1536 and
says: "A doxy is a woman one docks." This etymology
goes back to Skinner and should be discarded. Doxy did
not emerge in the meaning 'prostitute'; it existed for a
long time as a term of endearment ('wench,
sweetheart'). A neutral and even tender word for
'woman; the loved one' might yield 'prostitute.' Such is
the history of quean, which, in the rare cases it is used in
present-day English, means 'shameless jade, hussy' and
in the north 'lass, woman' (< OE cwene 'woman').
Likewise, whore is related to L ca rus 'dear' and OIr cara
'friend.' E hussy (< huswif 'housewife') and G Dirne
'whore,' originally 'maid(en),' have had a similar history.
But the way up, from 'prostitute' to 'sweetheart,' is
unimaginable. 2. From LG *doketje, a diminutive of dokk,
or directly from dokke, both meaning 'doll.' This
etymology (which first appeared in W 1828) is better
than Skinner's. Comparison of doxy with duck 'pet' (W1)
281
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lacks foundation. MLG ddkmaget 'whore,' literally

'maiden- [wearing a] kerchief' (ddk is a cognate HG Tuch
—Schutte [1902]), resembles doxy, but no connection
between it and doxy can be established.
Most modern dictionaries, insofar as they commit
themselves to some hypothesis, derive doxy from a word
for 'doll.' See a detailed explanation in CD, in all the
editions of Webster, and in Partridge (1961). OED leaves
the derivation of doxy open. It mentions only dock, one
of whose meanings is 'the solid fleshy part of an animal's
tail' (dock sb2), and relates it tentatively to Fr dokke
'bundle, bunch, ball (of twine, straw, etc),' LG dokke
'bundle (of straw, thread), skein of yarn, peg' (see
Baader [1953 (1954):42/18 on the Low German word]),
and G Docke 'bundle, skein; plug, peg.' Even in glossing
Docke, OED avoids 'doll' and lists only 'bundle, skein,
etc.' ODEE goes still further and dismisses doxy as a word
of unknown origin. Under PIE *der 'peel,' Shipley
(1984:69) lists a string of ill-assorted words, including
drab (sb, adj), draff, and dross, but offers no arguments
to justify his choice. Wedgwood laid special emphasis on
the fact that doxy at one time meant 'beggar's harlot.'
He cited the pair doxy - gixy and sought a connection
with F guese 'woman beggar.' His etymology (repeated
only by R.G. Latham) is not superior to Brocket's doxy < F
doux-œil, literally 'tender eye.'

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Dolls were originally small bundles, objects swaddled

and used as toys, and words designating bundles often
serve as (pet) names for children and women. However
devious the route of baggage 'pert, saucy woman' may
be, the common association between soft packages and
women ('bag and baggage') must have helped it stay in
English. As analogues one can cite Modi pjönkur (pl of
pjanka) 'bundle, baggage' versus Sw reg panka 'young
pig; little girl' (ABM), as well as G reg bönsel (< bünsel)
'little boy' and bunschel 'bundle' (J. Müller [1911:182]).
The path from 'doll' to 'lassie, gal' and eventually to
'whore' is straightforward (Liberman [1992a:80-81]).
DRAB 'slut' (1515)
Drab seems to be etymologically related to traipse. If
this suggestion has merit, it is easy to understand how
the first word came to mean 'gadabout.' Drab is not a
metaphorical use of E drap 'kind of cloth' (which is from
French). A connection between drab and OE drabbe
'dregs' is equally unlikely. Similar-sounding Celtic words
are probably borrowings from English.
Dictionaries usually explain drab as a cognate of G
Treber (earlier spelling Traber) and Du drab 'dregs,
refuse, lees' (which is related to E draff 'yeast' and
drivel). According to that etymology, a drab is a person
from the dregs of society. But drab is not a bookish or
churchy word, and in popular speech 'prostitute' refers
to a woman's genitals, to her being common property,
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Adz(e) Adz(e)

men's plaything, slovenly, dirty, or to her selling

(exposing) herself, gadding about and idling, rather than
to social stratification (Buck [1367-69:19.72]). Even when
'prostitute' is derivable from 'err,' 'err' means 'fornicate.'
in the vocabulary of English, drab is not 'woman who
makes a false step,' 'fallen woman,' or 'erring sister.' it
belongs with broad, chippy, tart, and the words featured
in J. Stanley (1977:316-18); draggle-tail is especially close
to it. Drab seems to be a doublet of traipse. Junius
suggested the derivation of drab (which he spells drabb)
from the old verb (?*) drabben 'cursitare, discurrere,'
that is, 'run around,' but later researchers disregarded
his etymology. His parallel Du drille 'featherbrained
woman' ~ drillen, trillen 'loaf (v), etc' may be right. SwiG
leische 'walk in a trailing way,' leischa 'whore,' and
ldutsch 'whore; bitch; idler' supply an additional
semantic parallel (Singer [1924:231]). Junius's
comparison sheds light on G Trolle ~ Trulle 'hussy' and E
trull (Sc troll), which is related to drille by secondary
ablaut; MHG trollen 'walk with short steps' is a
counterpart of E troll (v) 'move about to and fro' and
stroll. (MHG trolle meant 'hayseed,' originally 'ghost-like
monster': KM, trollen; see further at TROT on the
connection between monsters, walking lightly or heavily,
and female gadabouts.)
Another possibility is to follow O. Ritter (1908:429),
who connects drab 'slut' and drab 'kind of cloth,'
284
Adz(e) Adz(e)

apparently from F drap, another 16th-century word.

Ritter cites F torchon 'rag' and 'slattern,' E bit of calico
(bit of muslin, bit of stuff) 'prostitute,' blowze ~ blouze
'beggar's trull, slattern,' and LG flicke 'rag' ~ Sw flicka
'girl.' Blowze 'slattern' is hardly related to blouse
'shirtwaist,' but torchon provides a good parallel. See
more about links between words for 'wench' and
'garment' (or 'cloth') at GIRL and LASS. Weekley
preferrred Rit-ter's etymology of drab to all others. The
most serious objection to it is that drap, unlike calico and
muslin, was the name of coarse undyed cloth (as the
meaning of E drape shows), of which women's skirts
were seldom, if ever, made. Also, when sluts and trollops
get their names from 'rag,' the association usually comes
from some cloth draggling or hanging loosely and
untidily.
OED is noncommittal with regard to the Celtic origin
of drab (sb). Davies (1855:241), Hettema (1856:201; he
cites MDu dribbe, sb 'cantankerous woman' and dribben
'tell falsehoods; slander' as parallels), and Skeat 1 derived
drab from Celtic, but their idea was later abolished. O.
Ritter and Skeat4 trace Ir drab 'spot, stain,' Ir drabog
'dirty woman,' and Sc Gael drabag 'slut' to English
(Liberman
[1992a:91-92]).

DWARF (700)
285
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OE dweorg 'dwarf occurs in the earliest recorded En-

glish glosses. Its cognates turn up in all the old Germanic
languages except Gothic and show no semantic
variations. The differences in their phonetic makeup in
Frisian, Dutch, German, and Icelandic are due to regular
sound changes. Around the year 600, the West Germanic
and Scandinavian root of this word must already have
been *dwerg-. Numerous fanciful and several reasonable
suggestions about the origin of dwarf circulate in the
literature, but the more cautious etymologists accepted
none of them. The origin of *dwerg- will become clear if
we assume that -r- is the result of rhotacism
and posit *dwezg- from *dwes-g- as the original
form. The mythological dwarf, when he was called
*dwez-g-az (if this noun was masculine and occurred in
the singular) or when he was part of the collective whole
*dwez-g-o- (if only the neuter plural existed), shared the
most prominent characteristics with other supernatural
beings, such as the gods and the elves, and was thought
of as neither small nor deformed. At that time, dwarves
were not rock or earth dwellers. The root *dwes- is
present in OE gedw^snes 'dementia,' MHG getwas 'spec-
ter, ghost,' MDu dwaes 'foolish,' and possibly in Gk θεός
'god.' A foolish or mad person was said to be possessed
by a god, an elf, a dwarf, a witch, and so forth. Judging
by the extant Scandinavian myths, the dwarves emerged
as the gods' servants; they were socially inferior, rather
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than short. Once *dwez-g- became *dwerg-, the word for

'dwarf began to rhyme with *berg- 'mountain,' and this
is when dwarves came to be firmly associated with rocks.
The outward appearance and habits of dwarves in
medieval romances and later folklore provide no clue to
the etymology of the word dwarf.
The sections are devoted to 1) dwarves in myth and
folklore, 2) the phonetic history of dwarf and the short-
lived etymologies offered for this word, 3) the names of
dwarf outside Germanic and the four still current
etymologies of the Germanic word, 4) the derivation of
dwarf from *dwe-s-g- and the effect of the change
*dwezg- to *dwerg- on the treatment of dwarves in
folklore, 5) the loss by dwerg- of the ability to alternate
with other words by ablaut and the consequences of this
loss for the name of the female dwarf, and 6) dwarf and
quartz.
1. To discover the etymology of the word dwarf, it is
necessary to examine the place the most ancient
dwarves occupied in Germanic beliefs. Our resources are
limited, because the myths of the Germanic nations
outside Scandinavia are lost, and we do not know
whether Southerners told tales reminiscent of those
preserved in the lays of the Elder Edda and systematized
by Snorri Stur-luson.
According to Snorri, the dwarves came to life like
maggots in the flesh of the primordial giant, but they
287
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received human understanding and the appearance of

men from the gods despite the fact that they lived in the
earth and in rocks. Some details in the wording of the
Elder Edda are obscure, and even Snorri may not have
understood them. It is unclear when the dwarves chose
their habitat in rocks or why they developed into
anthropomorphic creatures by order of the gods;
however, once this happened, they came into their own.
Volospa ('The Seeress's Prophecy'), the opening lay of
the Elder Edda, which devotes two lines to the creation
of the dwarves, says that the most famous of them was
Motsognir and offers a catalog of dwarves' names. Later
we are told that the foremost dwarf is called Dvalinn. All
in all, in Old Icelandic literature (poetry and prose), over
200 such names occur.
Several dwarves supply the gods with their main
treasures, including the mead of poetry; they
occasionally render the same service to the heroes in the
romantic sagas. In other tales, they appear as smiths.
When Loki cut off the hair of Thor's (porr's) wife Sif, the
sons of Ivaldi, called dark elves (who are
indistinguishable from the dwarves), made her new hair
from gold. They made Odin's (Osinn's) spear and Frey's
(Freyr's) ship. The dwarves Eitri and Brokkr forged a boar
with bristles of gold, the ring Draupnir (the source of
wealth that never gives out) and Thor's hammer. Four

288
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dwarves called North, South, East, and West (OI Nor5ri,

Su5ri, Austri, and Vestri) support the vault of heaven.
The dwarves are powerful and cunning, but they are
almost never depicted as small. That circumstance has
been noticed but not discussed in any detail or
explained. See the following contradictory statements:
Gazophylacium (dwarf: "Teutonic Zwerch, Zwarg, that is,
one of short stature"), FT (dwerg: according to them,
subterranean dwellers were visualized as short
creatures), J. de Vries (1956a:254: dwarves are called the
embodiment of
the soul), Motz (1973-74:105; 1993:93: "[T]he mod-
ern observer may wonder why the important office of
craftsman-priest was entrusted to a being of stunted
size. The proportions of the creatures are not, however,
mentioned in Germanic myth. While dwarfs were of
religious significance, their appearance was of no
importance. With the loss of function and the
development into a figure of folk-and fairy-tale the
picturesque aspect came to the fore, and as characters of
modern stories size is their most important quality"),
and Polome (1997:449; a passing remark along the same
lines). Only once do we hear that Regin, Sigurd's
(SigurBr's) foster father, was "a dwarf in stature"
(Motz [1993:93, note 29]). In all likelihood, he
ended up being a dwarf because he forged a won-
derful sword. Such leaps of logic are typical of ancient
289
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('primitive') thinking: since dwarves are smiths, smiths

must be dwarves. In similar fashion, Regin's brother
Fafnir lay on his gold and turned into a dragon: dragons
guard treasure, so that a guardian of a hoard becomes a
dragon. Even Volundr, the Scandinavian counterpart of
Wayland, not "a dwarf in stature," is called dlfa visi
'prince (lord) of the elves,' and by implication, of the
dwarves, probably because he is a smith.
No conclusions regarding the dwarves' nature can be
drawn from their names, which have often been
classified and analyzed. Many names are opaque, and
few contain references to the dwarves' small size.
Judging by ModI nori 'something very small; small part of
something; small lump; little boy; seal's cub; narrow
creek,' the dwarf Nori was tiny. Also nabbi means
'pimple, lump; blemish' in Modern Icelandic, which sug-
gests that the eddic dwarf Nabbi was like Nori, even
though the common names nori and nabbi were first
recorded in the 17th century. Finally, Ber-lingr is an
animated *berlingr 'short stick' (attested as part of the
compound berlingsdss, but berling occurs in Swedish and
Norwegian dialects). Despite the preoccupation of the
Eddas with the dwarves' names, the antiquity of most of
them is in doubt, for the skalds mention only Dainn,
Dvalinn, Falr,
and Durnir (De Boor [1924:548]). Since the

290
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dwarves had descriptive names like Brown, and

Shining, the same name could belong to a dwarf and
another character or object, for example, to a fish, a
hart, a ring, a rooster, a boar, a sword, Odin, and even a
giant.
In myths, dwarves are never 'dwarved' by their
surroundings. They were never "loathsome" (contrary to
Arvidsson [2005:105]). Allviss woos Thor's daughter; if
she inherited her father's physique, she probably looked
more like a giantess than an average woman. Both
dwarves and giants lust for Freya (Freyja), who is
reported to have slept with four dwarves in order to
obtain a precious necklace. Dwarves occasionally get the
better of giants (as in the myth of the mead of poetry).
Loki was not tall, and yet Brokkr, one of two master
smiths employed by the gods, sewed up Loki's mouth,
without experiencing any inconvenience. All three eddic
races (the gods, the dwarves, and the giants) were
anthropomorphic. Their place in the universe, rather
than their size, distinguished them: the gods ensured
that the world would run its course, the giants fought to
destroy order, and the dwarves were the gods' artisans,
for without the tools (treasures) that the dwarves forged
the gods would have been powerless and destitute. All
the honor went to the elves, who were equal to the gods
and who had a cult, but the memory of the elves as
divinities was forgotten early. It is not unthinkable that
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some of the dwarves' names at one time belonged to the

elves.
The Eddas give no account of the origin of the gods,
but some conclusions can be drawn from the
grammatical characteristics of the Icelandic noun gud
(n). Aside from late references to the Christian god, it
was used only in the plural. Go galiuga-gud* and OHG
abgot 'false god(s)' are likewise neuter (see an important
discussion in De Tollenaere [1969:226-27]). Originally,
the Scandinavians and, one can assume, all the speakers
of the Germanic languages envisioned their gods as a
collective whole. Although in the Eddas each god had a
name and could be identified in the singular as an Ass or
a Vanr, the plural forms—Ksir and Vanir— were in the
absolute majority. Even today we sometimes use the
plural when the idea of a whole is uppermost in our
mind, for instance, children as in: "They have no
children" (one child would suffice for stating that they
have 'children'), germs (for what is a germ?), and so
forth. Skeat preferred to list the form bots 'worms' in his
dictionary, yet bot, singular, exists too (OED).
Despite the fact that OI dvergr is a masculine noun
whose plural is dvergar, the dwarves must have started
as a mass, a collective whole. The Old High German
cognate of OE dweorg and OI dvergr was (gi)twerc. Its
gender is impossible to determine from the extant texts,
but in Middle High German (ge)twerc was nearly always
292
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neuter. Alongside twerc, the prefixed form (ge)twerc

existed (see Nib 97/1, note); ge- occurs in nouns
denoting groups of people or objects. The situation in
Old and Middle High German is the most archaic, for the
path from gud (n pl) to gud (m sg) and from (ge)twerc (n
pl) to twerc (n m sg), that is, from an undifferentiated
mass to an individual, is natural, whereas the reverse
path is out of the question. Change of grammatical
gender in such words was not uncommon (Brugmann
[1907:318]). Note that OE gast and gxst 'ghost' must
originally have belonged to the s-stem, which means
that both words may at one time have been neuter (SB,
sec 288, note 1; A. Campbell [1959:sec 636, end]; OED:
ghost). Go skohsl* 'demon' was neuter too, but no
general rule obtains here, for MHG orke 'demonic
creature' is masculine, and so is OE orcne as (pl) 'evil
spirits, monsters,' known from Beowulf 112. The gender
of Gmc orc- was probably influenced by its etymon, L
orcus 'god of death.'
Not only the fact that the gods and the dwarves
were in the remote past members of 'hosts' rather than
individual deities unites them. They seem to have been
visualized and worshipped in a similar way. In Old
Icelandic, two words spelled dss existed: one meant
'member of the ^sir family,' the other 'pole, beam' (as in
ber-lingsdss, mentioned above). It is tempting to treat
them as the descendants of the same etymon despite
293
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some doubts on this score. Columns and beams of all

sorts have been objects of cults all over the world
(Meringer [1904-05:159-66; 1907:296-306; 1908:269-70;
Olrik [1910]; Weiser [1926:12]). See
the discussion of the Gothic cognates of OI dss1 and
dss2 in Feist34 at ans* 'beam' and anses '(demi)gods.' Of
special interest is the ancient Venetian word ahsu-,
which probably meant 'herma,' that is, a statue of
Hermes mounted on a square stone post, and which can
thus be related to both dss1 and dss2 (Sommer
[1924:132]), Krahe [1929:325]). Ass1 and dss2 are now
believed to be different words (Polome [1953; 1957]),
but it is remarkable, if it is a coincidence, that in
medieval Iceland, dvergar meant 'dwarves' and 'short
pillars that support the beams and rafters in a house.'
See more on dvergar 'pillars' in Gunnell (2001:20-22;
2003:193).
The specialized meaning of dvergar is usually said to
go back to the myth about four dwarves supporting the
sky (ODGNS), but the development in the opposite
direction is more probable: dvergar may have been
understood as 'stalwarts,' as supports subservient to xsir
'beams,' and, once the world came into being, it was
natural for ^sir to entrust four dwarves—North, South,
East, and West—with propping up the new structure.
The Old Icelandic for 'world' was heimr 'home,' so that
"the big home" must have been modeled on human
294
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dwellings. The myth of four dwarves did not arise when

the Scandinavians were cave dwellers. Likewise in
Hittite, "[t]he typical 4 halhaltumari are not merely the
mundane corners of a house or hearth, they also denote
the 'four corners of the universe,' that is, cardinal points
in terms of movements of the sun and the winds"
(Puhvel [1988:257]). Ksir and the dvergar as beams form
a perfect correlation. An ornament called dvergar, one
on each shoulder, mentioned in the Elder Edda, must
have been a short support or a pin (Nerman
[1954]).
We should approach the etymology of dwarf with
the following considerations in mind: the eddic dwarves
were the gods' most important servants, even culture
heroes; they shared mythological space with the gods,
elves, and giants, from all of whom they were in some
cases indistinguishable; they did not emerge in people's
fantasy as small creatures living in mountains and rocks;
their names furnish no information about their origin;
and the eddic dwarves may have had counterparts
elsewhere in the Germanic speaking world.
2. The forms relevant for the etymology of dwarf are
as follows: OE dweorg, OI dvergr (ModI dvergur, Far
dvorgur, N dverg, Sw dvdrg, Dan dvxrg), OFr dwerch and
dwirg, OS (gi)dwerg, MLG and
MDu dwerch, OHG and MHG (gi)twerc, (ge)twerc (G
Zwerg). OED gives a detailed list of cognates in the
295
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Germanic languages and English dialects, but EDD barely

mentions dwarf (only as part of plant names and such).
Labialization in Faroese (e > 0) is late, and so is the
irregular change of tw- to zw- in German. The protoform
immediately preceding the recorded forms must have
been *dwerg-. The relation of OFr dwerch to dwirg will
be discussed below.
The diphthong in OE dweorg is due to Old English
breaking (e > eo before rg). The Middle English form was
dwerg(h). It is immaterial whether it goes back to eo
smoothed (monophthongized) or to e that was not
broken in the Anglian dialects. When ME er became ar,
dwerg acquired the pronunciation dwarg, with wa later
going over to wo. Detailed books on the history of
English give an account of those changes; see, for
example, Luick
(1964:478, 697, 861). Hirt (1921:31) mistakenly re-
ferred the differences between a in dwarf and e in Zwerg
to the differences in the influence of i in Germanic. In
Zwerg, e is old (that is, not the result of umlaut),
whereas in dwarf, a is not original.
The letter g in OE dweorg designated a fricative. That
sound regularly became f in Middle English, with gh
reflecting the oldest pronunciation of -g. It is due to
chance that dwarf is not spelled dwargh or dwergh now.
Koeppel (1904:34) notes that -a- in dweorgas was hardly
"a guttural vowel" when fricative g yielded w, but by the
296
Adz(e) Adz(e)

time of the change g to w (whatever Koeppel's

formulation means) dweorg had been monosyllabic for
centuries. According to anonymous (1901a), Skeat cited
reg dwerk and adduced it as proof that fricative g occa-
sionally became k. The form dwerk is not listed in the
sources consulted, and Skeat does not seem to have
mentioned it in any of his published works. If dwerk
exists, it is probably a variant of Scand dverg.
Most etymologists consider the word dwarf to be of
unknown origin. J. de Vries (NEW, dwerg) suggested that
it was a relic from a substrate language (was he thinking
of a term of pre-Germanic religion?). His idea, although
not repeated in AEW, found its way into Mackensen
(Zwerg) as a remote possibility. Other modern
dictionaries do not mention the substrate but have little
to say about the history of dwarf. The hypotheses on the
origin of this word are of two types. Some died without
issue: no one supported them or the support was
minimal. Others enjoyed considerable popularity for a
long time. In this section, only the less fortunate
conjectures will be mentioned.
Promising or fanciful, the etymologies of dwarf do
not differ too much: all of them attempt to show that the
original meaning of the word was 'short,' 'deformed,' or
'deviant,' none of which can be right.
Probably the oldest etymology of dvergr goes back
to Gu3 mundur Andresson, who referred this word to Gk
297
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θεός 'god' and έργον 'work.' Finn Magnusen (FML) found

himself in agreement with Andresson. Their etymology
became widely known, because Jacob Grimm supported
it (without references). He offered it in all four editions
of his Deutsche Mythologie (1835:252; 1875:370). Since
θεουργία meant 'divine work, miracle, magic, sorcery' (cf
θεουργός 'one who does the work of God, priest') and
has retained its meaning in modern use, as in E theurgy
'the working of some divine or supernatural agency in
human affairs,' Andresson and others were justified in
searching for links between the earliest sense of dvergr
and the production of magical objects, but dvergr cannot
be a relic of a disguised late Greek compound. Those
who referred to Grimm (they did not know his
predecessors) added question marks. Mueller mentions
him, but Ten Doornkaat Koolman (dwarg, dwerg), Kluge
(EWDS: Zwerg), and Franck (EWNT: dwerg) make a point
of distancing themselves from Grimm. Weigand
combined Grimm's etymology with the Zwerch
hypothesis (see below).
According to Skinner and Wachter, Martinius
(apparently, not in Martinius [1701]) compared dwarf
and L dlvergium, a word derived from Late L d vergere
'turn aside,' because dwarves are deviant creatures.
Skinner refers to Martinius without comment and adds
Belgian (that is, Flemish) dweeis Obliqus.' The closest
one comes to dweeis is MDu dwaes 'foolish.' Wachter
298
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called Martinius's conjecture ingenious but doubted its

validity. Cle-land (1766:47), who set out to demonstrate
the Celtic origin of most words, looked on dwarf as the
sum of the 'Celtic' privative prefix de- and OE arf
'inheritance.' The expected result should have been
'disinherited' or 'dispossessed,' but Cleland says 'not
grown.' Only Lemon took his etymology seriously. Dwarf
turns up in W. Barnes (1862:233) under one of his roots,
namely dw*ng 'dwindle.' Grouping together several
mainly regional words beginning with dw- and having
something to do with diminution and smallness was a
good idea, but the root dw*ng does not exist. Zollinger
(1952:89), ninety years later, in a book whose title is
amusingly reminiscent of Barnes's, compared PIE
*dhuergh, from IEW (279), and Egyptian dnrg, dang,
darg, da'g, all of which he glossed as 'dwarf.'
Between 1862 and 1952, two more researchers dealt
with this word. According to Loewenthal (1928:459),
dvergr should be understood as *dhuer-uokwos, the
second component being related to L vox 'voice.' He
glosses that compound as 'one saying fateful things,'
though the dwarves are nowhere depicted as prophets.
Juret (1942) gave a thesaurus of his own roots. Under 92t
'small, tiny,' we find, among others, E dwarf and thin (p.
342).
3. 'Divergent,' 'dwindler,' 'sooth-sayer,' and
'producer of magical things for the gods' do not seem to
299
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be the original meanings of dwarf. Nor is the material

outside Germanic of much help in approaching the
Germanic word. 'Dwarf' does not appear in Buck, but
some comparative material can be found in SN (708). Gk
νάννος and ναννος from which Latin has nanus (whence
Ital nano, F nain, and Sp enano) and Hebrew has onn
(nns), is probably a baby word. Gk πυγμαίος is from
πυγμή 'fist,' a formation like G Däumling, E Tom Thumb,
and OPr parstuck (Lith pirstas 'finger,' and so on). Russ
kar-lik, with a diminutive suffix, and its cognates in
Polish and Czech are slightly reshaped borrowings from
German (OHG karal, MHG karl, G Kerl 'young man':
Vasmer, karla; further references in ESRI [XI:72], karlik).
See more on Kerl at GIRL. Lith kaukas goes back to the
root meaning 'elevation' (the kaukas is visualized as a
gland, pimple, knob; among the related words is Go
hauhs* 'high,' LEW). L pumilio is obscure. If it is from PIE
*p(a)u-'small' (pu-mi-l-ion), -m- remains unexplained
(WH); if it is from pumi-l-ion 'little hairy one' (as in D.
Adams [1985:244, note 8]), the feature chosen for the
nomination ('hairy') makes little sense. F nabot is equally
opaque. From (O)I Nabbi (see it above)? A disguised
compound from nain + (pied)bot 'club-foot'? Both
hypotheses look strained. Nothing is known about the
history of gnome, first occurring in Paracelsus (KS,
Gnom). Gmc *dwerg- is neither a baby word nor

300
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'manikin,' and unless it is a substrate word, it must have

a recoverable root.
Over the years, four etymologies of dwarf (dvergr,
Zwerg) have been recognized as holding out some
promise.
1) Dwarf is presumably a cognate of G zwerch, now
extant in a few compounds like Zwerchfell 'diaphragm';
as an independent word it exists only in the form quer
'diagonally.' The originator of this etymology was
Minsheu (dwarf), but it has the greatest appeal to
German-speakers, for G Zwerg and zwerch- are near
homonyms, and both zwerg and zwirg have been
recorded as forms of zwerch (Much 1893:92), whereas in
Low German, dwerch combined the meanings of the two
homonyms 'crippled, lopsided' and 'dwarf' (Lubben
[1871:317]). In the other languages, the similarity
between dverg(r) ~ dwarf, on one hand, and the
cognates of zwerch, on the other, is not so great:
compare Go pwairhs 'quick-tempered,' OI pverr
'troublesome,' and OE pweorh 'hostile.' The semantic
link between 'diagonally' and 'angry' is obvious; one can
cite the English adverb across and the adjective cross.
The only cognate of pweorh in Standard Modern English
is thwart 'frustrate, challenge,' which is a borrowing
from Scandinavian. Minsheu's etymology reemerged in
Wachter (Zwerg), but neither bothered to explain the

301
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difference between *pw- and *dw-. Such an explanation

could not be expected at that time.
Zwerg from zwerch- appears in Kaltschmidt (an early
but serious dictionary), Terwen (dwerg; his
only source is Kaltschmidt), Talbot (1847:37-38),
Richardson, Chambers (1867), and Faulmann (from
the nonexistent strong verb *zerben 'turn oneself
around'; with the explanation that deformed,
hunchbacked people do not grow). Richardson, who
borrowed his etymology from Wachter, noted that the
word dwarf had perhaps originally been applied to
certain imaginary creatures of thwart, cross, crooked,
mischievous dispositions, and later to any thing stunted
or perhaps deformed in its growth. Faulmann seems to
be the latest proponent of the zwerch etymology (1893).
As early as 1879, Ten Doornkaat Koolman rejected it as
unconvincing. G zwerch and Go pwairhs can be related to
L torqueo 'twist, bend.' L. Schmidt (1961:33-49), the
author of a special work on torqueo, does not mention
Zwerg.
The mythological dwarves, it should be repeated,
were not deformed (crooked, hunchbacked, or stunted);
only later folklore occasionally represented them as such
(Siefert [1902:377]). Nor were they particularly
mischievous or evil. Ethical norms are alien to myth, and
the behavior of mythological characters is determined by
expedience rather than morality. In the Eddas, dwarves
302
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do what they find useful at any given moment, and

malice is not their most prominent feature. In recent
time, J. de Vries (AEW, dvergr) partly revived Minsheu's
idea. He cited a few words in which initial p- and d-
alternate and suggested that the most ancient meaning
of the root was 'pin, peg, short stick.' A widespread
syncretism 'child, little, creature' / 'block of wood' exists
in the Germanic languages, so that a semantic link
between 'shoot' and 'offshoot' is real (see CUB, KEY, and
PIMP). Numerous words for 'child' go back to words
meaning 'chip, chit, pin.' But two circumstances
invalidate J. de Vries's hypothesis: 1) no recorded word
containing the root pver- means 'branch, twig, pin, short
stick,' and 2) mythological dwarves were not thought of
as short. In his history of Germanic religion, J. de Vries
(1956:253, 254) notes that the small size of all 'dwarf-
like' creatures may be due to the conception of the soul
being embodied in them. The eddic dwarves have
nothing to do with the soul. W. Krause (1958:56)
rejected J. de Vries's reconstruction, and it does not
appear in any later etymological dictionary, seemingly,
for a good reason.
Marginally related to the etymology discussed here
is Te Winkel's conjecture that MDu dwerch is akin to OE
pweran, which in poetry meant 'beat, forge,' for
dwarves, as he says, were smiths, and Du smeden 'forge,
weld' (a cognate of G schmieden) was a synonym of
303
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pweran (1875:111, see dwerch in the glossary). Here he

erred slightly, for in the remote past, smiths were
craftsmen, wrights, rather than workers in metal. Also,
the meaning of OE pweran 'beat, forge' seems to have
been derived from 'stir, churn' (hence 'soften, make
malleable'). Te Winkel related MDu dwerch and OE
pweran to Go pwairhs 'quick-tempered' (with the
implication that 'irascible' = 'pugnacious'?) and OE pyrs
'giant, demon, wizard' (he could have added OI purs 'gi-
ant'). Dwarves were, in his opinion, not unlike Cyclopes
and later came to designate monsters, often but not
necessarily small. He quotes Bilder-dijk (dwaarg), who
noted that in Dutch medieval romances dwerg was used
interchangeably with reus 'giant,' both kinds of creatures
being deformed but of enormous size (!) and presented
as robbers, and finds ample evidence of huge dwarves in
Jacob van Maerlant's Roman van Torec, which Te Winkel
edited. However, initial p- in pyrs ~ purs (and OE pweran)
cannot be reconciled with d- in dwerg-. It will be shown
below that r of dwerg- and pyrs ~ purs are equally
irreconcilable. Nor is ablaut (e-u) to be expected in this
case (sec 5, below). The origin of pyrs ~ purs remains
unclear (see AeEW, AEW, DEO4: turs(e), and other
Scandinavian etymological dictionaries).
2) A. Kuhn (1852:201-02), in an article on evil
creatures in Indo-European mythology, compared dvergr
and Skt dhvards- 'crooked, dishonest,' an epithet
304
Adz(e) Adz(e)

accompanying Druh, a demon; he traced them to the

root *dvr. Although his article appeared in volume 1 of
the celebrated Zeitschrift fur vergleichende
Sprachforschung and Pictet (1859-63, II:637-38) referred
to it, his proposal attracted little attention until it was
incorporated into Fick3 I:121 and III:155-56. Dvergr now
joined Skt dhvärati 'fell, cause to fall,' L fraus 'detriment,
harm, etc,' and many other words as a related form. In a
kind of postscript, Fick compared Vedic dhvaräs- 'evil
fairy, demon of deceit' with Gmc *dverga-. This remains
the most often cited etymology of dwarf. No one
subscribes to it wholeheartedly, but for want of a better
solution dictionary makers mention it with various
degrees of hedging. M. Schwartz's detailed analysis of
the root *dhvari brought him to the conclusion that the
Vedic word is not related to dwarf (1992:405-10, esp p.
410). Von Bradtke (1886:352, note 1) preferred druh to
dhvaräs- as a cognate of dvergr. Kuhn discussed both
druh and dhvaräs- before him and, as we have seen,
made a different choice. If even Kuhn's comparison had
to wait more than two decades before it found its way
into a widely read manual (however, the users of Fick's
compendium did not always know who offered the
etymologies in it, for Fick gave no references), it could
only be expected that Holmboe's idea, which was exactly
the same (OI dvergr: Skt dvr 'bend, curve') and was also
made public in 1852, passed without notice.
305
Adz(e) Adz(e)

3) Another attempt to link Gmc *dwerg- to an

Iranian word was Bartholomae's (1901:130-31, note 2).
He connected dvergr and Avestan drva, the name of
some (unidentifiable) physical deformity. Bartholomae's
etymology has found a number of supporters, the most
confident of whom was Krogmann (1934-35). It is not
obvious what unites dvergr and drva apart from the
phonetic similarity between d-v-r and d-r-v. The dwarves
of Scandinavian mythology were not deformed. Bar-
tholomae and others may have been inspired by the
circumstance that the dwarves and elves were believed
to cause diseases and produce deformity in people.
This belief has left some traces in the Germanic
languages, such as N dvergskott 'epizootic' = and
'dwarves' shot' (De Boor [1924:545]); the affected cattle
are called dvergslagen. But in this respect dwarves do
not differ from other spirits, fairies, and so on, as
follows, for example, from G Hexenschuß and N
hekseskudd ~ hekseskott 'lumbago,' OE ylfa gesceot
'disease attributed to evil spirits' (see
elfshot in OED and elf in ODEE, Lessiak [1912:13640],
and Ivanov [1999a:4-5] for a broad discussion of diseases
caused by elves and their kin). E giddy, from Late OE
gidig, from *gydig (the umlauted form of *guö-ig-az)
probably means 'possessed by a god.' Likewise, OE ylfig
(ielf, ylf, ylfe, xlf 'elf') meant 'mad, deranged.' The
Classical Greek noun evBououxoimoc; 'inspiration'
306
Adz(e) Adz(e)

derives from 'being possessed or inspired by a god,' so

that enthusiastic is, as far as its inner form is concerned,
close to giddy. The root of the word ghost meant 'terrify,
afflict' (cf Go usgaisjan* 'frighten').
Having a god in one might be beneficial or injurious
to the person possessed. Although the dwarves, the
gods, and the elves could cause insanity, it would be
imprudent to look for the origin of the words god, elf,
and Hexe (hekse) 'witch' among the names of demons,
even if the first dwarf's name Motsognir or Modsognir
means 'sucking strength' (Reichborn-Kjennerud [1931]).
In Anglo-Saxon England, dwarves were said to cause
convulsion (see BT II:dweorg and discussion in Ostheeren
[1992:45]). Those names were too numerous and too
varied.
Nothing is known about the Avestan word drva
except that it occurs in a list of physical deformities (see
Derolez [1945]). Krogmann (193435) added Latv drugt
'collapse, diminish' to Avestan drva as a cognate of
*dwerg-. Neither he nor those referring to drugt in their
dictionaries realized that it is an obscure regional word,
itself in need of an etymology. Von Grienberger
(1900:59) tentavely connected it with Go drauhsnos
'fragments, crumbs,' but the form and the origin of the
Gothic noun seem to be beyond reconstruction. The
putative cognates of Latv drugt are OI draugr 'dry wood'
(a homonym of draugr 'ghost' or the same word?), OE
307
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dryge 'dry,' Go driusan* 'fall,' and Lith drugys 'chill fever;

butterfly' (see Russ drozh' 'shiver' in Vasmer I, 540-41);
finally, Lith druska 'salt' is sometimes drawn into this
circle. It is anybody's guess whether drugt belongs with
them. Berneker (231) mentions it, while Fraenkel (LEW,
drugys) does not. Wood (1914a:69/7) combined E dry
and Latv drugt, and Endzelln in Muhlenbachs (drugt)
thought his idea to be reasonable, but Karulis did not
include drugt in his dictionary. Endzelln thought of a
connection between drugt and E dry as possible.
Etymologies based on the obscurum per obscurius
principle seldom prove to be right. Two almost
impenetrable words (drva and drugt) are hardly able to
shed light on the seemingly isolated *dwerg-, whose ties
with those words are exactly what has to be established.
Since Skt dhvdrati is believed to be a cognate of OHG
triogan 'deceive' and since dhvards- designates some
demonic creature, *dwerg- was assigned to the root
*dreug-a- 'deceive.' Seebold (1970:168-69) does not
mention Zwerg; however, in KS he admits the possibility
that Zwerg and (be)trugen are related. 'Dwarf' as
'deceiver' appears in FT(N) (the dwarves allegedly cause
visual aberrations, or they are dangerous, harmful crea-
tures). WP 1:871-72 give dhuergh : drugh 'dwarflike,
deformed' (likewise in IEW, 279); KEWA II:119 refers to
IEW but translates the root dhuer-, dhuera 'destroy by
deception or cunning; injure.' It is the confusion of
308
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'deformity' and 'deception' that makes the etymology of

dwarf so vague. We constantly run into *dhrugh 'harm,
deceive' (as in Mogk [1918-19:597]—'schädigen,
betrügen') or are told that harming results in deceiving
(as in Det-ter's dictionary, Zwerg; edited out in Loewe's
version).
Although no system can be detected in the practice
of lexicographers' dealing with the origin of dwarf, in the
dictionaries dependent on Fick3 the gloss 'deformity'
prevails (so, for example, in Ze-hetmayr), while Kluge
(EWDS) and his followers prefer 'deception.' Those who
treat dwarves as deceivers rely mainly on the Sanskrit
cognate; those who look on dwarves as cripples cite the
A-vestan word. Practically, all of them leave the question
open, list both etymologies as uncertain, and refuse to
take sides. Certainty is rare (for instance, L. Bloomfield
[1912:258/10] refers to Fick's solution as definitive).
Equally rare are new attempts to explain the nature of
dwarves from linguistic data. Thus, Scardigli and Gervasi
(1978, dwarf) give *dhreugh- 'deceive'? and suggest
'creatura misteriosa' as the original sense of dwarf; this
is a rather mysterious gloss (do they mean 'belonging to
so-called hidden people'?). Motz (197374:113-14) takes
the ritual deformity of the mythological smith
(Hephaistos and others) as her point of departure, and
supports Bartholomae's etymology (Avestan drva, Gmc
dwerg-). The statements in Motz (1983:117, 118) are
309
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more cautious. Volundr, like Hephaistos, was indeed

deformed, but none of the eddic dwarves is represented
as a cripple.
4) One more hypothesis gained considerable
currency at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the
20th century. Holthausen (1886:554) suggested that
dvergr is related to Gk aep(i)cpoj 'midge.' E. Zupitza
(1896:99) supported Holthausen and later (1899:100,
103) added OIr dergnat 'flea' as a cognate of oeppxoj.
When A. Noreen (1894:224), Pedersen
(1909:109, sec 65), and Vendryes (1912:286) gave
this etymology their imprimatur, it became widely
known. Skeat1 borrowed his etymology from Fick3,
whereas Murray chose Holthausen's derivation, and it
appeared as proven in OED, SOD1-3, and ODEE. Only
SOD3a makes no mention of it, presumably because
Beeler (1970:322) expressed his surprise that a major
English dictionary could offer an etymology classicists
had never taken seriously.
Attempts to establish the origin of σέρ(ι)φος have
failed. Venmans (1930:72) compared the Greek word
with L serpens 'snake,' but Kretschmer (1933:181) and
Specht (1944:266/6) rejected his etymology on phonetic
grounds. Fernández (1959:98) tends to agree with
Wood's idea (1919:250/101) that σέρφος belongs with
συρφετός 'sweepings, refuse, litter,' and σύρμα
'sweepings, refuse, heap of straw,' σάρος 'broom, litter,
310
Adz(e) Adz(e)

refuse,' and σύρω 'drag along,' all of them allegedly from

PIE *tuer-. Frisk wonders whether σέρφος is an
onomatopoeic word, but other compendia and dic-
tionaries of Classical Greek (Prellwitz, Leo Meyer,
Hofmann) venture no hypotheses. Frisk and Chantraine
are of the opinion that σέρφος defies explanation. Only
Boisacq compared σέρφος and Skt dhvarah 'demon.'
There is partial agreement on the fact that -φ- in σέρφος
is a suffix (from *bh-), which neither invalidates the
comparison σέρ-φ-ος: *dwer-g-az nor strengthens it. The
main argument against Holthausen's etymology of dwarf
~ Zwerg ~ dvergr is, once again, the use of the obscurum
per obscurius principle: the opaque Greek word σέρφος
cannot reveal the origin of an equally opaque Germanic
word. See Petersson (1921:18) for some arguments
against the dwarf— σέρ(ι)φος connection.
This episode in the study of dwarf is typical in that it
shows the lack of coordination among the various
branches of Indo-European etymology as a science.
Apparently, if dwarf is related to σέρφος, σέρφος is
related to dwarf (Zwerg, dvergr). But despite the
prestige of OED and the high esteem in which
Holthausen was held, not a single etymological
dictionary of Classical Greek considered dvergr as a
possible cognate of σέρφος, and among Greek scholars
only Boisacq comments on the im-plausibility of
Holthausen's conjecture from the semantic point of
311
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view. Juret, who offered his own fanciful etymology of

dwarf, made no mention of σέρφος. Apart from OED,
Tamm (dvdrg) accepted σέρφος as a cognate of the
Germanic word, and SOAB followed him with some
reservations (vol 7, containing dvdrg, was published in
1925). Hellquist rejected Holthausen's etymology (SEO).
The other national dictionaries of the Scandinavian
languages and of Dutch offer the usual choice between
Skt dhvárati and Avestan drva.
The latest admirer of the dvergr—σέρφος— dergnat
etymology was Güntert (1919:235-37), who cited many
instances of insects as spirits. However, nothing follows
from his examples for dvergr. OIr dergnat is as obscure
as σέρφος. Scandinavian folklore links dwarves and
spiders, and the word dvdrg means 'spider' in some
Swedish dialects. A dwarves' (or dwarf's) net (dvdrganet,
dvdrgsnet) as the name of the spider's threads hanging
in the air in autumn is current in many parts of Sweden.
Rietz pointed out that the dwarves were likened to
spiders because they were so skillful. Schwenck repeated
Rietz's explanation in all the editions of his dictionary.
The connection dwarf—spider has no value for
etymology. The parallel Loki ~ Sw reg loki 'spider,' which
SEO cites, is of no consequence, for, despite all efforts to
prove the opposite, the Scandinavian god Loki has
nothing to do with the spider (Liberman [1992b:132-33],
repr in Liberman [1994c:219-20]), and the Welsh
312
Adz(e) Adz(e)

polysemous noun cor 'point; dwarf; spider' (Wilhelm

Lehmann [1908:435-36]) does not make the triad dwarf
— aepcpoj—dergnat any more appealing. We can con-
clude that the dwarves did not get their name because
they were associated with some insects or spiders and
that aep(i)(poj and *dwerg-az are not related. Obviously,
a word like OI dvergr 'dog with a short tail' (May, Zwerg)
does not clarify the original meaning of dvergr 'dwarf'
either.
Some lexicographers have listed the cognates of
dwarf but refrained from conjectures on its origin.
Among them are Kilianus, Junius (who made the
statement that since dwarf has no reliable etymons, it
might be from Greek), Johnson, Todd in Johnson-Todd,
Wedgwood, Mackay (1877), Stor-month, Skeat4,
Weekley, Partridge, Barnhart, and Webster. All the
revisers of Webster's dictionary withstood the
temptation of offering an etymology of dwarf until W2
gave dhvaras (without a stress mark) as a tentative
cognate and listed E dream as possibly related. In W3,
dhvarati (again without a diacritic) turns up. The changes
from W2 to W3 show that in the absence of new ideas
dictionaries substitute repackaging for research. This
semblance of activity is typical. WNWD 1 gives the Indo-
European base *dhwergh- 'delude,' offers no cognates
outside Germanic, and defines the etymon as 'deceptive
(that is, magic-making) being, little devil'. Later editions
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Adz(e) Adz(e)

add Skt dhvdrati '(he) injures,' and *dhwer acquires the

gloss 'trick, injure.' When references to the scholarly
literature are included, the choice is often unpredictable.
IsEW lists many sources, among them Loewenthal
(1928); NEW mentions IEW and Krogmann (1935),
AEW adds Nerman (1954); DEO3 cites Krogmann (1935),
Derolez (1945), and Nerman (1954); KS
makes do with Lecouteux (1981), whose article
contains only one page (372-73) on matters etymological
(Desportes's letter to the author and the conclusion that
dwarves were deformed, evil creatures).
All that is known about the origin of dwarf can be
summed up in two short statements: 1) dwarf has
numerous Germanic cognates, and 2) two words, one
Sanskrit and one Avestan, sound like *dwerg, but their
connection with *dwerg- is unlikely. However, someone
who would dare reexamine the etymology of dwarf will
not start from scratch, for on a few occasions
etymologists have been within reach of what seems to
be the right solution.
4. Kluge (EWDS1) suggested that Zwerg may have
developed from either *dwezgo or *dwergo. If he had
pursued that line of reasoning, the etymology of Zwerg
(dvergr, dwarf) would have been discovered then and
there, but connecting the German word with a Sanskrit
one looked attractive, and Kluge never returned to his
idea that r in Zwerg is the product of rhotacism.
314
Adz(e) Adz(e)

However, if we assume the protoroot *dwezg-,

everything will fall into place. The sound z existed in
early Germanic only as the result of the voicing of s, so
that *dwezg-must have been derived from *dwesg- (cf
Go azgo* versus OI aska 'ashes'). In *dwesg-, s was
voiced between a vowel (e) and a voiced consonant (g).
One has to reckon with the possibility that the pro-
toform was *dwizg- rather than *dwezg- because, before
r from z, i became e in all the Germanic languages except
Gothic, which had no rhotacism (SB,
sec 45, note 3; A. Campbell 1959:sec 123; BE, sec 31;
Noreen 1970:sec 110.2, with references to Behaghel
and Sievers; O. Ritter [1922:173-76]), but only
*dwezg- lends itself to etymological analysis. OFr
dwirg, a doublet of dwerch, is due to the variation e ~ i
before r (as in werk ~ wirk 'work,' berd ~ bird 'beard,'
herd ~ hird 'hearth,' werd ~ wird 'word'; Steller [1928:sec
8, note 2]) and is irrelevant in reconstructing the
Germanic protoform. Richthofen preferred dwirg as the
Modern Frisian form, but later dictionaries (including
WFT) give dwerch. Dwerch is the only form in AfWb.
Van Wijk was also close to discovering the origin of
dwarf, but like Kluge, he missed his chance. In EWNT 2, he
traced Du bedaren 'calm down; subside (of a storm, etc),'
an obscure verb with cognates in Middle Low German
and Frisian, to the root *daz-, as in Du bedeesd 'timid'
and MDu daes 'stupid' (ModDu dwaas; see Skinner,
315
Adz(e) Adz(e)

above). Thus he established a connection between das-

and dar-, and only one step was needed to relate Du
dwerg to dwaas. Van Haeringen (EWNT, Supplement)
had doubts about Van Wijk's etymology of bedaren, but
W. de Vries (1914:148) and Tornkvist (1969) accepted
and developed it. In NEW (bedaren), the reference to
EWNT is noncommittal. Van Wijk's combination is
promising, and bedaren is probably one more instance of
*d(w)ar-, *dwer- having r by rhotacism.
*Dwezg-, from *dwes-g-, is related by ablaut to OE
(ge)dwxs 'dull, foolish; clumsy impostor' (the same root
in OE gedwxsmann 'fool,' dwxsnes 'folly, stupidity,'
gedwxsnes 'dementia') (DOE), MHG twas 'fool,' MHG
getwas 'specter, ghost,' MDu dwaes 'foolish' (ModDu
dwaas; see above) and ge-dwas (with a short vowel)
'stupidity, hallucination, ghost.' The meaning 'stupid'
tends to develop from 'stunned,' 'pitiful,' 'unsociable,'
'blissfully unaware of the surrounding world,' 'too
trustful' (such is, for instance, G albern), and 'too
accommodating' (such is E daft; its etymological doublet
is deft). In historical semantics, the line between 'stupid'
and 'insane' is easy to cross, as seen in the origin of such
words as silly, foolish, mad, crazy, moron, imbecile, and
idiot: people called this are 'impaired,' 'unprotected,'
'benighted,' and 'possessed by a god or spirit' (see the
discussion of giddy above). OE dwxs and MHG twas
belong with the giddy group.
316
Adz(e) Adz(e)

A gedwxsmann and a twas seem to have been

people possessed by a *dwezgaz, that is, by a dwarf. The
ancient meaning of dwxs and its cognates was forgotten
early; compare the tautological Middle Dutch compound
alfsgedwas 'phantom conjured up by elves' (Te Winkel
[1875:101, glossary] and VV). Each kind of being
possessed, whether by the gods, the elves, or the
dwarves, must have been specific enough when the
words for those states were coined, but today ancient
distinctions can no longer be discerned. Modern giddy
'easily distracted; flighty; having a reeling sensation'
(previously, 'mad, foolish') gives no clue to the difference
between OE gidig and, for example, OE ylfin, usually
glossed as 'raving mad.' This difference was hardly clear
even twelve centuries ago, but at one time it must have
been known; see discussion in Stuart (1976). All
supernatural creatures were believed to act as incubi
and succubi and to cause nightmare. The second part of
the compound nightmare is related to the name of the
Old Irish female demon Mor-rlgain (-rigain 'queen'), a
word with wide connections in Germanic and Slavic. The
German for nightmare is Alptraum; Alp
~ Alb is 'elf.'
The dwarves, like the elves, may have exercised their
power at night. Only Modern Dutch has retained the
adjective dwaas 'foolish, stupid'; yet English has dizzy, a
close synonym of giddy. OE dysig, like MDu dwaes,
317
Adz(e) Adz(e)

meant 'foolish, stupid, ignorant' (a meaning still current

in certain modern English dialects) and had cognates in
all the West
Germanic languages except Yiddish. Ray cited dizzy
'mad with anger.' The same root (*dus-), but with a long
vowel, appears in MDu düselen and ModDu duizeln 'be
giddy or stupid.' The idea of sleep is present in OI düs
'lull, dead calm,' possibly in OI düsa 'be quiet,' and ModI
düsa 'take one's time.' English may have borrowed the
verb doze 'stupefy, muddle, perplex; sleep drowsily'
from Scandinavian. However, the etymon of that word
(some verb like Sw reg däsa) may itself be of Low
German origin. Middle Dutch had not only düselen but
also dosich 'sleepy.' The Modern German adjective dösig
'sleepy,' which emerged in the 19th century, is a
borrowing from Low German, and so are Sw, N, and Dan
dösig ~ d0sig 'drowsy.' OI dasast 'become exhausted'
(from which English has daze 'benumb the senses') and
its cognates MDu dasen 'behave like a fool,' ModDu
dazen 'talk nonsense, act stupidly,' and OI dasi
'lazybones' have never been discussed in connection
with doze, dizzy, and the rest, though while browsing in
etymological dictionaries (for instance, NEW and AEW),
one eventually restores the ties severed by the practice
of writing short entries on each word rather than essays
on large families. It is unlikely that dizzy has the Indo-
European root for 'breath'
318
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(so, following IEW, 269; MA, 82).

The root *dus-, which we see in OE dysig, probably
goes back to *dwus (w was regularly lost in medial
position before u in Old English [SB, 150;
A. Campbell 1959:sec 470] and Old Norse [A.
Noreen 1970:sec 235, 1a]), with *dwus being the
zero grade of *dwes. A sound complex like *dwezg-or
*dwesk- had no affiliation with any ablaut series in
Germanic. Yet the strong verb *dweskan or *dwezgan
'stupefy; behave in an irrational way' is not unthinkable,
for the weak Old English verb gedwxscan 'extinguish fire;
abolish; blot out enmity or sin; eliminate, perish' has
been recorded. Karsten (1902:435-36) connected it with
OE dw na 'dwindle' (it appears erroneously). *Dweskan
would have belonged to the third class: *dweskan —
*dwask—*dwuskun —*dwuskan(s), so that *dwus- fits
the model. The same cannot be said about *dwes—
dwxs, for the alternation e ~ x is irregular as long as we
remain in the e—a—u—u series. Middle Dutch had the
verb düselen, apparently related to dwaes (u ~ a), which
in turn is related to gedwas (a ~ a). The posited
alternation OE e ~ x (= MHG and MDu e ~ a) in *dwes- ~
dwxs makes the picture even more complicated.
The alternations a ~ a and e ~ a both occur in
Germanic, but they belong to different series, whereas
the alternation u ~ a is irregular. Could it be that words
denoting insanity, nonsense, and nightmare were often
319
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pronounced with emphatic lengthening and violated

standard rules of derivation because they were subject
to taboo? If so, we would witness a veritable triumph of
iconicity: erratic forms designating erratic behavior.
Bout-kan (1999:19) briefly mentions words with "the
deviant root-vocalism P[roto]Gmc. *X — *a—*o" and
argues for their non-Indo-European substrate origin. It is
puzzling why that type of "deviation" occurs with such
regularity. Despite all the difficulties, it seems that dizzy,
daze, doze, dwXs, dwXscan; duselen, and dusa culled
from Modern
English, Old English, Middle Dutch, and Old Icelandic
belong together (see some of them in L. Bloomfield
[1909-10:276/96]) and are related to *dwesk- ~ *dwezg-,
the root of the noun dvergr ~ dweorg ~ twerc ~ twerch
'dwarf.'
If OE hxg-tes(se) 'witch' goes back to *hage-tusjo, -
*tusjo, despite its initial t, may belong with the words
discussed above, but the etymology of -*tusjo- is
problematic (see more at WITCH). OE hxgtes(se) is not
given in WP or IEW. Nor does Mayrhofer (KEWA II:28-29)
consider *-tusjo as a cognate of ddsyuh 'demon,' cited by
Kauffmann
(1894:155).
A parallel to *dweskan is OHG dwesben 'destroy,' a
weak verb occurring only in Otfrid, who also used
irdwesben 'destroy, kill' and firdwesben 'destroy, kill;
320
Adz(e) Adz(e)

spoil' (Riecke [1997:207] quotes all five relevant

passages). Riecke is probably right in interpreting <sb> as
<sp>. He tries to save Petersson's etymology of dwesben
(1906-07:367) and compares the Old High German verb
with L tesqua 'desert, wasteland' (pp. 207-10), but it is
more likely that *dwes-p-an and *dwes-k-an (a strong
verb) had the root referring to the pernicious influence
of dwarves. In Middle High German, bedespen and
verdespen, both apparently meaning 'hide, bury,' have
been recorded (Riecke, p. 210). Finally, Riecke (p. 209)
cites G reg dusper 'dark, dusky,' which is related to -
despen (as, for example, OE derne 'dark' is related to OE
darian 'lie hid'), but dusper and -despen have nothing to
do with the words containing the root *dwezg-.
Since Kluge's form *dwezgo faded from view, it is
customary to reconstruct Gmc *dwergaz and Go
*dwairgs (or *dverga and *dvairgs) for dwarf (among
the earlier authors see Schade). However, the oldest
Germanic form was either *dwezgaz (if the word was
masculine) or *dwezgam (if it was neuter). If it occurred
only in the neuter plural, the dwarves were called
*dwezgo. The Goths must have had *dwisks (if
masculine; pl *dwizgos), *dwisk
(if neuter), or *dwizga (if only neuter plural). Three
consonants in word final position did not contradict
Gothic phonotactics: cf asts 'branch' from *azdaz. Jessen
(dverg), probably following not only Kluge but also
321
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Grimm, asked whether dvergr could go back to *dhwas-

gh and compared it with Gk θεός 'god.' Much later, Oehl
(1921-22:768) listed dvergr as related to MHG getwas
'specter, ghost' and Gk θεός and added Skt dhvaras- to
them. Jessen's readership outside Scandinavia was
limited, and Oehl buried his etymology in a long
unindexed article on primitive word formation. He was
right in bringing together getwas and dvergr, but he
offered no discussion, said nothing about either
rhotacism or ablaut, and even if someone had paid
attention to his etymology (as a matter of fact, no one
did), it would not have made an impression on dictionary
makers, because he did not have a clear idea of the
development of the pronunciation and meaning of the
word dvergr. In any case, by adding dhvaras-, which has
old r, to dvergr, with r < *z, he doomed his hypothesis,
for dvergr cannot be related to both getwas and
dhvaras-.
Attempts to connect Germanic religious terms with
Indo-Iranian ones have so far proved unconvincing. If
dhvaras- turned out to be the only non-Germanic
cognate of dvergr, it would be unique in that no other
instance is known of a Germanic-Sanskrit
correspondence without related forms in some language
spoken between India and the territory occupied by
ancient Germanic tribes; see Polome's comments (1980)
on Chemodanov (1962:105-07). In Gmc *dwezg-, -g- is a
322
Adz(e) Adz(e)

suffix, whereas the root is *dheues- 'breathe' (IEW, 268-

71). MHG getwas and, more problematically, Gk θεός are
both members of this family (the origin of *Γεός is still
debatable, as it was a hundred years ago: L.
Meyer [1902:413], WP I:867, IEW, 269; Frisk; M.
Schwartz [1992:392] rejects the connection between
the Greek word and *dhwes-). If E dull and G toll 'mad'
belong here too (which is not certain), we obtain one
more word meaning 'insane,' remotely connected with
the dwarves.
During the centuries the dwarves were called
*dwezgo z or *dwezgo , they must have been thought of
as having the same size as the gods and the elves. The
turning point in the history of their names was the final
stage of Germanic rho-tacism. When *dwezg- became
*dwerg- and *r merged with r, the word dvergr began to
rhyme with berg 'mountain.' This is when the popular
imagination resettled dwarves into rocks, and this is
when OI bergmal 'echo' (literally 'mountains' talk')
acquired the synonym dvergmal 'dwarves' talk.' Snorri
knew myths, according to which the dwarves lived in the
earth and in stones. One such myth (about a king lured
into a rock by a dwarf), has been preserved in skaldic
poetry (Ynglinga Saga, chapter 12). It contains an
international folklore motif of the open, Sesame type.
According to the eddic catalog of dwarves, eleven of
them live in rocks (or boulders, or stones: i steinom).
323
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Before the final battle between the gods and the giants,
dwarves are depicted as weeping in front of 'stone
doors' (fyr steindurom, Volospă 48:5-6). Yet the
*dwezgos or *dwezgo of the ancient Germanic religion
must first have shared their habitat with the gods and
the elves. The early Teutons venerated stones, but no
evidence points to any original connection between
stones and dwarves (see a broad discussion of dwarves,
smiths, and stones in Motz [1983:87-140]).
As far as we can judge by inscriptions, Scandinavian
rhotacism did not occur before the second half of the
third century; neither did West Germanic rhotacism. The
later rhyme dverg- : berg-presupposes the merger of r
and r dated tentatively
to the 7th or 8th century (Makaev [1962:57]). It fol-
lows that the emergence of the dwarf, a rock dweller,
did not happen before approximately the year 600. De
Boor (1924) and J. de Vries (1956a:256) erred in their
insistence that the dwarves had no roots in religion. The
ancient *dwezgos (or *dwezgo) were part of faith,
whereas dvergar, their successors, were not. For this
reason, the eddic episodes dealing with the dwarves
(and those episodes may have been influenced by later
folklore) do not compare too well with the fairy tales
and local legends in which dwarves interact with people.
When disparate stories are lumped together, as in

324
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Reichborn-Kjennerud (1934), the results carry little

conviction.
The dwarves were created to serve the gods, and
servants are socially inferior to their masters, so that the
word *dwezgas always had the potential for designating
a small person. At first, the dwarves were diminutive in
the sense in which a bellboy is a boy (see more on this
matter at BOY), a waiter is a garçon, and a disciple is a
Jünger. A chance fact emphasizes their status: œsir,
when this noun designated part of a building, were huge
crossbeams, and dvergar were ancillary supports. Finally,
according to a popular belief, supernatural creatures
were able to give people their own loathsome shape.
Thus OI trylla (related to troll ~ troll 'troll') meant not
only 'enchant' but also 'turn into a troll.' Perhaps
dwarves were made responsible for stunted growth
(which in the Middle Ages was looked on as a mental
disease: see the supplement below) and gradually
acquired the stature of their victims.
*Dwezga(z) could not be the first word used in
Germanic for an undersized person. While *dwezgo(z)
were supernatural beings akin to the gods and the elves,
speakers must have had another name for a manikin,
just as the Slavic speakers surely had another word for
'dwarf' before they borrowed karl from German. The
extinct synonyms of Gmc *dwezga(z) may be hidden
among the numerous words for 'boy' in the Old
325
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Germanic languages. CD is ready to look for the original

sense of dwarf in mythology but does not elaborate. In
Old Icelandic, a dvergr was not a manikin, even if some
dwarves were small.
Old English and Old High German glossators knew
that the equivalent of nanus, pumilio, and pygmxus was
dweorg ~ twerc. Medieval Europe enjoyed stories of the
fabulous pygmies (Janni [1978; 1985]), and pygmies turn
up in Isidore's Etymologise XI, 3, 26 and Liber
monstrorum de diversis generibus 11, 7 (see, in addition
to Janni [1978:49], Lutjens [1911:22, sec 31]). As late as
1887, notes like the following one could appear in a
respectable journal: "A strange anthropological
discovery is reported to have been made in the Eastern
Pyrenees. In the valley of Ribas a race of dwarfs, called
by the people 'Nanos,' is said to exist. They never attain
more than four feet in height, and have high cheek
bones and almond eyes of Mongolian type. They marry
only amongst themselves, and are of a very low
intellectual type" (anonymous [1887]). The semantic
change from *dwezgaz 'supernatural being' to dvergr ~
dweorg ~ twerc 'manikin' seems to owe nothing to the
transmission of classical folklore, let alone the distant
memory of two races, giants and dwarves (fantasies on
this subject are popular; see De Mon-tigny [1953]). It is
when rhotacism tied the dwarves to mountains and

326
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pushed their race underground that they became tiny in

the human imagination.
In English, sound symbolism may have accelerated
dwarves' loss of stature. Words beginning with dw-
frequently refer to diminution and diminutive objects.
Modern dialects have dwub 'feeble person,' dwable
'flexible, shaky, feeble,' dwine 'waste away,' dwinge
'shirk, dwindle,' dwingle 'loiter,' and dwizzen 'shrink'
(EDD). The origin of the recent American English
slangism dweeb 'insignificant person' is unknown, but it
looks like one of those given above (see especially
dwab). Martin Schwartz has pointed out that twerp, a
synonym of dweeb, resembles dwarf (personal
communication). Whether dweeb and twerp (both
recent) are in some obscure way related to dwarf or are
products of so-called primitive creation (Urschopfung)
cannot be decided. The dw- group in dweorg made itself
felt to such an extent that the Old English plant name
dweorgdoste 'pennyroyal' even developed into
dweorgdwost(l)e (Petersson [1914:136], and see
Holthausen [1918a:253/29], who must have been
unaware of Petersson's etymology of -dwoste from -
doste; BWA I:49; Sauer [1992:401]: he also missed
Petersson). Why the first part of that plant name is
dweorg- 'dwarf' and whether dweorgdwost(l)e has
cognates outside Germanic (see Hoops [1889:49] and
KEWA II: 88-89, dhatturah) is of no consequence in the
327
Adz(e) Adz(e)

present context. However, if the element -dwost(l)e is

related to OE dwXs, as Holthausen suggested, and if
dweorg- goes back to *dwezg-, both elements were at
one time derived from the same root and we may be
dealing with a tautological compound.
5. All the dwarves mentioned in Scandinavian
mythology are male, and in this respect their race was
different from the races of the gods and the elves.
Female dwarves appeared only in later folktales. When
need arose, German-speakers coined the noun Zwergin.
Old Icelandic dyrgja turned up first in pjalar-Jons saga, a
14th-century text (ODGNS, CV). It is not akin to dvergr.
Modern Icelandic has dyrgja 'fat, clumsy woman; hag'
and durgur 'hulking, sullen man,' the latter recorded in
the 19th century (ABM). Despite recent attestation,
durgur gives the impression of being an old word rather
than a neologism formed in retrospect as a missing
partner of dyrgja, for the Old Icelandic nickname dyrgill
(listed in both Jonsson
[1907:300] and Kahle [1910:229]) must have meant
'moper,' 'fatty,' or something similar. Dictionaries
give the amusingly literal gloss 'little dwarf, Zwergkin.'
The main question is whether dyrgja 'female dwarf'
and dyrgja 'fat, clumsy woman' are related. A. Noreen
(1970:145) set up the proportion dvergr : dyrgja = verk
'work, business' : yrkja 'perform work,' with e and y (<
*u) representing the normal and the zero grades of
328
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ablaut respectively. Yet a late word for a female dwarf

would hardly have had such history. For purposes of
comparison, we may take OI gydja 'goddess,' arguably
not an ancient but earlier word than dyrgja (y in gydja is
the umlaut of u), which has the same grade of ablaut as
gu5; a similar case is OE xlf and xlfen. Lindroth (1911-
12:156 and note 5), despite several cautionary remarks,
reconstructs *dwergion, which, following the rule he
formulated (ue occasionally becomes y after a
consonant), allegedly yielded dyrgin. But if female
dwarves did not exist, no one needed the Proto-Norse
word *duergion. According to Motz (1973:107), the only
female dwarf named in the sagas, also recorded late, is
HerriBr. J. de Vries (AEW) endorsed Lindroth's
reconstruction and added that the two meanings of
dyrgja are not irreconcilable, because the same word
designates supernatural beings, such as dwarves and
trolls. But common names like dvergr 'dwarf' and purs
'giant' substitute for one another only in later folklore,
when they are subsumed under the concept 'monster.'
The original meaning of dyrgja was, in all probability,
*'giantess, troll woman,' and folk etymology connected
it with dvergr. The early history of dyrgja is unknown.
IsEW (521) ties the word to dorg 'an angler's tackle'
(dorga 'to fish'), an unappealing etymology, as de Vries
(AEW) put it. Dorga is usually understood as a
metathesized form of draga 'pull, draw.' Shetland dwarg
329
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'rush; passing shower, etc' resembles OI dvergr but goes

back to OI dorg (EONSS, dwarg); see also dwarg 'large,
great,' recorded from Shetlands and Orkneys in EDD.
Cannot dyrgja be cognate with OI drjugr (ju < *eu) 'solid,
substantial' (OE gedreog 'fitting, sober, serious,' Lith
druktas, driuktas 'thick,' and so on)?
The often-cited West Germanic parallel to dyrgja,
allegedly reproducing the zero grade of ablaut of the
root in dverg, is LG dorf 'dwarf' (Fick3, FT, and others).
Lindroth (loc cit) doubted the existence of dorf. As DW
made clear (Zwerg; an outstanding etymological entry),
dorf occurs only in BWb I: 231, which labels it as a swear
word and classifies it with borrowings from English. The
idea that Zwerg and dorf are connected by ablaut is
untenable. Although DW 16 was published in 1954,
Mitzka disregarded that information in KM17-20, and only
Seebold (KS) expunged reference to dorf at Zwerg.
Almost certainly, no other word with medial r is related
to dvergr by ablaut. Consequently, the dwarf name
Durinn cannot be etymologized as 'the main dwarf'
(Gutenbrunner's
idea [1955:74]).
6. As a postscript to the story of dwarf, it can be
worth mentioning that G Quartz, from which English has
quartz, is called in Norwegian dvergstein
'dwarfstone' (De Boor [1924:540-41]). Although

330
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the origin of this word is debatable, the connection

Quartz ~ Zwerg is not necessarily due to folk etymology,
for both kw- and zw- can go back to tw- (cf G quer,
above) (Liberman [2002a and c]).
A Note on MLG altvile, OI Dvalinn and Dulinn, and
the Etymology of Dwarf
Additional support for an etymology connecting
dwarf and insanity comes from MLG altvile, a hapax
legomenon recorded only in the plural in the
Sachsenspiegel (I:4), a 14th-century Civil Code. Among
those who can inherit neither movable property nor a
fief, mention is made of dwerghe 'dwarves' and altvile.
Copies of the Sachsenspiegel containing the relevant
sentence display a variety of forms altfile, altveile,
oltvile, oltuile, ultfyle, aldefil, alwile, antvile; altuvole,
alczu vil, and so forth (A. Hófer [1870a:4]). They show
that scribes did not understand that word (which is
amazing in light of Latendorf's [1880] communication:
see below) and spelled it according to their folk
etymological notions. The Sachsenspiegel was several
times translated into Latin, but the Latin glosses for
altvile, dwerghe ('dwarves'), and Kropelkint (n pl; 'those
born with crippled bodies'), the names of the three
categories of disenfranchised people, are often unclear
(nani, gnavi, neptunii, nepternii, homuncii, ho-
munciones, etc; A. Hófer [1870a:5, 6]; Latendorf [1877]),
and it is sometimes hard to tell which Latin gloss
331
Adz(e) Adz(e)

corresponds to which German word. The phrase filius

fatuus gnavus aut contractus seems to match altvil (sg)
best of all. Pictures in the Sachsenspiegel are
memorable. There, the altvil is represented as a small
man, different from the dwergh but devoid of any
specific features.
The idea that altvile in the Sachsenspiegel is a
synonym of dwerghe is unconvincing, for the purpose of
the statute must have been to target three, not two
groups of people, whatever the original meaning of
either word may have been. The form altuvole
(corresponding to HG alczu vil) 'too many [organs?],'
marks the beginning of the tradition, according to which
altvile was understood as 'hermaphrodite.' 19th-century
philologists, like their distant predecessors, realized that
altvile is a compound but had trouble choosing between
al-tvile and alt-vile. J. Grimm discussed that word three
times (DW: altwilisch '?old, ancient,' with examples from
Fischart; [1983:566], and [1848:947, note = 1868:657,
note, continued on p 658], with reference to OHG alta
'membrum') and offered conflicting interpretations of al-
and alt-, but invariably came up with the result
'hermaphrodite'; the derivation of altvil from alta + vil
returned him to 'all zu viel.' OHG widello and OE widl,
glossed as 'hermaphro-ditus,' which attracted Grimm's
attention in Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer as possible
counterparts of -vile, are words of unknown origin. WP
332
Adz(e) Adz(e)

I:225 give a few putative cognates of widello ~ widl; like-

wise Holthausen, AeEW. IEW does not reproduce any of
them.
The German for 'hermaphrodite' is Zwitter (OHG
zwitarn, from zwie- 'two'; -tarn is unclear: KS), and -tv- in
altvile, assuming the division al-tvile, suggests the
connection with some form of the numeral two. Both al-
tvile and alt-vile have been made to yield the same
meaning, though only LG old, olde, ald, and alde can
correspond to HG alt. The most influential editors and
translators of the Sachsenspiegel, as well as
lexicographers, believed that it was dwarves, cripples,
and hermaphrodites who could not inherit property in
some parts of medieval Germany (see, for instance, von
Sydow
[1828:67-68], Homeyer [1830:560, glossary]; Lexer;
Weiske [1840:156, glossary], Kosegarten [p. 286],
Hildebrand [1876:125, glossary], and Rotermund
[1895:20]). Hildebrand and Rotermund's example is
instructive, for their works appeared long after the gloss
'hermaphrodite' had been discredited.
No reason would have justified singling out
hermaphrodites along with people unable to defend
themselves like dwarves and cripples or, for example,
lepers (a provision added to that clause in some versions
of the Sachsenspiegel). Hermaphrodites are born rarely,
and the Germanic words that rendered L hermaphroditus
333
Adz(e) Adz(e)

in glosses—OHG widello, wibello, wivello, OE bxddel (the

putative etymon of ModE bad), and OE scritta—meant
'castrated man; effeminate person,' and 'devil,' but not
'a person with two sets of reproductive organs'
(Leverkus; see his rough draft in Lubben [1871:320]),
though OE wxpenwifestre (in a gloss; probably a nonce
word, approximately like E willgill or willjill), 'female
creature with a penis' (see MAN for various
interpretations of wxpen-) reveals a clearer
understanding of hermaphroditus (Kluge
[1916a: 182/6]).
Germanic glossators, not versed in Ovid, did not
seem to know exactly what hermaphroditus means and
matched it with native words applicable to people with
some deficiencies in the sexual sphere or even demons
(the latter holds for OE scritta). Germanic mythology is
poor in tales of hermaphrodites. Tacitus (Germania 2:1)
mentions Tuisto, or Tuisco, the spouseless father of the
good Mannus, but nothing is known about his appear-
ance (see MAN). Only his name suggests 'two of
something.' According to Snorri, Ymir, the primordial
giant of the Scandinavian creation myth, fell into a sweat
while he slept, whereupon a man and a woman grew
under his arm; also, one of his legs got a son with the
other. The name Ymir, even if it is related to several non-
Germanic words for

334
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'twin(s),' such as L gemini, provides no evidence that

its bearer had the organs of a male and a female (Dörner
[1993:6]), and Snorri does not intimate that Ymir was a
hermaphrodite. Nor is the Indo-European etymology of
Ymir, a typical paper construct, more convincing than the
obvious one (Ymir 'making a lot of noise,' as Kure argues
[2003]). Modern coinages, such as LG helferling (a term
in pigeon breeding: Schütte [1912]), are usually
transparent. The chance that MLG altvile meant
'hermaphrodites' is extremely small. Riccius (1750:66)
noted that even if altvile had "two many" organs, it did
not mean that the organs in question were genitalia (see
also Mentz [1905:2])—an apt remark.
Four more interpretations of altvile exist. Woeste
(1875) suggested that *altfil might be adlfil 'leper,' with -
fil as in Go prutsfill 'leprosy.' Sachsse (1853:6-8), a law
historian, indulged in fanciful operations with that word.
However, one of his ideas that emerged from making
sounds perform all kinds of tricks was not lost: he
connected altvile and words for 'elf.' It may be that some
old glosses (for example, neptunii) reflect a similar
notion. As late as 1880, the word altwil 'elf' (a
subterranean sprite substituting a changeling for an
unbaptized baby) seems to have been current in the
vicinity of Schwerin (Latendorf [1880]). The most
consistent defender of altvile as 'elves' was Wilken
(1872:44950), who dismissed Sachsse's exercises in
335
Adz(e) Adz(e)

phonetics and believed -t- to be an excrescent sound;

alvile from altvile can be understood as 'little elves.' He
equated elflings with changelings and obtained a
tautological binomial dwerghe unde altvile 'men of low
stature.' That result invalidates his conclusion, at least
with regard to the Sachsenspiegel. K. Haupt's aim (1870)
was to support Sachsse's idea, but its subject is elves, not
altvile, except in the introductory chapter (Haupt, too,
reads alvil, not alt-vil). Mentz (1905 and 1908) believed
in *alftwil. Björkman (1899) offered a subtler defense of
elves' relation to altvile. His starting point was the form
*alfilus, and he concluded that altvile were 'fools.' He
also pointed to ME alfin ~ alphin 'bishop in chess; fool.'
A. Höfer's booklet (1870a), devoted to altvile, offers
a survey of earlier scholarship and the most persuasive
translation of altvile. Like several researchers before
him, Höfer paired altvil and L filius fatuus 'stupid child' of
the Latin version and concluded that the three categories
of people not allowed to inherit property were dwarves,
cripples, and imbeciles. But to justify his interpretation,
he referred to the jocular Scots phrase old file, applied
mainly to stupid women, with counterparts in Low
German (pp. 25-40). Such a slang expression would be
dramatically at variance with the surrounding text. The
whole sounds like 'dwarves, persons with misshapen
bodies, and old beans.' This is exactly what an
anonymous reviewer said (anonymous 1870), only in
336
Adz(e) Adz(e)

German. A. Höfer's spirited rejoinder (1870b) did not

make his etymology more attractive. (Judging by the text
of the entry altvil in MW, the reviewer was Lübben.) The
same holds for A. Höfer (1873). Smits (1870:152)
asserted that he could see a file in the picture of the
altvil. The triangular piece the altvil holds does not look
like any identifiable object, but perhaps it points to three
categories of the disinherited.
From an etymological point of view, the best
interpretation of altvile is Leverkus-Lübben's (1871); see
also Rochholz (1871:339-41), Koppmann (1876), and
Lübben (1876). That interpretation is old; A. Höfer
(1870a:5) knew but rejected it in favor of his own. Altvile
should be divided al-tvile and -tvile assigned to the root
dwal-. Dwel- would in some cases be its umlauted form,
in others related to it by ablaut. The words containing
the root dwal- ~ dwel- have seemingly incompatible
meanings, namely 'tarry' and 'lead astray.' 'Have one's
abode, spend time (on),' as in E dwell (both meanings
were borrowed from Scandinavian), goes back to 'tarry';
'be stupid' is the continuation of 'lead astray.' See details
on this root in Siebs (1904:313), WP I:842-43, and IEW,
265-66, and Go dwals* 'foolish,' Go dulps 'festival,' G toll
'mad,' OE dwellan 'go; lead astray,' E dwell and dull, and
OI dvelja 'tarry, delay' in etymological dictionaries.
Wyld (UED) follows WP and offers an outstanding
analysis of dwell and its cognates. He arrives at the
337
Adz(e) Adz(e)

conclusion that the sense 'hinder, delay' "is the

connecting link between that of 'wandering' and
'dwelling'; 'to wander, having lost one's way; to linger,
delay, in doubt which way to go,' & finally, 'to remain
where one is.'" On the strength of Gk Qolöj or Qoloj
'sepia' (a dark fluid, ink) and Qolepöj 'muddy, troubled'
(said about water, and so on), he glosses *dwal- ~ dwel
as 'go astray in the dark.' The sense 'obscure, dark, lack-
ing clearness' could develop into both 'delay' and
'folly.'
Lübben (in Leverkus-Lübben [1871:324-29]) re-
constructed an even more convincing original meaning
with evidence only from Middle High German at his
disposal. Some of his etymologies are wrong, but his
examples show that the words clustered round
*dwellan (MHG twellen) once meant *'move in a
circle.' A person moving in a circle gets nowhere (is
delayed) and labors under the illusion of making
progress (is led astray). Alt-vile were feeble-minded
people, 'totally deranged' (al- is an intensifying prefix). In
similar fashion, Till Eulenspiegel (Ulenspiegel) was Fool
Eulenspiegel (he pretended to understand everything
literally and behaved unconventionally), and William Tell
was William (Wilhelm) the fool (he feigned madness). Cf
Woeste's discussion of til(l) 'fool' (1875:209). Both Till
and Tell were soubriquets (Pfannenschmid [1865:36-
37], Lubben
338
Adz(e) Adz(e)

[1871:329-30], Rochholz [1871:340-41]). The nu-

merous modern investigations of Till Eulen-spiegel's
name subject only Eulenspiegel and Ulenspiegel to
serious scrutiny, while Till and Dill are disregarded. E
dally and its cognates may have influenced the meaning
of Tell and Till (Maak [1974, esp p. 379]). Conversely,
attempts to connect Tell with the Scandinavian
mythological names Dellingr and Heimdall can be
dismissed as unsuccessful (the latest survey that puts
this idea to rest is F. Neumann [1881]).
Two difficulties stand in the way of this otherwise
well-argued etymology of altvile. It is based on the
spelling -w-, rather than -v- (as in dwell), and -d- rather
than -t- (one expects *aldwile), because a Low German
word is supposed to have unshifted d, as in E dull and
dwell, not as in G toll or MHG twellen. Neither difficulty
is insurmountable. In Middle High German, the
alternation of the letters v and f followed rules that
sometimes escape us today, regardless of whether they
reflected phonetic reality or obeyed the scribes' whims.
Since w also designated /v/ in that period, an occasional
use of v for w, especially in a word with an obscure inner
form, need not cause surprise; see dvalitha in Lubben
(1871:324). It is hard to disagree with Woeste (1875:208)
that the scribe who wrote dwerge would have written
*altwile if he pronounced [w] in it. However, altvile was

339
Adz(e) Adz(e)

an obscure word, and the scribe may have copied it in

the form in which he saw it.
As regards -t- versus -d-, it is not known which form
of the word altvile is 'correct.' Discussion centers on the
verse from the Sachsenspiegel: "Uppe altvile unde uppe
dwerghe / nirstirft weder len noch erve, noch uppe
kropelkint. / Swe denne de erven sint / unde ire nesten
mage, / de solen se halden in irer plage." ('On altvile and
on dwarves /neither movable property nor a fief shall be
devolved, nor on children born crippled./ Therefore, the
[legitimate] heirs / and their [these people's] next of
kin / are responsible for their care.') The pronunciation
of dwerghe as [dwerws] or [dvervs] follows from its
rhyme with erve, but for the pronunciation of altvile we
depend on the extant spelling, which, in the verse, is not
more reliable than, for example, aldefil. Besides this, dw-
and tw- were often confused in medieval German
(Lubben
[1871:323]).
M. Haupt (1848) pointed to Markwart Altfil occurring
twice around 1180. Markwart's nickname is usually cited
as proof of t being the original consonant in altvile, for
the counterpart of LG t would have been HG z. But it
proves the opposite. Since the High German word was
recorded with t, the earliest Low German form must
have had d. Altfil is indistinguishable from *Altvil: after t,
v had little chance of remaining voiced. M. Haupt divided
340
Adz(e) Adz(e)

altfil into alt- and -fil, glossed it as 'changeling' (because

changelings look like children but are really old men and
because folklore dwarves have gray beards), and took
alt- for G alt 'old,' but he could offer no explanation for -
fil. In all probability, the 12th-century character passed
under the name Markwart the dolt. Bjorkman's
arguments (1899) are different, but he arrived at the
same conclusion. It is an almost incredible coincidence
that E dolt, an etymological doublet of the now archaic
dold, has the same alternation of consonants as in
German. Other than that, dol-t looks like a viable
cognate of *dwil in another grade of ablaut. Although
*aldwil ~ *altwil had some limited currency in the north
and in the south, in most regions it seems to have gone
out of use early, and only the phrase altvile unde
dwerghe survived in some areas of Germany.
Even if the triad altvile, dwerghe [unde] kropel-kint
'half-wits, dwarves, [and] cripples' has been unraveled, it
is less compact than could be expected from a legal
formula. Restrictions should have affected people of
deficient physical and mental abilities. It was not
necessary to make a special mention of dwarves. The
binomial *dwile [ unde] dwerg(e) is based on alliteration.
This fact presupposes a certain bond between the unit's
members. The relation may go from closeness and near
identity (as in bed and board, safe and sound, and fret
and fume) to contrast (as in through thick and thin).
341
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Combining words to forge a quasi-idiom would be

pointless. Children who did not grow were believed to
be possessed by an evil spirit, and barbarous methods of
exorcising it, like exposing the baby to great heat, were
practiced in Europe. Derangement was ascribed to the
same forces. Medieval medicine treated stunted growth
and mental retardation as caused by similar factors and
in principle different from deformity. Belief in
changelings should also be reckoned with, but if any
group among the altvile, dwerghe, and kropelkint in the
Sachsenspiegel was looked on as consisting of
changelings, it must have been the dwerghe, not the
altvile.
*Dwerg- is an ancient word. The legal language of
medieval Germany needed a partner for it, to indicate
another category of people possessed by spirits, and that
is probably why *aldwil came into existence. Although
this noun almost disappeared at the beginning of the
second millennium, it does not mean that the coinage
was inept, for attraction between the root dwal-, the ba-
sis of words meaning 'wander aimlessly, move without
making progress; lead or go astray,' and dwarves can be
traced to a remote epoch.
The name of the only prominent dwarf in
Scandinavian mythology is Dvalinn. The other dwarves
are his host, the sun is called his playmate (more likely,
'deceiver'), and some goddesses of fate are his daughters
342
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(see Edda I:326, index). However little onomastics may

tell us about dwarves' nature, the similarity between
Dvalinn and *dwile (altvile) is significant.
AEW (dvala, end of the entry) repeats Mag-nusen's
explanation in FML (without referring to the source) and
cites N dvalen 'lazy, sleepy' in explaining the origin of
Dvalinn. Mythological dwarves were neither lazy nor
sleepy, but consider what has been said above about
dizzy and doze and the root *dwesk-. If we are allowed
to cross the line separating a bearer of madness (a
dwarf) and his victim, Dvalinn may be understood both
as 'inflicting madness' and 'mad.' This gloss will also fit
two other Dvalins recorded in the Elder Edda: Dvalin the
hart ('precipitous?') and Dvalinn the warrior ('furious?'),
the owner of the horse M65inn 'courageous, spirited.'
Frenzy characterized both. Another dwarf was Dulinn
(see LP), whose name AEW etymologizes as 'hidden'
(from OI dylja 'hide'). But dwarves became "hidden" only
in later folklore, and Dulinn is even closer to OE dol
'foolish' (ModE dull is a borrowing from Scandinavian
rather than a continuation of that Old English word) and
G toll 'mad' than Dvalinn is. The senses involved here are
'drive crazy; lead astray, impede progress,' not 'lazy' or
'hide.' Dvalinn and Dulinn look like etymological
doublets, with the root in the normal and the zero grade
of ablaut respectively. Whenever we meet dwarves,
madness is close. If *dwile 'imbeciles' [and] dwerg(e)
343
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'madmen, changelings' is an ancient formula, each of its

parts may have referred to different types of mental ab-
erration, but since dvergr and its cognates have not been
recorded with the meaning 'madman,' such a hypothesis
would need more proof.
The origin of the names Dvalinn and Dulinn attracted
almost no attention, and few remember the exchange of
opinions concerning altvile that seems to have ended in
1905. AHD devotes an entry to altphil 'bishop' (in chess)
and identifies Markwart's soubriquet with it, but makes
no connection between altphil and altvile. Dobozy
(1999:210-11, note 28) contains minimal discussion. Only
Janz (1989:68-75) examines the most important works
on the subject and reproduces the illustration from the
Sachsenspiegel. A. Höfer (1873:29) mentions "the
impossible explanation by Messers de Vries and de Wal."
Mentz, the author of an exhaustive survey of the altvile
problem, tried to locate Vries and Wal's article (1905:6,
note 7), but drew blank. In his book, A. Höfer promised
to deal with their explanation later but must have
thought better of his plan. The results obtained from the
study of the medieval concepts of madness and the
origin of altvile, Til, Tell, Dvalinn, and Dulinn are of some
importance for understanding the nature of the
mythological dwarf and, by implication, for the
etymology of the word dwarf.
EENA (1855)
344
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The ancient Celtic numeral that allegedly gave rise to

eena 'one' is still current in England, especially in
Yorkshire (along with similar words for 'two,' 'three,'
'four,' and 'five'), for counting sheep. According to some
researchers, those pseudonumerals were brought to New
England and used as tally marks in trading with the
native population. They are now preserved only in
children's games. Although counting out rhymes like
eena, meena, mina, mo have been recorded in many
languages, it is unlikely that all or most of them go back
to a single source.
OED dismisses eena as a nonsense word. AMG (250),
calls the jingle "Eena, meena, mina, mo, Catch a nigger
by the toe, / If he hollers, let him go, / Eena, meena,
mina, mo" comparatively recent, without further
comment.
An old exchange of opinions on "the ancient British
numerals," known better among students of folklore
than among etymologists, partly revealed the history of
eena (the latest survey of this material [Barry 1969]
appeared in Folk Life; see also Barry
[1967] and Greene [1992:551-52], the latter is based
on Barry's works). Here are the first five numerals
used in scoring sheep in the Yorkshire Dales and
transcribed by A. Ellis with the so-called Glossic signs he
invented (1867): yaan, taih'n, tedhuru, (m)edhuru,

345
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pi(m)p, that is, [jain], ['taisn], ['teösrs], ['(m)eÖ3re],

[pi(m)p] (Ellis [1870:117; 1871: XIX]).
I. Taylor's list of "ancient numerals which were
formerly in use in the northwestern corner" of England
(1877:338) is similar: eina, peina, para, pat-tera, pith,
and so on. In his opinion, "these numerals are a relic of a
language of the British kingdom of Strathclyde or
Cumbria, which stretched northwards to Dumbarton,
and whose southern boundary ran a few miles to the
north of the place from whence these numerals have
been obtained." He adds that according to a local
tradition, "the numerals were brought to Craven by
drovers from Scotland. This tradition in no way implies
that the numerals are Gaelic, but may be sufficiently ex-
plained by the fact that a great part of the Cumbrian
kingdom lay to the north of the modern Scottish
border."
Ellis traced the Yorkshire numerals to Celtic, namely
to "the Welsh branch, dreadfully disfigured in passing
from mouth to mouth as mere nonsense." But Bradley
(1877) wondered how Cymric numerals "could have
become so familiarly known in Yorkshire" and believed
"that they had descended traditionally from the time
when a Cymric dialect was spoken in that district." He
looked on them as ancient British rather than Welsh, and
Taylor supported him. All the materials appeared in the
same volume of The Athenxum. According to the
346
Adz(e) Adz(e)

editorial note (p. 43), The Athenxum received "a great

many more communications on the subject" than the
magazine could print. It printed only Westwood (1877),
Ellwood
(1877), Powell (1877), and Trumbull (1877). Later
authors (like Beddoe and Rowe [1907:42]) repeated
Bradley's conclusions. See the discussion in Mac-Ritchie
(1915) and more contemporary accounts in
Potter (1949-50b) and Barry (1967). The numerals
that Taylor, Ellis, and Bradley recorded are some-
times mere gibberish, with English words replacing the
original forms (for example, yahn = [ja:n] 'one,' the local
pronunciation of one) and rhyming words invented by
informants.
A similar string of numerals was in use among the
native population in North America, for example, een,
teen, tother, fither, pimp, with the variant eeny, teeny,
tuthery, fethery, fip. A list of Wawena numerals from
Maine first appeared in Brunovicus (1868:180), with
reference to a communication by
R.K. Sewall, dated Winter 1867. Kohl (1869:91)
suggested in passing that these numerals "bear a
resemblance to the Icelandic" (which they do not).
Trumbull (1871) corrected Kohl's mistake and pointed
out that those scores were "to be regarded rather as
tally-marks or counters than as true cardinal or ordinal
numbers. They were used in counting by fives, tens or
347
Adz(e) Adz(e)

twenties. Traces of some such systems may be found in

many school-boy rhymes for 'counting out'" (pp. 14-15).
In his opinion, the numerals in question, were "brought
to New England by English colonists and used by them in
dealing with the Indians in counting fish, beaver skins,
and other articles of traffic. When the memory of their
origin was lost, the Anglo-Americans believed them to be
Indian numerals, and the Indians, probably, believed
them to be good English." Other variants of the rhyme in
question abound (Newell [1883:194-203], Bolton
[1888:103-08, numbers 568-646], A. Hall [1894],
Abrahams and Rankin [1980: nos 119-411]); see also
Witty (1927:44-45), Cassidy (1958:23-24), and Barry
(1969). Gold (1990b) offers an especially detailed survey.
According to Potter (1949-50a), the second line of
the rhyme goes back to a supposed French Canadian
cache ton poing derrière ton dos 'hide your fist behind
your back.' Misunderstood by Anglophone children, it
allegedly turned, under the influence of their parents'
conversations when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was
being debated, into catch a nigger by the toe. He does
not exclude the role of an Indian or a half-breed
intermediary and remarks that in the earliest variants
(eena, meena, mona, mite, basca, lora, hora, bite,
hugga, bucca, bau; eggs, butter, cheese, bread, stick,
stock, stone dead-O-U-T) there is no mention of Negroes.
According to OO [1951:156-57], the French Canadian
348
Adz(e) Adz(e)

hypothesis is interesting but hardly necessary. In fact, it

is not interesting at all. As Gold indicates (1990b and
personal communication), no native speaker of French
would say derrière TON dos, and no evidence supports
the rise of eena, meena, mina, mo among Canadian
children. Even less credible is Potter's reconstruction of
"an ancient magic rime-charm allegedly used in Druid
times to choose the human victims to be ferried across
the Menai Strait to the Isle of Mona to meet a horrible
fate under the Golden Bough of the sacred mistletoe
amid the holy oaks" (340). The most fanciful conjecture
is Bickerton's (1982). He traces eena, meena, mina, mo
to a phrase in Sâo Tomense, "a creole language with a
largely Portuguese vocabulary spoken on the island of
Sâo Tomé, off the West Coast of Africa, since the
sixteenth century." Gold (1990b) provides decisive
arguments against this conjecture.
Barry (1969:78-87) divides the hypotheses on the
origin of the North Country numerals into two groups:
survival from the Old Welsh language once spoken by
the Britons and importation (from either Wales or
Scotland) at a later date. Bradley (1877) supported the
idea of survival, Ellis (1871:XIX) believed in importation.
No conclusive proof in favor of either theory exists, and a
definitive solution is impossible here.
Not only sheep are scored in the way described
above, and not only in Yorkshire; see the
349
Adz(e) Adz(e)

examples in OED and in OO (1983:12-13). S. Levin

(1995:422-23) discusses the opening line of the
rhyme within the framework of his theory of displaced
numerals. Gold (1990b) argues against the British origin
of eena, meena, mina, mo in the New World, but he does
not call into question one as the etymon of eena. If we
do not follow Potter all the way to the Golden Bough,
meena will appear as a variant of eena, while mina and
mo seem to be nonsense words alliterating with meeny
and leading up to the pair mo / toe. Nonsense words of
this sort are to be expected in games: cf strips like eensy-
weensy and itty-bitty. It is not necessary to trace the
counterparts of eena in various languages (and the en-
tire line for that matter) to English, let alone Celtic. Some
similarities can be explained by the universal
characteristics of children's language, but a few
questions remain unanswered (Liberman
[1994b:175-78]).

EVER (1000)
The etymon of OE »fre (> ModE ever) has two mor-
phemes, but whether the constituent elements are the
root and a suffix or two roots within a compound, or
whether a phrase preceded the emergence of this adverb
remains a matter of debate. Of several etymologies of
ever proposed in the 19th century, two are still
occasionally cited because of the favorable treatment
350
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that OED gave them; both trace »fre to old prepositional

phrases. However, »fre, contrary to the implicit
assumption in all dictionaries, was probably coined late
in ecclesiastical English by adding the suffix of the
comparative degree to OE awa 'always,' a synonym of
»fre. Words for 'ever, always,' especially the shorter
ones, are regularly reinforced in the languages of the
world. The vowel rather than the expected a, may have
been chosen under the influence of other comparatives
or because of the confusion between OE a 'always, ever'
and a= 'law, covenant.'
The sections are devoted to 1) a survey of opinions
on the origin of ever, 2) arguments for the derivation of
»fre from »w + re (the suffix of the comparative degree),
and 3) the later history of ever.
1. Most often, words for 'ever,' like words for
'always,' are compounds. Such are L semper (from sem-
'one,' as in L semel 'one,' and per 'through';
approximately 'all the way through'), G immer (from
OHG io 'ever' and mer 'more'), Russ vsegda (an obscure
formation but undoubtedly a compound; the same holds
for its cognates in Slavic and Lithuanian: Vasmer I:362-
63), Icel alltaf (= allt 'all,' n and af- 'of, etc') and xtid (x
'ever' and tid 'time').
The earliest etymologists chanced on what seems to
be the correct cognates of xfre: G ewig 'eternal,' Gk
dud)V 'time, lifetime, generation, eternity, etc,' and L
351
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aeternus (Minsheu). Skinner compared ever and OE a

'ever,' and Junius mentioned L aevam 'lifetime,
generation' (with reference to Vossius). Wedgwood
listed the same words and added several Finnish and
Estonian look-alikes, which need not be related to
aevum and the rest, but he was the first to refer to Go
aiws* 'time, eternity.' OI xvi 'lifetime, generation' turns
up only in Chambers (1867). DDEL offers a string of the
same cognates and traces them to the root *as 'be.'
Thomson detected the verb 'be' in ver but arranged the
components in a different order: he represented OE xfre
as the sum of OI x 'always' and vera 'be' and noted the
identity of ever and aye. W. Barnes (1862:323) compared
ever with every and ere. Every, from OE xfre xlc, that is,
'ever each,' sheds no light on xfre, while Hre (< Gmc
*airiz; Go airis) is the comparative degree of *air 'early'
and is at best of typological interest for the history of
ever, as will be seen below. In Gothic, the idea of
perpetuity is expressed in the simplest way possible: aiw
'ever' is the accusative singular of the noun aiws* 'time'
(recorded only in negative clauses with ni ... aiw 'never').
The etymology of xfre resolves itself into discovering the
origin of -fre. A connection between x - and some word
designating time in Old English and elsewhere is secure,
but whether that word is OE x needs discussion.
A reasonable, even if faulty, etymology of xfre
appears in Ettmuller (1851:55). According to him, xfre is
352
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the dative of the noun aw, which is a cognate of Go aiws.

He cites OE halor 'salvation' (from hal 'healthy, etc') and
pundur 'weight.' It is unclear how those words bear on
his argument (halor contains a derivational suffix, and
pundur is a borrowing from Latin), but since Go aiw is
the accusative of aiws*, the idea of interpreting xfre as a
form of x (w) is tempting. However, -re does not occur
among the case endings in the declension of Old English
nouns. The genitive and dative singular of OE x is x we,
and texts display some vacillation between x and x w
(SB, sec 288, note 3); *x wre as a case form of x w is
unthinkable. Nevertheless, Mueller1 reproduces
Ettmuller's etymology without comment. Mueller2 calls
xfre an adverbial formation, a statement echoing Skeat1:
"-re answers to the common A.S. [= Anglo-Saxon] ending
of the dat. fem. sg. of adjectives and has an adverbial
force." Skeat considered OE xf- to be related to OE a wa
and Go aiws but did not explain how an ending of
adjectives could be appended to a noun and give it
adverbial force. In 1882, Skeat also brought out his CED,
and there his statement is terse: "Related to A.S. a wa."
Yet he clung to his original etymology for a long time. He
called -re of xfre an adjectival ending, as in go d-re (gen
and dat sg of
go d 'good') in Skeat (1887 = 1892:274). CED says
the same and refers to other Old English adverbs
ending in the vowel -e, for instance, e ce 'ever.'
353
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Cosijn (1879:267/2) offered the first of the two

durable etymologies of ever, though he explained never
rather than ever. He derived it from some phrase like Go
*ni aiw fairHau and pointed to Northumbr nxfra "a u-
stem." Bradley (OED, ever) cited OE a to fe ore, which, he
said, is equivalent to Go *aiw fairHau and OHG
neo(i)naltre 'never,' literally 'never in life.' "This," he
argued, "is supported by the agreement of the final -a of
the Northumbr. xfra with the ending of the locative
(dat.) of the -u declension, to which the sb. feorh life (:-
*ferhwus) originally belonged. The recorded forms of
feorh, however, do not account for the umlaut; but cf
the cognates OE. firas, OS. firihos, ON. firar 'men'."
Cosijn's discussion takes a line and a half (a footnote) in
a long article written in Dutch and bearing the title 'De
oudste Westsaksische chronicle' ('The Oldest West Saxon
Chronicle'). If OED had not highlighted that footnote, no
one would probably have known of it. In Horn's opinion
(1921a:77/75), the etymon of ever was aiw in fairH au.
Then came Hempl's (1889) hypothesis. He re-
constructed *a-bifore or *a-buri but preferred the latter:
"[f]inal i mutates u to y and this mutates the d to x ...
while the e < y ... being in unguarded position, is of
course syncopated. According to this the original force of
ever was 'in any case, at any time,'" as in G jemals. *Buri,
in Hempl's opinion, must have meant 'event, occasion'
(cf OE byre 'time, opportunity,' perhaps 'occasion' and
354
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OHG gaburi, glossed as 'casus, eventus, occasio, tem-

pus'). Hempl adds: "This also gives an explanation of the
persistence of the writing (n)xbre (so always in the 'Cura
Past[oralis]') when the labial fricative had come to be
represented by f, and b was restricted to the
representation of the labial stop. ... We should therefore
recognize in the ultimate change of xbre > xfre ... a real
change of b to f and not simply an alteration in the
orthography." In looking for an instance of umlaut
similar to that posited for *a buri, Hempl cited OE xrende
'message, mission, tidings.' Mayhew (1891c:sec 416)
accepted that derivation of ever (xfre < x + byre) but
gave no reference, which caused Hempl's gentle
rejoinder (1891) and Mayhew's unusually courteous
apology (1891b). However, according to Mayhew
(1891b), xf in xfrende is a reflex of WG a and is not due
to umlaut. Hempl (1892b) disagreed. Bradley (OED)
quoted both Cosijn and Hempl, without taking sides.
Hence Hempl's comment (1892b): "I cannot understand
how anyone can be contented to explain a mutation by
saying that, though there is no i in the word involved
(feorh, Goth. fairhwus), there is one in a word (firas) that
some have thought related to it."
Later dictionaries and manuals add nothing new to
OED except for occasional mistakes. Skeat4 and UED are
not even sure that xffre is related to OE a. Webster from
1828 onward, Weekley (1921), and Klein (CEDEL) believe
355
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that the relation exists. AeEW, EW2,3, and Weekley (1924)

say "? < a in feore 'ever in life'." Baly (1897:41) does
without a question mark. RH1 suggests kinship with Go
aiws*, but RH2 makes no mention of it. Nicolai (1907:sec
92) follows Hempl. WNWD1 gives a + byre 'time, occa-
sion' as the etymon of ever, while WNWD3 inexplicably
suggests a + feorr 'far.' Kluge (KL) was positive that a and
x- are cognates, but he only reproduced Bradley's text
with abridgments. Barnhart states that some scholars
derive ever from a in feore, whereas others trace it to a +
-re, "dat. fem. adj. suffix, often formative of adverbs."
"Some scholars" are Skeat and Scott, the etymologist of
CD. We thus have a set of shaky solutions, and dictionary
makers, not knowing what to say, prefer to choose the
safest variant rather than saying nothing. No one has
refuted either Cosjin or Hempl, and the origin of ever is
still believed to be unknown.
Two more deservedly forgotten conjectures on the
origin of ever are Platt's and Pogatscher's. According to
Platt (1892), who, without supplying a reference, says
that he advanced his idea several years earlier, ever is
"an adverb to the adjective afor with vowel
modification." Probably he meant OE afora 'posterity,
heir' rather than afor. The mechanism of the
"modification" remains a mystery. Pogatscher (1898:97-
98) endorsed Kluge's derivation of G immer from *x-mre
(EWDS4, immer) and traced xffre to this etymon, though
356
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Kluge gave up his unfortunate derivation in the next

edition of EWDS and never returned to it.
2. Words for 'always, ever' are not necessarily
disguised compounds; they may be phrases. Compare E
ever and ever and the archaic binomial ever and ay (ay is
a Middle English borrowing from Old Norse; OI ey
competed with x, ei, and 0y). G immer, already a
compound (io 'ever' + mer 'more'), swells to immer
wieder 'ever again,' that is, 'again and again.' Horn, who
shared Cosjin's views on the origin of xfre and noted that
words for 'always, ever' are frequently replaced with
new words (L semper with F toujours, and so forth) or
reinforced, looked even on OE o, the enigmatic doublet
of OE a, as a pronounced with a high tone (HL, 747; Horn
calls such emphatic forms Hochtonformen). Therefore,
xfre may be a reinforced form of the adverb awa, a
variant of a 'always,' with -re being the suffix of the
comparative degree. The element -re may have been
borrowed from words like xdre 'early' and hlu tre
'clearly,' but that is less likely. The forms of the
comparative degree of both adjectives and adverbs that
ended in -ra probably influenced xfre. Although the form
xfra occurs only in Northumbrian, it is arguably the
oldest. Some vacillation in the use of OE -re ~ -ra is not
unthinkable: cf clxfre and clxfra 'clover' (see CLOVER).
The stumbling block of all etymologies of xfre is the
origin of x-. The vowel of OE x (w) 'law,' an i-stem noun,
357
Adz(e) Adz(e)

owes its existence to umlaut. Go aiws* was declined as

an a-stem in the singular and an i-stem in the plural. OI x
'ever' is usually traced to *aiwi. But even if we disregard
the semantic difficulty (OE x ~ xw did not mean 'time'),
xfre cannot be the product of an adjectival or adverbial
suffix grafted on a noun, for such hybrids do not exist.
That is why Ettmuller's and Skeat's etymologies of
ever are untenable. Only a wa is a viable basis of xfre,
and x remains unexplained.
Foerste (1954:405-08) suggested that x in clxfre
'clover' and in a few other words in which umlaut is
usually posited can be traced directly to Gmc *x (> Go e,
WGmc *a) that alternated with *ai; see dis-cusion at
CLOVER. Such a shortcut would perhaps also be
acceptable for xfre if xfre could be shown to go back to
the remote past. But it emerged only in Cynewulf, at the
close of the Old English period, and its antiquity need not
be taken for granted. Ever was then and remains to this
day an elevated word, as opposed to always, and may be
a coinage of clerics, in whose language reference to
eternity would be common, or of religious poets.
Solemn phrases rendering L in saeculum, in aeter-
num, and in perpetuum were needed for prayers in
native languages, and Go in aiwins, OHG in then alten
euuon (Otfrid I:20, 25), and the like sprang up
(Weisweiler [1924:457]). Ever belongs to the same style.
Consequently, positing ancient West Germanic forms for
358
Adz(e) Adz(e)

it cannot be recommended, the more so because in the

speech of officiating priests, phrases of such importance
would not have shrunk to xfre, as happened, for
instance, to G nur 'only' and Du maar 'but,' both of
which were informal shortenings of ni wdri and newdre.
A similar objection is applicable to Cosijn's and Hempl's
etymons; xfre may not have had an asterisked
prehistory. That OE xfre lacks cognates is commonplace
(besides dictionaries, see Jellinghaus [1898a:463]).
If x fre was formed from a wa (with the ending -a
syncopated) and contains the suffix -re, *awre, not x wre
could be expected. Two factors probably affected the
shape of the new word: 1) The noun x (w) 'law' had the
doublet a and the variant x (w) was more common.
Some grounds for confusion existed in any derivative of
this root. 2) Although the comparative degree did not
need umlaut in Old English, some of the most frequent
adjectives and adverbs, namely those with the suffix *-
iza, had mutated vowels: i(e)ldra, yldra, eldra, xldra
(eald, ald 'old'), grl(e)tra, grytra, gryttra (great 'great'),
gingra (gung, geong 'young'), hl(e)r(r)a, hyrra, hegra
(heah, heh 'high'), scyrtra (sceort 'short'), occasionally
brx dra (brad 'broad')
(SB, sec 307; A. Campbell [1959:sec 658]). Against
the background of grytra, brxdra, and so forth, the
neologism *xwra would have sounded as natural as
*awra. The suffixed forms x(w) + ra (re) would also
359
Adz(e) Adz(e)

explain the variant with -b-: xbre 'ever' and nx bre

'never' would develop like clx bre 'clover.' Both OED
(ever) and Pogatscher (1898:97-98) emphasized the
parallelism in the development of the -br- ~ -fr- group in
the words ever and clover.
The suffix of the comparative degree, expressing
increase and growth, is uniquely suited to serve as an
element of semantic reinforcement, and it merges easily
with adverbs and prepositions. The result is often the
rise of new words. The history of other, whether, after
(also Go afar 'after'), over, and their cognates in
Germanic and elsewhere bears witness to this process.
*Mwra seems to have been coined (in the 10th century?)
with the meaning 'more than always,' that is, 'for ever
and ever,' 'in all eternity' and to be a lexicalized
comparative degree of a wa 'always' with analogical
umlaut. Proto-Indo-European had no word for 'eternity,'
and the process of coining nouns and adverbs for this
abstract concept did not stop in the prehistori-cal period.
See Benveniste's numerous works on this subject (for
instance, Benveniste [1937]) and aiws and ajukdups in
Feist4 for more references. Assuming that such is the
origin of ever, Skeat, it must be acknowledged, came
closer to the truth
than anyone else before or after him. It also follows
that E ever does not belong with the words that became

360
Adz(e) Adz(e)

shorter on account of their frequency, as Manczak

(1987:90) suggested.
A connection between OE x 'always' and x 'law' is of
tangential interest for reconstructing the origin of the
adverb ever. Convinced by Weisweiler's arguments
(1924), some researchers treat OHG ewa 'eternity' and
'law' as unrelated homonyms (see G Ehe 'marriage' and
ewig 'eternal' in later etymological dictionaries and a- 2
'law' in OFED). But 'oath,' 'law,' 'covenant,' and 'institu-
tion sanctified by law' (inviolable things) are fitting
measures of eternity within the limits of human
experience. No compelling reason exists for seeking
separate etymologies of OHG ewa1 and ewa2.
3. In Middle English, xfre became evre. Morsbach
(1896:sec 61) and Luick (1964:sec 352, note 2)
explain differently the loss of length in x. Around the
beginning of the 14th century, an epenthetic vowel (e)
sprang up between v and r (Luick
[1964:sec 449 and note 1]). In late Middle English,
the forms er and er were common (OED; Luick
[1964:secs 454.1 and 745.2]). The semantic shift in
ever is less obvious. In Old English, xfre usually
meant 'at all times, always,' while the meaning 'at any
time' can be detected primarily in negative
constructions, as in Gothic (ni ... aiws 'never'). In the
early modern period, ever acquired the force of an

361
Adz(e) Adz(e)

emphatic particle in whatever, whoever, ever so much,

and the like (OED).
FAG 'servant; male homosexual, etc' (1775);
FAG(G)OT (1300)
The original meaning of fag(g)ot is 'bundle of
firewood.' All the other meanings, 'drudge' and 'junior in
a public school' among them, go back to the second half
of the 18th century. The range of application is from 'ugly
woman' to 'cheap meal' (all depreciatory). Fag(g)ot
'bundle of firewood' may have come to designate 'menial
servant' and 'male homosexual' under the influence of its
near synonym pimp 'bundle of firewood' and 'boy who
does menial jobs,' 'procurer of prostitutes.' Fag is a
clipping of fag(g)ot. Hence also fag (v), fagged out, fag
end, and probably fag 'end of a cigaret.'
The sections are devoted to 1) the various meanings
of fag and 2) the origin of fag.
1. The earliest known meaning of fagot is 'bundle of
sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees bound together.'
Later, 'bundle or bunch in general' and 'collection of
things not forming any genuine unity' turned up. At the
end of the 16th century, fagot 'old woman' appeared, and
at the end of the 17th century, 'person temporarily hired
to supply a deficiency at the muster or on the roll of a
company or regiment.' Since 1882, fagot as a term of
reproach, used about children, adults, and stray cows,

362
Adz(e) Adz(e)

has been recorded. In 1914 fagot '(male) homosexual'

made its debut on a printed page in the United States.
ME fagot is a borrowing from French. According to
Torp, the Romance word, which came to French from
Italian, is of Germanic origin. However, VL *facus and
Gmc *fag seem to be different words. Nynorsk fagg
'bundle, short fat man' corresponds to Icel fdggur
'baggage' and Sw faggorna, the latter used only in such
phrases as ha ddden i faggorna 'have one foot in the
grave,' literally 'have death in one's luggage.' Scand fagg
is a possible etymon of E fadge (with [g] Anglicized to [<
%]), but ME *fag 'bundle' did not turn up. Fadge is a pre-
dominantly northern word. It means 'bundle of leather,
sticks, wool, etc; bale of goods' (first recorded in 1588),
'large flat loaf; bannock' (1609), 'short, fat individual'
(1765), and 'farthing' (1789).
It is unclear whether we are dealing with homonyms
or different meanings of the same poorly attested noun
and whether a connection can be assumed between
fadge (sb) on one hand and
fadge (v) 'fit, suit' (1573) and 'trudge' (1658) on the
other; see more on fadge 'fit' at FUCK. Fadge 'far-
thing' is a typical name of a 'clumsy coin'; likewise, cob
'lump' meant 'old Spanish dollar' (Schwabe 1916-17,
106/6a and 8). If ME *fag 'bundle' existed, it may have
been viewed as a colloquial variant of F fagot, regardless
of the origin of fagot in French. But since ME *fag has not
363
Adz(e) Adz(e)

been found, its possible interaction with fagot and the

derivation of fadge from it remain a matter of
speculation.
Fadge and fagot did coexist in the north of England,
but only fagot, though a borrowed word, became part of
the standard language. See Skeat
(1899-1902:665-66, fadge and faggot), NEO (fagg),
SEO faggor), ABM (fdggur), Atkinson (fadge; he
summarizes several earlier hypotheses and derives fadge
from Welsh), and Holthausen (1932:67/1517). OED (but
not ODEE) cites OF fais 'bundle' (> ModF faix 'burden');
this trace leads nowhere. Fag 'drudge' surfaced in the
seventeen-seventies, and its ties with the later meanings
of fagot are obvious. Sheridan named a servant in The
Rivals Fag (the play was first performed in January 1775).
Names from recent colloquialisms were popular in 18 th-
century comedies; see also SLANG.
OED gives the following dates for the earliest
occurrences of fag 'servant' and fag 'drudge, drudgery':
1775 'work hard,' 1780 'hard work,' 1785 'junior in a
public school,' 1806 'be a fag,' 1824 'make a fag,' 1826
'weary one,' 1840 'fieldsman,'

1923 'homosexual.' We can assume that before the

nineteen-twenties fag rarely (if at all) referred to sexual
orientation. The fashion for fag 'servant, drudge' must
364
Adz(e) Adz(e)

have originated when it appeared in print. Fag 'servant'

is an improbable continuation of *fag 'bundle.'
The common belief that the starting point in the
history of fag 'servant' is the verb fag 'decline,' which
yielded 'wearied, fagged out,' 'drudgery,' and 'servant'
has little to recommend it, for the 18th-century noun fag
does not seem to have developed naturally from a word
of comparable semantics; it has always belonged to
specialized slang. The comparison between fag and
fatigue (ODEE) is a product of etymological despair. (E.
Edwards may have been the first to explain fagged
'weary' as a contraction of fatigued.) Two other
conjectures concerning fag are even more fanciful: from
F.A.G. (the Fifth Axiom of Geometry: Hotten; the anony-
mous reviser of the 1903 edition of Hotten's dictionary
struck out this place but added reference to LG fakk
'wearied,' without identifying its source) and from Gael
faigh 'get, obtain, acquire' (Mackay [1877]). School slang
sometimes originates in the facetious use of Classical
Greek and Latin words, for example, fag 'eatables'
(Christ's Hospital; believed to be from Gk pxxyevv 'eat')
and doul 'fag' (sb and v) from Gk SoUloj 'slave'
(Shrewsbury and Durham; see both words in Farmer),
but a classical etymon of E fag has not been found.
In all likelihood, fag emerged as a clipped form of
fagot, whose pejorative meaning was known in the
1770's and brought to the New World. Lighter (fag4) says
365
Adz(e) Adz(e)

"short for faggot" but gives no proof. Fag must have

been a low word from the start. A pun on fag 'young boy
in service of a senior' and fag end or any other fag
designating an object hanging loose is too obvious to
miss in male company (cf prick as a term of abuse), but
those must have been secondary developments. Fag
'drudge' and 'weary' are also late senses (a fag would, of
course, be fagged out after all the fagging he had to do).
Some researchers believe that fagged out, applied to
a rope with its 'whipping' gone, is an extension of fag
end 'worthless remainder,' originally 'piece of rope
whose end became untwisted' (a word current on
shipboard) and that fagged out 'weary, tired' originated
in sailors' slang (Wasson [1928-29:383]; see also Kuethe
[1941:56]). But the earliest example of the nautical use
of fagged in OED dates to 1841 and of fagged out to
1868. Therefore, it seems natural to view fagged out
'tired; untwisted' and fag 'work hard' as being coined at
ap-
FFag FFag(g)ot
proximately the same time; also, out makes little
sense when added to fag 'droop, decline.'
Fag end (said about a rope) is another 18th-century
phrase (not attested before 1775), contemporaneous
with fag 'work hard,' whereas fag 'something that hangs
loose' was recorded in 1486, and fag 'flag, droop,
decline' in 1530. If this fag is the etymon of fagged out,
366
Adz(e) Adz(e)

an interval of three centuries and a half between them in

printed sources is hard to explain. (Similar queries arise
in the history of COB (v) and FILCH.) Fagged in fagged
out (said about a rope) bears some resemblance to fake
'one of the circles or windings of a cable or hawser, as it
lies disposed in a coil.' The verb fake 'lay a rope in coils'
was first recorded in 1400; the next example in OED is
from 1860, and the noun fake surfaced in 1627.
However, fake 'counterfeit' can be related to the FUCK
group. See more on the interchange of postvocalic k and
g in colloquial and slang words at MOOCH and NUDGE.
Servants, especially those bullied by their superiors,
do not command respect. Fag was an appellation meant
to humiliate. That is another reason it could probably
not have developed from such inoffensive words of low
frequency as fag 'droop,' fag 'remnant,' or the polite,
learned noun fatigue. At Oxford and later at Harvard and
Yale, paid servants were called scouts. The origin of this
word is unknown, but it is usually believed to go back to
scout 'spy.' Scout 'a term of the greatest contumely,
applied to a woman; as equivalent to troll, or camp-troll'
(Jamieson 1825, cited in OED) but used also in addressing
men (clearly a borrowing from Scandinavian: both OI
skuti and skuta refer to abuse [AEW]) is a likelier
etymon; it would be a counterpart of fag (from 'fairy' to
'servant').

367
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Oliver Twist was the thieves' fag. Could that

circumstance have suggested the name Fagin to
Dickens? In his youth, Dickens worked with a Bob Fagin
and was on good terms with him. The often-repeated
idea that he later bestowed that man's name on one of
his most repulsive characters to take revenge on a Jew
who had dared patronize him seems far-fetched.
According to Paroissien (1986:XIII/228-48, nos 67-121),
only Paroissien (1984) and Fleissner (1983) have tried to
explain Fagin's name. (In his survey, he missed Davis's
idea [1895] that Fagin is an anagram of Hebr ganif
'thief.')
Paroissien (1984) deals with the origin of the family
name rather than with Dickens's reasons for choosing it.
Fleisner's wanderings through associations between
Fagin, "Old German" Veigelein 'violet' (the flower), and
homosexuality or effeminacy are of little use, but he
does quote (p 30) Robert W. Burchfield's improbable
suggestion in The New York Times Book Review
(November 26, 1972, p. 24): "fag: from Charles Dickens'
character Fagin in Oliver Twist, 'a man who teaches boys
to be dishonest.'" If Fagin is a pun on fag, homosexuality
has nothing to do with it. Nor is it necessary to set up a
special meaning for fag, because 'young boy in service of
a senior' will do. Dickens denied accusations of anti-
Semitism and noted that fences were or had often been
Jews. Consciously or subconsciously, fag may have
368
Adz(e) Adz(e)

brought forth Fagin, and this automatically made "the

old gentleman" Jewish. We will probably never discover
the truth. The opposite way, from Fagin to fag, is
impossible for chronological reasons. In slang, Fagin has
been recorded with the meaning 'fence' (Eisiminger
[1984:91]), but that usage testifies only to the popularity
of Dickens's novel.
2. The most difficult question is how fagot, a foreign
word for 'bundle,' could acquire the meanings 'old
woman' and later 'bloke, brat' and 'stray cow,' thus
becoming a vague synonym for 'scoundrel, rascal' and
degenerating into a vulgar name for a homosexual.
According to Hotten, fagot 'old woman' got its name
because a bundle of firewood is like a shriveled old
woman whose bones are like a bundle of sticks only fit to
burn. Partridge [1949a] says that fagot could mean
'whore' as early
as 1797 (not in Partridge [1961]); OED does not
confirm his observation. Hotten's suggestion recurs
in Edye (1886-87) and BL. Yet the semantic base of fagot
is 'menial (hired) servant' or 'human trash,' rather than
'ugly, slovenly woman,' even though 'a term of contempt
or reproach applied to women and children, a slattern, a
worthless woman' (often pronounced facket; with an
obsolete variant fagoghe) is the only gloss of its type in
EDD. The word fagot progressed so far in its ability to
refer to cheap objects and serve as a term of abuse that
369
Adz(e) Adz(e)

it came to designate even 'dish ... made of the fry, liver,

or inferior portions of a pig or sheep' (EDD), and consider
the following: "You stinking faggot, come here" said by a
mother "in the lower parts of Plymouth" (Devonshire) to
"the girl who is the object of the mother's wrath"
(Hibyskwe [1885-86]). It is hard to tell whether fag
'sheep fly or tick' (OED, EDD) started as a generic
derogatory term 'vermin.' In any case, fag also means
'loach' (EDD), whereas loach can mean 'simpleton.'
Perhaps fagot owes its later meanings to an
interaction between fagot 'bundle of wood' and pimp
'pander' and (in southern counties) also 'bundle of wood'
(see further at PIMP). Grose
Fag Fag(g)ot
(1785) says that bundles of firewood (that is, fagots)
are called pimps because they introduce the fire to the
coals. The first English author to use pimp 'bundle' was
Defoe (1742); see the quotations from Grose and Defoe
in OED. Grose, who believed that pimp 'bundle' (a new
word in his time) arose by association with fagot, was
probably close to the truth, though the process must
have gone in the opposite direction: pimp seems to be
an old word in all its meanings, while fagot 'pander' is
late.
The paths of pimp 'pander' and fagot 'firewood'
cross in that pimps (panders) introduce lustful men to
willing women as fagots (firewood) introduce the fire to
370
Adz(e) Adz(e)

flammable coals. One can also imagine that the

existence of fagot 'slatternly woman or child' (almost a
synonym for whore in popular usage) and fagot 'old,
shriveled woman' ('match maker' by implication?)
contributed to the semantic leap toward 'queer.' If today
pimp 'pander' and fagot 'homosexual' are not synonyms,
the reason may be that they developed differently from
the meaning '(despised) party in sexual affairs': 'he who
procures women' and 'he who acts like a woman.' BL
suggested the influence of F fagote 'dressed in ill-fitting,
badly matched garments,' but no evidence points to the
use of this participle among the lower classes in London.
It is also most unlikely that fagot as a term of reproach
has anything to do with the custom of making a recanter
carry a faggot on his back for twelve months (G. P. [1885-
86], Eisiminger [1984: 91).
Fagots (wood) were common, and people treated
them with rough familiarity as shown by the Dorset
word nickie 'tiny faggot made to light fires' (anonymous
[1935:179]). Pimp 'bundle of firewood' may have
reached London by the forties of the 18th century and
struck people as amusing because everyone in the
capital knew the other meaning of pimp. The emergence
of pimp 'bundle of firewood' in London probably resulted
in that fagot 'bundle of firewood' acquired the meaning
'despicable person' under the influence of its synonym.

371
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The fact that at present both pimp and fagot pertain

to the gathering of wood and despised forms of sexual
activities will be accounted for if we take into account
the interaction of the two words in the middle of the 18 th
century. Consider also the parallelism between pimp
'boy who does menial jobs' and fagot 'person
temporarily hired to supply a deficiency at the muster'
(see more at PIMP). Soon after fagot spread in its second
meaning, fag, a clipped form of fagot, appeared as its
double. Sw (regional, colloquial) fagott 'fellow, guy'
first turned up in Rietz and has been explained as an
extension of fagott 'bassoon' (SEO). No connection
seems to exist between the Swedish word and E fagot.
Fort's derivation (1971:137) of fagot 'male homosexual'
from Du vangertje 'tag' (a children's game) is of no
interest.
FIELDFARE (1100)
Fieldfare was first recorded in the form feldefare. ME
feldefare, with nonsyncopated -e-, is probably from
*feldgefare, *feldgefore. This bird name was early
confused with OE felofor 'brown one,' a kind of thrush
(?), but also designating some large waterfowl (= L
porphyrio). OE scealfor 'diver, cormorant' and Du
ooievaar 'stork' (G Adebar) probably contain the same
suffix as fieldfare, which may be identical with -fora and -
fara in OE innefora ~ innefara 'intestines' and also with -
fore in OE heahfore 'heifer' and -ver in ModE elver
372
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'young eel'; it presumably meant 'dweller (of).' Fieldfare

is then 'field dweller,' the idea of 'fieldfarer' being the
result of folk etymology. Reflexes of feld(e)fore,
feldgefore, and felofor designate the same bird in
modern dialects.
The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest forms of
fieldfare, 2) the existing etymologies of fieldfare, 3) the
protoform of fieldfare in Old English, 4) -fare in fieldfare
in its relation to other animal names with supposedly the
same suffix, 5) the proposed etymology of fieldfare, and
6) the place name Fieldfare.
1. According to OED, fieldfare 'Old World thrush,
turdus pilaris' (1100) was first recorded in the form
feldeware. Although Förster (1917:113, note 4) pointed
out that the word appears in the gloss as feldefare, MED
believes in w. Even if the letter in the gloss is wyn, it
should be dismissed as scribal error. See the discussion
in Kitson (1997:487-88, esp 487). Feldefare is a
compound that violates the rule of West Germanic
syncope: after a long syllable (feld-), medial -e- should
have been lost. Words like E handiwork and landi-mere,
which L. Tobler (1868:46) tentatively compared with ME
feldefare, had -ge- in Old English (handgeweorc,
landgemxre). He also mentioned reg messigate 'road to
the church,' literally 'road to Mass' (see EDD), but 1100 is
too early a date for the change ge- > e-. Chaucer
pronounced ME feldefare in four syllables, and modern
373
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dialects have retained medial -e-. In one case it has even

drawn stress to itself: EDD cites vildever. Alongside felde-
fare, fildefore, and so on, modern dialects have felfar,
felfer, fellfaw, and several other forms (EDD). They look
like descendants of OE felofor (felufor, fealefor, fealfor;
the Old High German glosses felefor and felefer were
written by Old English scribes: Suolahti [1909:300] and
Michiels [1912:69/28]), but felofor translates L
porphyrio, the name of a pelican or some other big water
fowl.
Dialects have many names for the fieldfare in the
languages of Europe (M. Höfer [1815:2, 163],
Newton [1893-96:249], and Lockwood [1981a:191-
94]), and its English name appears in numerous
variants in older texts. Therefore, etymologists cannot
rely on one 'correct' form or a name that would bring out
the bird's most conspicuous feature. I. Taylor (1873:106)
says that the fieldfare is so called for its characteristic
habit of moving across the fields, but this is a self-serving
explanation, for the bird does not move in a particularly
striking way.
In Troilus and Criseyde (III:861), Pandare says: "The
harm is don and fare-wel feldefare." The meaning seems
to be '...and the battle is lost' or '...and nobody cares' or
'...and I am done with you.' This proverbial saying was
first attested in Chaucer's poem. OED (farewell 2b)
explains it as an allusion to the fieldfare's departure
374
Adz(e) Adz(e)

northward at the end of winter. The editors of the poem

offer similar comments. "...fieldfares suddenly appear
with the advent of cold weather and as suddenly depart.
He, therefore, that would catch field-fares.must not
delay; for a warm day may come, and then, farewell,
fieldfare!" (TC-B:145, note 2). "As fieldfares come here in
the winter months, people are glad to see them go, as a
sign of approaching summer. In the present case, the
sense appears to be that, when an opportunity is missed,
the harm is done; and people will cry, 'farewell fieldfare!'
by way of derision." (SKCW-2:479, note to line 861); the
same in TC-R:480-1, note to line 861. B. Whiting's
quotation from Lydgate (1449) shows that the proverb
goes back to a line in a song (1968:111, F130); consider
the internal rhyme and alliteration farewell : fieldfare
(Chaucer's line was not changed in a 17 th-century
modernization
of the poem: TC-W:208/123). The choice of the
bird name may have had nothing to do with the
fieldfare's habits (all birds appear and disappear
"suddenly"). H.C.K. (1858:511) traced fieldfare to
fealla-far ~ feala-for 'something that is restless and
always on the move' and accounted so for Chaucer's
wording (allegedly, the fieldfare is particularly fickle
because it "fares" a lot). Likewise, E. Edwards glosses OE
fe(a)la-for 'something restless, and ever on the move.'

375
Adz(e) Adz(e)

2. Dictionaries usually state that fieldfare goes back

to either field < feld + fare < faran and means 'field
traveler' (so all the editions of Webster's dictionary until
W2, Skeat, CD, EW, and many others) or fallow < fealu +
fare < faran, the meaning being 'traverser over the
fallow fields' (for example, Wedgwood; R. Latham, and
EB). According to OED, the word is an obscure formation
and apparently means 'field goer,' but the middle
syllable is not accounted for, "and this, with the
divergent spelling in the OE. gloss, suggests possibility of
corruption from popular etymology." Older scholars
tended to identify OE felofor and ME feldefare (Ettmuller
[1851], 336; Stratmann1-3; Sweet [1897, felofor]; Brandl-
Zippel, feldfare).
One often runs into the statement that OE feldefare
is a reinterpretation of felofor (Mueller; Matzner, both
cautiously; Smythe Palmer [1883]; Sweet
[1888:309/715]), but this view found no support in later
research (anonymous [1897:610]
and OED). Pogatscher (1903:181) noted that in Old
English glosses L scorellus 'fieldfare' had often been
translated clodhamer (hamer = amer: cf G Ammer
'bunting' and the pair G Goldammer ~ E yellowham-mer,
in which -hammer is the result of a folk etymology most
appropriate for describing a woodpecker). He
reconstructed the string *felpu-amiron > *feldemre
(syncope, umlaut) > *feldebre, *feldefre (dissimilation of
376
Adz(e) Adz(e)

mr to br) > *feldefare (folk etymology). However, the

history of OE clodhamer and ModE yellow hammer
makes the development from -amiro n to -efre unlikely.
Some dictionaries say that fieldfare is a word of
uncertain origin. For example, in Weekley's opinion
(1921), the origin of fieldfare is doubtful, for felo-for
"may have changed its meaning, as bird names are often
very vague." The stumbling block seems to be the
relationship between felde- and felo-, but UED also calls
into question the derivation of -fare from the verb fare
'go.' MED, which took the nonexistent Old English
spelling feldeware at face value, interpreted the word as
'field-dweller.'
Likewise W2-3 and Longman; RHD1 says that the
change from feldeware to feldefare is due to w > f "by
alliterative assimilation." W3 no longer mentions that
etymology, but RHD2 does. Pogatscher
(1900:222) suggested the alternation of OE f with w
but did not find a single convincing example.
Wedgwood, who traced felde- to feolu-, left -fare
without comment. Lockwood (1981a:193; 1984;
1995b:373-4) reconstructed Old English *fealu-fearh
'grey piglet' (= 'fallow farrow'), on the analogy of Wel
socen lwyd 'fieldfare' and WFr fjildbok 'field billy-goat'
('fieldfare'); socen, allegedly an onomatopoeic word
representing the bird's cry, can also mean 'pig.'
Swainson, Swann, and Whitman add nothing new.
377
Adz(e) Adz(e)

3. Despite the conflicting evidence, two points can be

made with some certainty: 1) Although OE felofor and
ME feldefare designate different birds, the two names
interacted over the centuries: fieldfare goes back to
feldfare, whereas felfar and its variants continue felofor.
At some time, the true meaning of felofor must have
been forgotten, and the word began to be used as the
name of a 'wrong' bird. 2) The rule of West Germanic
syncope makes the retention of medial e inexplicable. A.
Campbell (1959:sec 367, note 3) called OE mihteleas
'weak, powerless' and *feldefare genitival compounds,
but Lockwood observes that no other Old English
compound beginning with feld- has -e-: even the word
*feldware 'dwellers in open country' deduced from place
names lacks it. OE felofor could not have influenced
*feldefare, for then the form would presumably have
been *feldofare or *feldufare.
The only solution seems to be positing OE
*feldgefore, a variant of *feldgefare (see more on the
alternation of OE fore ~ fare at HEIFER), which would be
a product of folk etymology, for 'field traveler' and
especially 'field companion' is a vapid phrase. Lockwood
(1981a:192) notes that the concepts 'goer' and 'dweller'
are alien to the popular ornithological nomenclature.
The failure of the attempts to etymologize OHG
wargengil 'butcher bird' as warg-gengil, from warg

378
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'wolf' and geng-il 'goer' bears out the truth of that

remark (Schlutter
[1923:206]). The parallels that W. Grimm
(1848:333) cites are unconvincing; see also Kralik
(1914:131).
4. Two bird names are relevant for discovering the
origin of fieldfare. The first of them is OE scealfor (or
scealfra) 'diver, cormorant'; see Kitson
(1997:497-98) on its attestation. Kluge (1901a:199)
derived scealfor from its synonym scrxf (with cog-
nates in West Germanic and Old Icelandic). Like many
others, he cited a wrong form (it should have been scrxb)
and did not explain how scealfor got its second syllable.
*Scrxf, with metathesis, supposedly yielded *scearf;
*scearf may have become scealf, but where is -or from?
Old English breaking rarely affected x before
metathesized r, except in the Anglian dialects. Scealfor
seems to be a doublet of scrxb, with the root vowel
broken before -lf.
The second syllable of scealfor could not have meant
'traveler,' but Du schollevaar, with its variant scholver
(the name of the same bird; MDu scolfern, scolfaren,
scolfaert, MLG scholver, schulver, Fr skolfer; Suolahti
[1909:395]), shows that -for is an integral part of
scealfor. According to J. de Vries (NEW), schollevaar falls
into scholl(e)v- and -aar, the latter on the analogy of aer
'eagle' (cf Du dompelaar 'cormorant' = dompel-aar from
379
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dompelen 'dive'; see that verb in KM at Tümpel 'pond').

More likely, schollevaar is scholl-(e)-vaar and MLG
scalvaron did not arise through dissimilation from
*scarvaron.
A second bird name important for understanding the
origin of fieldfare is Du ooievaar 'stork,' which has
numerous variants (Kosegarten, 101-02; Franck, VV,
NEW, Groger [1911:411], W. de
Vries [1919:268-69], Blok-Stege [1995:29]). The
Dutch word was so well known that one of its forms
may even have made its way into Russian (Russ aist is a
borrowing from Du or Low German; see Grot [1899]).
The relations between Du ooievaar and G Adebar 'stork'
have not been fully clarified. The first component of
ModFr (1802) earrebarre (WFT) exhibits rhotacized d.
The place name Ar-bere is, most probably, unrelated
to earrebare
(Naarding [1960]). J. Grimm (1844:638; the same in
later editions; not yet in the 1835 edition) explained
OHG odebero as 'luck bringer' (from OHG ot 'wealth,
luck' and -bero 'carrier'). The widespread attitude toward
the stork as a sacred bird and the custom of telling
children that babies are brought by storks (see the ditties
in Kosegarten and in Linnig [1895:445]) supported
Grimm's etymology. At the same time, J. Grimm
(1966:147; first presented in 1845) reconstructed Gmc

380
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*uddjabaira or *addjubaira 'egg carrier.' (See a

comment on this
etymology in Lagarde [1877:94, end of No 1358].)
Wackernagel (1874a:189, note 4; first published in
1860) compared ade- and L uterus 'womb.'
Grimm's etymology of Adebar ~ ooievaar dominated
German and Dutch dictionaries for ninety years (the
same in SEO, stork, Persson [1912:26], and Van
Langenhove [1928:160-61]), though Suo-
lahti (1909:369-71) showed that forms like Du reg
heildver and G Heilebart, all meaning 'luck bringer,'
arose by folk etymology (see also Andresen
[1889:119]). Groger (1911:secs 70-71) pointed out
that Old High German compound adjectives normally
lost the connecting element when it followed a long-
vocalic stem. If OHG odebero had had long o in the first
syllable, medial -e- would have been syncopated.
Holthausen (1924:116) came to a similar conclusion: in
his opinion, LG dderbdr testifies to o- in this word. Od-
with a short vowel cannot be understood as 'luck.'
Kluge tried to make Grimm's idea more palatable,
but with little success. Adebar appears in EWDS4 with the
gloss 'Kindbringer,' that is, 'child bringer.' In EWDS 5-6, he
took ade- (< ode-) to be a cognate of OI jod 'child,' itself
an obscure word; Persson (1912:26/3) tentatively
followed that interpretation. EWDS7-10 guardedly
equated -bero with -bero in OHG hornbero 'hornet' and
381
Adz(e) Adz(e)

in proper names. In these editions, he also divided

odebero into od and obero and traced obero to OHG
obassa 'roof' ('luck bringer on the roof').
Numerous old conjectures, now forgotten, exist
about the origin of adebar. Wachter (Edebar) already
knew two "fanciful, almost ludicrous" (miras & tantam
non ridiculas) derivations: adebar = oudvater 'old father'
or edel-bar 'noble bird.' He explained Edebar (the form
he preferred to adebar) as edefar 'traveling bird,' from
ede 'bird' and G fa(h)ren, but did not specify the
language in which he found ede. Apparently, he meant
Wel edn 'bird.' The same etymology, with a reference to
its originator, appears in Wiarda. Wachter's "ludicrous"
list can be enlarged: 'bird traveling in flocks,' from L avis
'bird' (Terwen [1844]); 'bright-colored bird,' from OE a d
'fire' and MHG var 'color' or their cognates (Schwenck1-2);
'lamb-bringer,' from Du oor 'ewe' (Schwenck4; before
Schwenck, Ten Kate compared ooievaar and L ovis
'sheep'), and finally, 'a bird believed to carry food in its
entrails,' from G
Ader 'vein' (Wasserzieher [1923:4-6]). (Wilken
[1872:446] also noticed the similarity between Ade-
bar and Ader—the stork allegedly had 'exposed veins'—
but called it "too trivial.") The latest fantasy is Zollinger's
(G Adebar and Atem 'breath' related to OI jod; 1952:61,
81; 86, note 73). OI jod, as we have seen, first turned up
in connection with adebar in EWDS.5-6
382
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Krogmann (1938a) disposed of the 'luck bringer'

idea. He compared G Adebar with E fieldfare and
identified ade- as a cognate of OE wadum(a) 'stream,
lake' and G -bar as 'traveler' with b < f by Verner's Law.
He offered a detailed analysis of the Germanic root for
'wet,' to which the Old English word is related (1936:35-
38). However, Krogmann conceded that -bar had later
been understood as 'carrier' and that Adebar might have
been reinterpreted as 'luck bringer.' The post-1936
dictionaries follow Krogmann, and those who felt
dissatisfied with his etymology, for instance, Karg-
Gasterstadt
(1941:211), Neuss (1973:131), Seebold (KS), and
Hiersche, offered no counterarguments.
5. Thus, we have E fieldfare, OE scealfor (with
cognates), and Du ooievaar (with cognates). OE felofor,
mentioned above, also needs attention. Suo-lahti
(1909:300-01) examined the variants porfilio, polfir,
folfir, philfor, and phelphur and concluded that felofor
was "a corruption" of L porphyrio under the influence of
scealfor. AeEW derives scealfor directly from porphyrio.
A bird name ending in -for must have sounded
natural to speakers of Old English. The history of that
element is almost impenetrable. It first probably meant
'belonging or pertaining to,' and only by inference
'dweller' (a concept alien to the popular ornithological
nomenclature, as pointed out above), but the original
383
Adz(e) Adz(e)

meaning seems to have been forgotten long before the

emergence of Old English texts.
Perhaps the same suffix can be detected in OE
inneforan ~ innefaran 'intestines, entrails.' If we assume
that -foran is a variant of -for(e), it can have its usual
meaning in innefora, that is, 'in front of, in the presence
of, before.' Gk evxepcx 'bowels' consists of en- 'in' and -
ter (a comparative suffix), the whole amounting to
something like 'farther inside' (see
WP I:217; IEW, 344, in both at e ter, and Brugmann
[1897-1916:II/1, 324-26]). In Germanic, the desig-
nation of viscera had the prefix in followed by all kinds of
unpredictable elements, as OE innod and innelfe (innifli,
innylfe), both with cognates in other Germanic
languages; OI istr ~ istra 'fat of the paunch' (which AEW
entatively derives from <*in-stra, as in MDu inster; ABM
suggests the etymon <*en(p)s-tra; see also idr
'intestines'), and many others (Arnoldson [1915:150-59,
especially 150-51],
Baskett [1920:99-101, especially E1-2], Heinertz
[1927:71-76], and AEW, innyfli). Innyfli consists of
inn- and a suffix (the same suffix occurs in OI daudyfli
'corpse': A. Sturtevant 1928:470-71). OE innefora has a
similar structure and presumably means 'being inside.'
See E. Sturtevant (1928:5) on the reverse process—the
names of parts of the body becoming prepositions.
AeEW (-fora, -fara) calls innefora a word of unknown
384
Adz(e) Adz(e)

origin. Later, Holthausen (1952:279, note 10) compared -

fora and Gk meipcxxcx 'limit, boundary, rope, end of the
rope,' with reference to L viscera 'intestines' (< PIE
*weis-'twist') and ModG Geschlinge (the same meaning;
schlingen 'tie, wrap, plait'). But innefora belongs with
the other in(n)- words: intestines, entrails, and so on. It is
a counterpart of regional (or colloquial) innards 'viscera'
(< inwards), known since the 13th century, and attempts
to separate -fora in innefora from the adverb fore carry
little conviction.
The existence of the suffix -fore finds additional
confirmation in the history of HEIFER and especially of
elver 'young eel' (1640), a variant of eelfare 'passage of
young eels up a river' and 'brood of young eels.' In the
earliest citation in OED (1533), eelfare means 'brood,'
whereas the meaning 'passage of young eels' emerges
only in 1836. The poor attestation of the word in texts
(no data between 1533 and 1836) makes it advisable to
reconstruct the history of elver on philological grounds
rather than basing it on the chronology of the recorded
examples.
Apparently, the change from el- to eel- occurred
contemporaneously with the shortening of the stressed
vowel in words like OE x rende (> ME erende) 'errand'
and OE xmerge (> ME emere 'ember'), that is, in the 13th
century at the latest (Luick [1964:secs 353 and 387]). The
voicing of -f- in elver must be old, as ModE wolves and
385
Adz(e) Adz(e)

culver from OE wulfas and culfer show. OE *xlfore ~

xlfare could not have had the sense 'young eel.' If,
however, the suffix -fore ~ -fare designated inhabitants
of restricted areas, it may occasionally have been used
for designating areas and habitats as well. Perhaps
*xlfore meant 'territory favored by eels' (for spawning?)
and, by implication, 'place favored by young eels,'
whence 'brood of young eels.' The sense 'young eel'
must have developed from the initial collective meaning
of that noun. OE heahfore retained voiceless f when it
became ME heifer, whereas *xlfore or *xlfare evidently
split into *elver and *elfare. The latter, naturally,
acquired the meaning 'passage of eels,' but it would not
have yielded 'passage of young eels' if the connotation of
the fish's age had not been present in the ancient form.
When *elfare went out of use, elver (<*elver) retained
the senses of both words.
6. This, then, is the picture in its entirety. Old English
had a bird name *feldfore 'turdus pilaris,' which acquired
a synonym *feldgefore. Both meant approximately
*'field bird.' Another bird, probably also a thrush, was
called felofor 'brown one.' Although Old English scribes
knew that L porphyrio designated some exotic
waterfowl, with time the Latin word changed beyond
recognition and merged with felofor. All three words
continue into the present: fieldfare (< *feldfore),
feldefore and its variants (< *feldgefore), and felfar and
386
Adz(e) Adz(e)

its variants (< felofor). The modern forms with feld-

(instead of field-, but not those with fel-) either never
had lengthening before three consonants or underwent
shortening in Middle English (HL, 705). Since by 1100, if
not much earlier, the old meaning of the element -fore
had been partly forgotten, compounds with it fell prey to
folk etymology.
The same happened to the name of the stork in
Dutch and German. Du ooievaar and G Adebar (*'swamp
bird') share the second element with E fieldfare. Since in
the beginning vaar ~ -bar ~ -fare ~ -fore had as little to
do with traveling or traversing as with carrying,
Krogmann's gloss of Adebar 'swamp goer' should be
modified as 'swamp-er,' assuming that ade- is related to
OE wadum(a). OE scealfor and Du scholver ~ schollevaar
have the same suffix. Whether scealfor goes back to
scrxb or has a
verbal root (see Suolahti [1909:393-97] and AeEW),
-for in it was interpreted or even introduced as a
suffix of a bird name.
7. I. Taylor (1873:119) mentions a mountain in Devon
called Fieldfare. He explains it as a Scandinavian name
(Field < fjeld), but in Dan fjeld 'mountain' the letter d
never designated any sound (cf N fjell, Sw fjall, OI fjall,
fell). Fieldfare does not turn up in books on Devon
toponymy (Liberman [1997:12030]).
FILCH (1300? 1561?)
387
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Filch 'steal' was, most likely, borrowed from thieves'

cant. It is an adaptation of G filzen 'comb through' (E
filch, sb, means 'hook'). Filch 'beat; attack' is a different
word, possibly from OE gefylcian 'marshal troops, etc.'
The date of the first occurrence of filch is unclear.
OED doubts the connection between filchid (1300) and
the modern verb (see filch and bagle). Both examples of
filch (sb) in MED (ca 1300) and of filch (v; 14th century)
presuppose the meaning 'attack,' not 'steal,' and are
about dogs. The noun ffylche 'attack' was recorded in a
poem of the first quarter of the 15th century. In 1561 filch
'steal' appeared and a year later filchman 'staff with a
hook at one end used to steal articles from hedges, open
windows, etc.' (Thieves using filchmans were popularly
called anglers; -man, more often -mans, was a common
suffix in thieves'
language: H. Webster [1943:232].) The other rele-
vant forms are filching, a verbal noun (1567); filching, a
present participle (1570); filcher (1573); filch-ingly
(1583); and filch = filchman (1622). See further examples
in Partridge (1949a). OED marks filch 'hook' as obsolete,
but Hotten3 cites it as current. The meaning 'beat' (?<
'attack') was also preserved in later times (OED: filch v3).
OED transcribed filch with [tf] and [J]. EDD has several
words spelled filsch, possibly connected with filch 'rag'
(for the [J] ~ [tf] variation after resonants see Storm
[1881:115, 126] and Luick [1964:1088, sec 788/2b]).
388
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Numerous words appear in dictionaries as possible

cognates of the verb filch: Gk cpr|1oÇ 'deceitful'
(Minsheu, Junius, Talbot), L fallax 'deceitful' (Minsheu), F
filou 'thief, swindler' and filouter 'steal' (N. Bailey,
Thomson, Mueller, Blackley [1869:202-03]), F félon
'traitor' (Holmboe, veila), Old Portuguese filhar 'seize,'
perhaps allied to Ital pigliare 'seize' or F piler 'crush'
(Marsh [1865:188]), OI fela 'hide' (Thomson, who calls
Old Icelandic Gothic; he also has "Gothic" filgia and
Sw(?) filska;
cf Graham [1843:25]), OI véla 'defraud' (Holmboe),
Go filhan 'steal' (Thomson's fela implies filhan and its
cognates, including E reg feal 'hide'), G filzig 'greedy'
(Skinner, Gazophylacium), Du fielt 'rascal'
(Minsheu, who knew that the etymon of fielt is L v lis
'base, mean'; he also cited Du biel, the same meaning),
Gael fealleaidh 'knavish' (Mackay [1877]), SwiG fldke
'steal' (Wedgwood), Gael peallaid or peal-laij 'skin of an
animal, pelt' (Mackay [1877], Stor-month).
Filch can be akin to a word for 'pelt' only if it once
meant 'rob an animal of its skin.' Analogous cases would
be Go wilwa 'plunder' (if it is related to L vellus 'shorn
wool,' and E fleece sb and v) and OE hxttian 'scalp as
punishment' from the root of hxteru (< *hxtteru)
'clothes.' Some of the comparisons, cited in the
paragraph above, are ingenious. Blackley wrote a
singularly uninformed book, but in addition to F filouter
389
Adz(e) Adz(e)

he offered a curious analogy: L filum (the etymon of F fil

'thread') is to filch as G Strick 'rope' to G Strang 'rope,
cord' and 'rogue, scamp' (that is, 'gallowbird'). But
thread was never used for hanging "rogues" and filch is
not a noun. Apparently, the sound complex f-l can
designate some miscreant, vice, or misdeed in a dozen
languages. The (mainly regional) words cited in Wood
(1913:19/159 and 64/48) also have the structure f-l but
mean 'jerk; ruin by improper handling; fumble; flap, etc'
and like various verbs from other languages for 'swing,
shake' hardly have anything to do with filch. None of
them except fillip (see it in the entry FUCK) has i in the
root.
The Classical Greek and Latin forms are irrelevant,
for, like filch, they begin with [f], but filch is not a
bookish borrowing, and if the words cited above were
cognates, the non-Germanic form would have had initial
p-. The same holds for the Latin and Old Icelandic forms
with v-. The origin of F filou (? < E fellow) is obscure. The
word seems to be too late to have served as the etymon
of filch (also -ch would remain unexplained) and is rather
reminiscent of E file 'pickpocket,' with which W (1828)
and Weekley compared it. Filch has a rhyming synonym
pilch; Mueller2 suggested that filch is its side form.
Skeat1 considered filch to be related to Go fil-han
(see his reservations in the fourth edition) and derived it
from OI fela 'hide' with a frequentative suffix, as in tal-k,
390
Adz(e) Adz(e)

stal-k, and lur-k versus tell, steal, and lour (-k as an

intensifying suffix is also possible: cf h(e)ar-k-(en) and its
cognates and see discussion at GAWK). To prove that the
alternation k ~ ch existed, he cited mil-k ~ mil-ch (Skeat
[1887 = 1892:468, 470]; Muller [1891:23] offers a list
of such pairs). Hellquist (1891:142, note 1) and CD
supported Skeat's etymology, and it appears in many
dictionaries, including W2. But filch never meant 'hide.'
Gothic etymological dictionaries take
no cognizance of E filch in the entry filhan.
Holthausen (1904-05:295/9) derived filch from OE
*fylcan and reconstructed Go *fulkjan, related to Go
flokan* 'complain' and OE flocan 'strike.' His derivation
presupposes that the verbs *ful-kjan and fl-okan
represent two variants of the zero grade, as do, for
instance, Go kun-i 'race, generation' and its synonym kn-
ops. Flocan 'beat, strike' may be related to filch 'beat'
and filch 'attack' but not to filch 'steal.' K. Malone (1955)
traced ME filch to OE (ge)fylcian 'marshal (troops), draw
(soldiers) up in battle,' later 'attack in a body, take as
booty,' and his etymology appears in W 3. Recorded evi-
dence does not fill the gaps between 'beat' or 'attack in a
body' and 'pilfer.' The question arises why two centuries
and a half separate the occurrences of a common verb. A
similar difficulty confronts us in the history of COB 'beat'
and FAG. In such cases, it is more reasonable not to

391
Adz(e) Adz(e)

postulate continuity. The unusual change from a literary

style to low slang also requires an explanation.
If we dismiss the comparison of filch with the words
given by Minsheu, Junius, Bailey, and others as fruitless
and deny the connection between filch and Go filhan and
OE *fylcan, (ge)fylcian, two approaches can yield more
or less satisfactory results. Wedgwood cited N pilka
(now, except in Nynorsk, spelled pilke) and Sc pilk 'to
pick' and suggested that filch is a rhyming synonym of
pilch (< pilk). Mueller2 found this etymology reasonable.
OED does not associate pilch 'outer garment, etc,' first
recorded in 1000 (E pilch, like G Pelz 'fur,' is from ML
pellicia 'cloak'), and the verb pilch 'pick, pluck; pilfer, rob'
(akin to LG pül(e)ken, pölken, N pilke, and a few
Romance verbs given above), though pilch 'garment' ~
pilch 'rob' would be a pair like fleece (sb and v). Pilch (v)
is a near doublet of pluck (see esp G pflücken in KM20),
another verb of Romance origin, and seems to be in
some way descended from L pila re 'pull hair,' the
etymon of E peel 'plunder' (obsolete), 'strip the outer
layer,' a word etymologically distinct from pelf, pilfer,
and pillage.
Despite the obvious similarity between the two
verbs that Wedgwood and Mueller discussed, filch need
not be a doublet of pilch. Ek-wall (1903:21, note 4)
compared filch and Dan reg (Jutland) filke 'scrape, cut
with a blunt knife,' and Oehl (1933b:169) tentatively
392
Adz(e) Adz(e)

supported him. Like pilk— pilch, presumably from pil-k—

pil-ch, Dan filke goes back to fil-k-e (ODS). Dan file (v)
means 'scrape with a blunt knife; polish with a file; rub,
scrub; pilfer'; the noun fil means 'file' (a tool). E file (< OE
feol, fil), Du vijl (related to OS fla), G Feile (<
OHG fhala; Dan fil and its Scandinavian cognates) are
native Germanic words; see them and (O)I pel 'file' in
etymological dictionaries. Although we obtain the
proportion pil: pilk(e) ~ pilch = fil: filk(e) ~ filch, the
connection between Dan filke 'scrape, scrub' and pilke
'pluck, peel; pick, peck; fish with a metal lure; jig' (so
Feilberg, filke) is unlikely. Filch and filke are probably
also distinct. The English verb was recorded late, and
*filk, its putative base, has not been found. In addition,
filch seems to have been coined as slang and has always
meant only 'pilfer.' Therefore, filch 'hook' is the best
starting point for tracing the origin of filch 'steal.'
According to Jamieson (1808; 1867; 1879-82),
filchans are 'rags patched or fastened together'
("hooked" in a bundle; see filchmans, above). The verb
filzen, once current among German thieves, means
'comb through': Kluge (190lc:422 and 425). Early MHG
filzen means 'search (a person),' a meaning still known.
Filz is 'felt' (sb). Consequently, filzen comes from
'disentangle' (cf verfilzt 'tousled, etc') or 'sift through,
filter'; 'filtering' needed sharp teeth (as on a comb) or
'hooks.' Filch is probably an English adaptation of filzen,
393
Adz(e) Adz(e)

with [J ] and [tJ ] reproducing the German affricate [ts].

Hotten3 derived filch from Romany filichi 'handkerchief'
(implying that filch means 'steal handkerchiefs'?)—a
dubious etymology, but since filchans 'rags' was part of
international cant, the borrowing of the German verb
into Early Modern English is likely. ME filch 'attack; beat'
is a homonym of filch 'steal.' E filch 'steal' seems to have
appeared as a borrowing from German approximately
when it was first recorded. Its meaning may have been
reinforced by file 'pickpocket' and pilch.
A Saxon last name Filtsch, limited to the Sie-
benbürgen area, is presumably of Slavic origin (from the
root velij- 'big'). Its variants are Filsch, Fielic, Fielke, and
Fieltz. See Keintzel-Schön (1976: index, and especially no
31 for 1933) and Gottschald (1954:584); not in
Brechenmacher (1957). That name has no connection
with the English verb (Liberman [1994b:169-73]).

FLATTER (1386)
Flatter is one of many Germanic words with the
structure fl + vowel + t/d/8, k/g denoting unsteady or
light, repeated movement, such as we find in flutter and
flicker. The original meaning of flatter was 'flit about'
(whence 'dance attendance'). The English verb is not
derived from flat (adj), as though from 'smoothing,' L
flatare 'make big' and thus 'inflate one's vanity,' or OF

394
Adz(e) Adz(e)

flater 'flatter.' In this meaning, the Old French verb was

more likely borrowed from Middle
English and crossed the path of a similar verb
meaning 'appease' and 'caress.' OI flaSra 'fawn on one'
fits the phonetic scheme given above, but the
relationship between -t and -8 remains unclear. Some fl-
words have doublets beginning with bl- (for example, E
blatter and blather); the origin of the interplay of fl- and
bl- is also obscure.
The sections are devoted to 1) flatter and L flatare,
flatter and flat, and a few other proposed etymologies of
flatter, 2) flatter and G flattern, 3) OI flaSra, and 4) the bl-
words synonymous with flatter.
1. Early etymologists derived E and F flatter 'flatter'
from L flata re 'make big,' which they understood as
frequentative of flare 'blow' (so Minsheu and Ménage),
because flatterers 'inflate' another person's vanity and
'swell' their reputation in the eyes of those who listen to
them or because they whisper ('blow') into the ears of
their patrons. Guyter (cited in Ménage) related F flatter
to L lactare 'dupe, entice,' < *flactare. According to
Junius, Ménage derived F flatter from flagitare 'demand,
importune' (his source was not Ménage [1750]).
Knobloch (1995:147) may not have known that he had
such an early predecessor. Storm (1876:178-9) suggested
that *afflare, *flatitare, and *afflaticare (> *flayer,
*fléer) meant 'flatter' and 'waft softly to make a fan
395
Adz(e) Adz(e)

move' since OF flavele 'flattery' goes back to flabellum

'fan.' Skinner derived E flatter from French, and F
flat(t)er from L blatera re 'blather.' Junius also looked on
the English verb as a borrowing from French but traced it
to L lactare < *flactare. In addition, he believed that
flatter could be derived from the English adjective flat
because flatterers "smoothen down" those (with a flat
hand, as it were) with whom they would curry favor.
Junius's etymologies proved to be especially durable.
The second of them turns up in Claiborne (1989:197) and
in Shipley (1984:299), who compares flatter and L pla ca
re 'soothe,' both allegedly from PIE *pela. A variation on
'smoothen down' is C. Smith's 'touch gently' (1865).
Barbier (1932-35:112) cited what he believed to be a
Romance parallel to flatter from flat. Kumada (1994:15),
who argues for a sound symbolic origin of flatter, also
assumes that the root of this verb is flat. See an
incomplete survey of early French scholarship on this
verb in NC, and of English, in Richardson and Mackay
(1877). Woll (1986:2, 4) has shown how improbable the
development from 'make flat' to 'fawn on, praise
insincerely' is.
Bailey (1730), Barclay, and Johnson mark flatter as
French. Todd, in Johnson-Todd, cites OI fladra [sic] and
flete 'woman who flatters,' along with fletsen,
"Teutonic" for 'flatter,' and vleyden (did he mean Du
vleien 'flatter'?). R. Latham, despite his dependence on
396
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Johnson-Todd, ventures no discussion. Holmboe's

etymology (he cites OI fladra, F flatter, and Skt lad as
cognates of flatter) rests on the idea of initial f-mobile.
See lad at ldlati (v) 'jests, plays' (v) in KEWAS, 259 and
KEWA III:91. Ldlati, which sounds like similar verbs in
other languages, cannot be a cognate of flatter. Apart
from phonetic difficulties, the meanings are
irreconcilable. Lan-man (1906:233) glosses ldlati as
'sport, dally, play; behave in an artless and
unconstrained manner.'
Gamillscheg (1921:633 and EWFS) derived OF
flater from Celtic *velno (cf Sc feall 'treason'), an
etymology that ML rejected as phonetically indefensible.
In Diez's opinion, OF flatir ~ flater are akin to OE/OD
flat(r), and OHG flaz 'flat.' The Old French noun flat
meant 'stroke, blow' and the verb flatir meant 'dash
down'; consequently, he interpreted the verb as 'stretch
down' and referred to OI fletja 'make flat' (his string is
'dash down' > 'flatten' > 'caress' > 'flatter'). Brachet
ignored Diez's etymology ("origin unknown"), ML (3356)
and Bruch (1917:685) rejected it, but it appealed to
von Wartburg (FEW).
2. According to DW (flattieren), the etymon of all the
verbs under consideration is G flattern because a
flatterer flaps his wings as a dog wags its tail. The
Grimms' etymology goes back to Ihre. Scheler1 follows
Diez. Scheler2 leans toward the Grimms' interpretation
397
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(likewise Mueller2), but in the third edition he again

surveys the literature and hesitatingly returns to his
initial idea. Tull-berg (flattera) endorses the Grimms'
derivation. Franck (flatteren) leaves the question open.
Attempts have been made to explain OF flater as 'lick'
(Cornu [1880:133]; Baist [1880] criticized Cornu's
idea, but Gaston Paris supported it: see Cornu
[1881:404, note 1, where Paris adds his comment], and
Woll [1986:1-4], who distances himself from this
etymology).
Contrary to the opinion of some eminent
etymologists, E flatter cannot be a borrowing from
French or Provencal. OED notes that F flat-er would have
become flat, not flatter, in Middle English. CD and Skeat4
found that argument convincing, but Kluge (in KL)
continued to call flatter a borrowing from French (the
fascicle of OED with flatter appeared in September 1896,
and KL was published in 1899). MED shares the opinion
of OED and compares the suffix in flatter with that in
flick-er-en and skim-er-en.
Of decisive importance are the forms ulateri 'flattery'
and ulatour 'flatterer' in the Middle English (Kentish)
poem Ayenbite of Inwit. The voicing of initial fricatives
in its text affects only native words (Wallenberg
[1923:263, note 3]). This rule, which finds an analogy in
Middle Dutch (Franck [1910:sec 81]), continued into later
periods
398
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(Meech [1940-41:116]). Jensen (1908:38) and Dolle

(1912:sec 139, 4.b) posited MDu flatteren as an in-
termediary between the Old French and the Old Kentish
form, but the need for such an intermediary is not
obvious, given that we are dealing with a sound change
common to both areas.
Jordan (1925:sec 215) and Berndt (1960:180,
note 2) support Wallenberg, but dictionaries are
slow in accepting their conclusions, though ODEE is
aware of the Kentish forms. Partridge (1958) and CEDEL
copy from Diez and thus repeat Scheler1,3. Barnhart
reproduces the etymology from MED. Weekley traces
flatter to French, and so does W3, which says, following
Gaston Paris, that OF flater means 'lick, flatter.' RHD1
dissociates E and F flatter, but RHD2 states that E flatter
was "reinforced" by the French verb.
Wedgwood modified slightly the Grimms' hypothesis
and traced the meaning of the English verb to *'wag the
tail' and that of F flatter to *'lick,' from which he derived
'stroke an animal' and 'flatter.' Skeat believed in the
French origin of flatter and rejected Gmc flat as the
etymon of OF flater. He noted OSw fleckra 'flatter' and
Sw reg fleka 'caress' but did not know how to explain the
alternation t ~ k. OED preferred to treat flatter as native,
"an onomatopoeia expressive of light repeated
movement"; it also cited the Swedish forms with k and
mentioned OI fladra. For the forms with k, fleech among
399
Adz(e) Adz(e)

them, see ODEE (flatter). A direct comparison of flatter

with G flehen 'beseech,' still present in Skeat1, cannot be
sustained on phonetic grounds.
Although not a borrowing, flatter, probably a slang
word when it came into use, superseded several other
native words. The Old English verb meaning 'flatter' was
lyffettan, licettan, and oleccan (TOE:04.06.02.06), though
licettan has more to do with hypocrisy than flattery
(Thaning [1904:81], Brendal [?1908: nos 932 and 933]).
The imperfectly known word twaddung, first discovered
by Napier (anonymous [1904]), with its doublet
twxdding, which makes one think of E twaddle (AeEW),
translates L adula tio, thus 'flattery.'
If flatter is a cognate of G flattern, whose origin
continues to puzzle German etymologists (DEW), its
semantic development was 'flit, hover' > 'flit about' >
'dance attendance' > 'flatter.' It then follows that OF
flater 'flatter' was borrowed from Middle English. The
problem with this hypothesis is that in Anglo-French of
the 12th to the 14th century, words of English origin are
rare, while in continental dialects they hardly exist at all.
Yet flatter may be one of them. Even Barbier, who was
unwilling to recognize the presence of English words in
early French, had to admit a few exceptions (Barbier
[1938-43:308]). Old French had flater
'lick,' 'lie, deceive,' and 'dash down.' The etymon of
each is contestable (Woll [1986] offers a detailed
400
Adz(e) Adz(e)

survey). The borrowing of a Middle English word may

have "reinforced" the native meaning 'deceive.' The
weakness of Woll's otherwise exemplary discussion is his
disregard of the Germanic side of the problem.
Behr's suggestion (1935:78) that flatter, which she
calls onomatopoeic, is a blend of flacker and flutter looks
like a misunderstanding. Did she believe that E flatter
means 'flutter'? The Dutch verb flikflooien 'flatter' is
based on the same idea as flatter ('move around'); see
the oldest conjectures on this
word in Hoeufft (1835:293-94).
The derivation of OF flater 'flatter' (v) from Gmc
*flat- is improbable. OF flater 'flatter' and OF flater 'dash
down' seem to be homonyms, and the latter may indeed
go back to the Germanic adjective (so Woll [1986:11-
12]). Judging by ModI
fletja (v) 'roll (dough), cut (a fish), open and remove
the backbone' and fletja (sb) 'roofing plank' (ABM),
*flatjan had predominantly specialized meanings. 'Dash
down' (and thus 'make flat') may have been one of them
(see FT, flek, the end of the entry, on the derivation of
'flatten' from 'strike'). OF *flatjan probably arose before
umlauting did and later merged with flatir ~ flater from
Middle English.
3. OI fladra occurs only once and seems to mean
'beat about the bush.' It has often been compared with E
flatter. In Modern Icelandic, fladra means 'fawn on one,
401
Adz(e) Adz(e)

jump around someone, cringe before one, flatter' (not

'wag the tail,' though fladra is usually applied to dogs);
see OED (flether and flaither). The etymology of fladra is
unknown (AEW, ABM). Like flatter, it has been traced to
an adjective meaning 'flat,' that is, *fladr (although
*fladr does not turn up in the texts, see its probable
derivatives in NEO, 113 and 117). However, 'flatter' is
usually a secondary meaning derived from 'inflate,' 'lick,'
'dupe,' and 'caress,' not 'make flat.' More importantly,
fladra means 'run around a master' (whence 'flatter')
and has nothing to do with flatness.
Germanic possessed many verbs beginning with fl-
and denoting unsteady or light repeated movement.
Root vowels alternated in them by secondary ablaut.
Equally variable were their root final consonants, so that
E flitter, flutter, flicker, G flattern, OI flaöra, and so on
are related through later associations, rather than
genetically. All such verbs meant 'flap the wings,' 'run
dog-like in circles,' 'flow lightly,' 'wave back and forth,'
'flash and die away by turns,' 'quiver, vibrate,' perhaps
'work nimbly with one's fingers' (for example, OI fletta
and G fleddern mean 'rob a corpse'). One of them was E
flatter 'flit around' > 'behave like a sycophant.' If f- in L
flagra re 'blaze, glow' is from *bh-, the Latin verb cannot
be related to OHG flogaron (> ModG flackern 'flicker'),
but the similarity between them is remarkable (Berneker

402
Adz(e) Adz(e)

[1898:364]). See also Wood (1899-1900:314/11) on

flicker and flutter.
4. Many fl- words have doublets beginning with bl-.
Skinner traced flatter to L blatera re (see sec 1, above).
The meanings of OI flaöra and bladra overlap (ODGNS
and CV, blaöra). Walde (1906:110) repeated CV without
referring to their dictionary. Whether OI bladra (sb)
'bubble' belongs here is uncertain. Of interest are E
blatter and blather, which are not necessarily from Latin.
Bladra 'chatter' may have influenced flaöra ('talk idly
and irresponsibly,' 'wag one's tongue' > 'talk insincerely'
> 'flatter'). Likewise, E blatter may have affected the
meaning of flatter, though blatter has at no time been
frequent. Ir blath 'praise' and blaith 'plain, smooth,'
which Webster (1828) mentioned at flatter, do not
belong here, for the vowels are incompatible and Ir bl- is
from ml- (Stokes [1897:51] and LE, mldith). Mackay's
derivation of E flatter from Gael blad 'big, loud mouth,'
bladair 'person with a big mouth; blatterer' (1877) is
impossible on phonetic grounds (Liberman [1990 and
1991:227-28]). It may be noted that the variation f-
~ b is also known (E. Schröder [1909]).

FUCK (1503)
Many verbs in Germanic with the roots fik-, fak-,
fuk-, fok-, have a basic meaning 'move back and forth.'
Their most common figurative meaning is 'cheat.' If Old
403
Adz(e) Adz(e)

English had such a verb, it seems to have been lost.

ModE fuck is, most likely, a borrowing from Low German,
rather than a direct continuation of a pre-15 th-century
native form. Fuck is part of a large group of loosely
related verbs having the structure f + vowel + stop.
Intrusive l and r appear frequently between f and the
vowel, so that fit, fiddle, fidget, fib, fob, as well as flit,
flip, flap, flop, flicker, frig, and so on belong together,
even though they cannot be called cognates in the strict
sense of this term. Given such an indiscriminate mass of
similar-sounding near synonyms, the task of discovering
the Indo-European cognates of any of them holds out
little promise. L pungere 'prick, sting,' L pugnere 'strike,
fight,' and Gk nuyfi 'buttocks' are probably not related to
fuck. The Germanic verb of copulation appears to have
had some currency in the Romance-speaking countries;
Ital ficcare looks like a borrowing from German.
The sections are devoted to 1) the Germanic
background of fuck, 2) words of similar sound and
meaning, 3) the etymon of fuck, 4) the English
environment of fuck, 5) the putative Indo-European
cognates of fuck, and 6) fuck in English etymological
lexicography and scholarship.
1. Numerous Germanic words have the root fik— fak
— fuk— fok-. Here are some of them having i. G ficken
(now relegated in this meaning to dialects) 'make short,
quick movements; flog lightly.' The swish of the rod or
404
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cane is accompanied by the exclamation fick, fick. In

dialects, ficken 'tap, rub, scratch, touch' has been
recorded; OHG ficchon ~ MHG vicken 'rub' is evidently
the same word. Early Modern Dutch and Dutch dialects
have fikken and fikkelen with the same meaning (were
the Dutch verbs imported from Frisian or Low German,
for why is their f- not voiced?). Fl fikken 'tinker at
something with a blunt knife', as well as Sw reg ficka
'hurry up' and fikla 'rummage about, work sloppily' (N
reg fikle), belong here too. Compare G reg Fickmulle (a
game in which stones are moved in different directions),
fickeln 'play the violin' (Fickelbogen means 'bow for
playing the violin'), Fickel 'penis,' and Gefick 'people
running in different directions.' In Bavarian, das ficht
mich nicht an 'it's not my concern' (from anfechten)
coexists with das fickt mich nicht an. Ficken 'copulate' is
widely known in dialects, but it is not the only meaning
of this verb.
Noneuphemistic verbs denoting sexual intercourse,
to the extent that they can be etymologized, usually
mean 'thrust, strike, pierce, prick, rub.' See Buck
278:4.67 for a general overview, Goldberger
(1932:103-18), and Holthausen (1955-56:97/16).
The number of metaphorical expressions for 'copu-
late' is almost endless, as modern dictionaries of
synonyms and annotated editions of Greek and Latin
authors (Goldberger, loc cit and Herescu [1959-60]) show
405
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(this is equally true of dialects; see Gering [1920:302-

03]), but in Germanic 'copulate' = 'thrust' is rare;
however, see some examples in Barbier (1932-35:313)
and Webinger (1937b:160).
'Move back and forth' as the semantic base of
'copulate' also occurs outside the ficken group. Such are
OHG riban 'rub; copulate' (ModG reiben 'rub'), MHG
baneken (Ochs [1954:150-51]), G ranzen 'copulate' (said
about animals), ultimately from MHG ranken 'move back
and forth,' the now obsolete E swive (compare it with E
swivel, G schweben
'float, hover, dangle,' and their cognates: OED), and
the names of several Scandinavian gods, giants, and
horses, seemingly meaning 'one rocking, moving back
and forth' (AEW: Vingnir, Ving-skornir, Vingporr, and
vingull 'a stallion's penis').
Words with a: G fackeln 'shilly-shally' (hardly from
Fackel 'torch' because of its unsteady flame), Faxen in
Faxen machen 'fool around,' Faxen schneiden 'pull faces,'
and G reg fäckli 'flap of a garment, lap' and fäck(t)en
'wing.' OI fokta 'flee, retreat' (if o is from a) may be part
of this group. Magnüsson (1953:15) compares fokta with
ModI fdk 'silly behavior,' fdkur 'fool, simpleton,' and
fdkur ~ fdkhestur 'steed' (from 'moving fast'), but the
long vowel in the root makes the comparison difficult.
He mentions E fetch 'apparition,' a word of obscure
history (OED); the meaning 'coming and going' would be
406
Adz(e) Adz(e)

compatible with 'move back and forth.' The verb fetch

has the same origin (sec 4, below). See the above-
mentioned Modern Icelandic words in ÄBM. Fick and
fack often go together. A West-phalian riddle about the
broom contains the words fick di fack; cf G fickfacken
'run aimlessly back and forth; have a lot to do; scheme
behind one's back, deceive, cheat; potter about; flog,'
West Fl fikfakken 'spray with paint,' G Fixefaxe 'pranks,
tomfoolery,' and G reg facksen 'write quickly and
illegibly.' If the original meaning of G fegen was the same
as today ('sweep') rather than 'cleanse, purge,' it may
belong with fickfacken (Gerland [1869b:21-22, no
52]); its e probably goes back to a.
Words with u, o: G reg fucken 'move fast' and fuck
'great speed; advantage; quick movement; deception';
fuckern, and fuckeln 'cheat, especially in games; move
quickly back and forth'; 'scratch'; fucksen, and fuckseln
'cheat in games, maltreat, torment, beat, steal.' Du reg
fokken 'walk, run' (now obsolete); of the same type are
G reg focken and MLG vocken 'tease, irritate; swindle,'
Early ModDu and Du reg vocken 'quiver' (said about the
flame), and the Early Modern German noun Focker ~
Fucker 'bellows' (ModDu vocken is the main verb for
'copulate': ErW), Sw reg fokka 'copulate' and fokk 'penis,'
and Sw slöfock 'dullard, sluggard.' Dan reg fok 'the last
sheaf' belongs here too on account of its connection with
fertility rites (Bernard Olsen [1910:8-9]; Ellekilde [1937-
407
Adz(e) Adz(e)

38]; T. Andersen [1982:17 and 21, note 11]). This must

have been the reason Mannhardt (1884:328) chose not
to discuss its etymology. In all probability, G
Federfuchser 'pettifogger; narrow-minded person' (that
is, penpusher?) and Pfennigfuchser 'miser' have nothing
to do with Fuchs 'fox'; neither does fuchsen 'annoy, vex'
or fuchs(teufels)wild 'livid with rage, furious' (see also
Bremmer [1992:66] on Du vossen 'study hard;
copulate'; its connection with Du vos is due to folk
etymology).
It will be seen that fick(s)en, fack(s)en, and fuck(s)en,
as well as the verbs ending in -eln and -ern, are near
synonyms. Their basic meaning is 'make quick
movements; move back and forth' (hence 'copulate').
The most common figurative meanings of all those verbs
are 'deceive, cheat; annoy, irritate; work with an
imperfect tool.' See DW
(ficken), Rietz (fika(s), fokk, fokka), FT (fikle), KS
(Faxe,
Fuchs2 'beginning student,' and Federfuchser), Gradl
(1870:125-27), WF (117, fikkelen-fikken), Franck
(1883:12-13), Laistner (1888:186), O. Weise
(1902:243-44), L. Bloomfield (1909-10:266/54; an
especially extensive list), Thomas (1909-10), Sperber
(1912:413-14, 429-30, 436), Stoett (1917:65), W. de Vries
(1924:135), Celander (1925), Stapelkamp (1957a:229),

408
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Müller-Graupa (1957:466-67), Carl (1957-58:357), and

Rosenfeld (1955). Ochs (1921)
can be consulted, but the article is confusing.
2. The fik— fak— fuk- words have doublets with
postvocalic -t or dental affricates (Gradl
[1870:125-30], Van Helten [1873:213-51], DW).
Such are G reg fitzen 'flog, make stitches' (akin to OI
fitja upp 'make the first stitches'), pfitzen 'run back and
forth,' fitschen 'flutter about,' fitscheln 'play ducks and
drakes; talk about nothing in particular,' fätscheln 'run
back and forth,' fatzen 'cheat in games, etc,' fätzen
'wrangle, tease,' pfutzen ~ futschen 'run back and forth,'
pfutschen 'gulp down,' futsch ~ pfutsch (interjections
accompanying a quick movement), fuschen 'bungle one's
work,' and Du futselen 'trifle with something.'
Another set of doublets begins with fl-. Here we find
G flicken 'mend, darn' (= 'make stitches'); G reg flicken
'strike' and jemanden flicken 'strike up friendship with
someone; copulate,' Du flikken 'patch (up)' and
'copulate.' Despite the prevailing opinion to the contrary
(see NEW), Du flikflooien 'flatter' should not be
separated from flikken, whatever the origin of -flooien
may be (W. de Vries [1915:11-12]; for more, see
FLATTER); Sw flacka (om-kring) 'wander around,' and G
reg flotschen 'flutter.' See Flom (1913), who surveys fl-
words in Scandinavian, A. Kock (1895-98:1-3), and SEO
(flicka).
409
Adz(e) Adz(e)

German flattern and English flatter also belong to

that group. Some verbs with different vowels in the root
have postvocalic p: OI fipla 'touch with the fingers,' LG
fipsen 'make quick movements; copulate' and fippen 'go
back and forth,' Du and G foppen 'cheat,' E flip, flap, flop
(Du flip also means 'vagina' [ErW]).
Some of the German verbs listed above show no
effects of the Second Consonant Shift. For
example, G foppen, flicken, and flattern have the
same stops as do Du foppen, E flicker, and E flatter.
Shifted forms exist, however: compare G Fach
'compartment, pigeon hole' versus OE fxc 'interval,' G
fuchtig, a doublet of fuchsig 'very angry' (a synonym of
fuchsteufelswild), G reg Fuchtel 'featherbrained woman,'
and so on. G Fächer 'fan' may be an adaptation of a Latin
word, but fanning presupposes movement back and
forth. OE fxc is easy to understand in light of Du vaak
'often, frequently' (= 'at regular intervals, happening
every now and then,' similar to 'move back and forth,'
the meaning underlying the entire f-k group; Muller
[1916]). If the basic meaning of G Fach is 'compartment,'
then it refers to the same entity as OE fxc, but in space
rather than in time. See the critique of Trier's ideas in
Drosdowski (1950:61.6b and 63; Trier thought that OE
fxc reflects the practice of making fences) and sec 4,
below, on fit. When analyzing the Germanic root fist,
Rosenfeld (1958:357-420) mentioned dozens of words,
410
Adz(e) Adz(e)

whose pejorative connotations trace, in his opinion, to

the meaning 'break wind,' but they much more likely
belong with verbs of copulation. The words ending in b,
d, g will be discussed below.
3. Apparently, E fuck is one of the many words listed
in sec 1 and 2, as was clear to L. Bloomfield, but it is
hardly native, for English has never had a profusion of fik
— fak— fuk- words. In Old English, fa cen 'deceit, sin,
crime, blemish,' fx cne 'deceitful, vile, worthless,' ficol
'cunning, tricky,' gefic 'deceit,' and (be)fician 'deceive,
flatter' have been attested. If fuck ever occurred or still
occurs with meanings other than 'copulate' (for example,
fuck the field 'plant,' as a farmer informed J. Adams
[1963:74]), they are derivative of the main one. The
strong verb *fican has not been recorded or
reconstructed (for example, Seebold [1970] does not
mention it), but ME fike 'move restlessly, bustle; act and
speak deceitfully' may testify to its existence. Although
current in the North, E reg fike does not seem to be a
borrowing from Scandinavian, for OI fikjask meant only
'strive eagerly,' while fikr and fikinn meant 'eager,
desirous.' If, however, some such Old English verb
existed, fuck is not its direct continuation. OE befician
and *fican may have meant *'copulate.'
In many languages, 'copulate' and 'deceive' are
related concepts (so in E screw). The Czech cognate of
Russ ebat' 'copulate' also means 'deceive' (the same
411
Adz(e) Adz(e)

meaning in Russ naebyvat'), while in Sorbian jebac

'deceive' has no sexual
meaning (WONS). See Brugmann (1913:323-25;
Slavic), ESSI VIII:188, Mackel (1905:269; LG futdn
'bitch about, carp,' most probably going back to F
foutre 'copulate'), Poetto (1984:198; English and
Italian), Arditti (1987:215; Salonica Judezmo), Gold
(1989:34, with references to his earlier works), and
especially Foerste (1964a). Foerste cites nontrivial
parallels for 'swing, jump, rub' (= 'move briskly back and
forth') > 'deceive' and compares G ficken and OE
befician. Sperber (1912) believed that the primary
meaning of all such verbs was 'copulate.' Screw would be
a counterexample, for it did not originate in the sexual
sphere, but, in principle, his hypothesis is right: the
development goes from 'have intercourse' to 'deceive'
('thrust forcibly, beat, nail down' > 'have intercourse' >
'be on top of it' > 'triumph' > 'look down upon' >
'deceive, mock, denigrate'; see also Goldberger
[1932:110-18]
and A. Keller [1871]). WONS admits both paths
(from 'copulate' to 'deceive' and from 'deceive' to
'copulate'), but the evidence for the second path is
lacking.
A third common meaning accompanying 'swing,'
'deceive,' and 'copulate,' is 'vex, annoy.' Such is LG
focken 'tease.' Kiick's derivation of that verb from MLG
412
Adz(e) Adz(e)

vocke 'toad' is fanciful (1905:15). Moving back and forth

may appear as a physical representation, a visible image
of inconstancy and hence of mockery and deceit. In
societies in which steadfastness was a cardinal virtue, its
opposite would easily develop into the most abhorrent
vice (lack of loyalty). The history of E fickle shows the
progress from 'treacherous' to 'inconstant,' though one
would expect the reverse order. OE fa cen means 'deceit,
treachery, crime,' but the only recorded sense of fa cian
is 'try to obtain; reach' and of fx can 'wish to go.' The
idea of movement underlies both (as well as OI fikjask
'strive eagerly,' mentioned above); however, the evil
connotations of fa cen are absent in them. Thus we have
no evidence that fuck is a native English verb. OI fjuka
(fauk, fuku, fokinn) 'be tossed by the wind' has no
cognates anywhere in Germanic and cannot support
Lass's idea (1995) that fuck goes back to OE *fucan.
The earliest known example of fuck in English is
dated to the second half of the 15 th century (Revard
[1977]). From 1503 onward, that verb has been
continually in use (OED, DOST) and ousted jape, sard,
and swive (see speculation on the
longevity of fuck in Noguchi [1996]). Buck 278:4.67
cites the name John le Fucker (1278), for which he
does not give the source. Fucker is probably a variant of
Fulcher, along with Fucher, Foker, Foucar, as Sherman
Kuhn suggested to Allen Walker Read
413
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(Read [1976:4-5]). OED has no citations of fucking

before 1568, but a reliable 1528 example is known in
which the word apparently means 'copulating' (not an
expletive: E. Wilson [1993]). Neither fuck nor its
derivatives appear in Shakespeare. He knew the word, as
follows from his pun on the fo-cative case, but the vogue
for it seems to have come later than roughly the years
1590-1610. The same is true of Fucker, fuckster, and puns
on fucus. See G.
Williams (1994:562-65 and 1997:136), whose exam-
ples of firk, fiddle, fig, and others are equally valuable,
and Webb (1989:42-43).
In the 16th century, fuck(ing) was applied mainly to
lascivious monks and did not compete with the likes of
swive in broader contexts. Fuck(ing) enjoyed special
popularity in Scotland, though it points to Flanders and
Germany rather than Scandinavia if we consider the late
date of borrowing. Consequently, the word may have
had too strong a northern coloring for Stratford-on-
Avon. G. Williams (1994:562) seems to be right when he
says that "Lowland Scots use of fucksail (foresail of a
ship) for a woman's skirt suggests a more comfortable
relationship with fuck than was found further south,"
but, as pointed out above, fuck might simply be a
predominantly northern word. The bawdy allusion fucus
= fuck was understood everywhere in England, however;
see fucus in G. Williams (1994) and Henke (1979).
414
Adz(e) Adz(e)

G ficken 'copulate' turned up in texts only in 1588

(WHirt), but the idea that a verb widespread in
numerous (perhaps in all) dialects is old (so DW) must be
correct. Unlike G ficken, E fuck has no support from
modern *fick and *fack. It probably appeared in English
when it surfaced in texts, that is, some time around
1450. The lending language was LG or Fl (hardly Scand).
The borrowing must have occurred before E /u/ changed
to /A/. Early ModE fuck(e) is related to Du or Fl vocken as
is E buck 'male of a deer' to its Dutch counterpart bok.
However, it remains a puzzle why English speakers did
not borrow the much more common ficke(n) and why
the new word ousted the equally vulgar synonyms jape,
sard, swive, and a host of others; T. Burton (1988:27-29)
discusses some of them.
It is now taken for granted that Ital ficcare, OSp ficar
(> ModSp hincar), Port ficar, and F ficher 'copulate' (cf
also F afficher 'fasten, attach') have a Romance etymon,
*ficticare or *figicare (< *flccare < L figere 'attach'; F
ficher replaced foutre only in the 17th century.) But
perhaps the Romance words were borrowed from
German. MHG vicken (v designated [f]) had the meanings
'rub' and 'fasten,' the second of which has also been
derived from figere.
Some contamination (G ficken X L figere) is not in-
conceivable, but if a sexual metaphor was at play, ficken
'fasten, attach' (= 'nail down') would accord well with
415
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ficken 'copulate.' Diez seems to have been the last

scholar to wonder at the similarity between Sw fikas and
Rom ficcarsi ('copulate'), both reflexive: see FEW
15/II:123 (ficken). Santangelo's few incoherent remarks
on this subject (1953:68) are of no account. ML (3920)
supported the oldest etymology ficcare < *figicare; Del
Rosal [?1537 -?1613] already knew it: see Del Rosal
[1992, hincar]), and modern dictionaries of the Romance
languages repeat it (this is true of all the dictionaries
consulted). Yet the Romance etymon of ficcare and its
cognates remains a matter of speculation, and, if E fuck
can be a borrowing from Low German, fic-care and the
rest could also come from Germanic. The Italian verb
first surfaced in Dante (DLLA, 1287). Bruckner (1899:13)
supports Diez's derivation of Ital fagno 'rogue passing
himself off as a dummy' from Go *faikns (see OE fScne,
above) but does not touch on ficcare. The words in
question were unprintable for a long time, and this may
be the reason they do not appear in Waltemath (1885),
Mackel (1887), Goldschmidt (1887), Zaccaria (1901),
Ulrix (1907), Bertoni (1914), Bonfante (1974), and
others. Nor does Knobloch (1987:66) mention the
connection of ficcare with the corresponding verbs in
Germanic, whereas Luiselli (1992) deals with the periods
too ancient for such a borrowing. According to Dietz
(2000:80, note 7), ficcare and ficken are "definitely"
unrelated (no other arguments given).
416
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Russ fukat' and its Slavic cognates often mean 'make

a noise' and are traditionally derived from the
onomatopoeic complex *fu (Vasmer IV:209), but note
Russ profukat' 'waste (wealth),' Pol fukac 'berate,' and
Slovenian fukati 'copulate.' Words from different
etymons may have converged in Slavic. Fick- seems to
have reached Czech at a period when speakers of Slavic
languages still substituted p for foreign f (Janko [1926]).
The Gmc verb enjoyed a truly international reputation
(Spitzer [1915:213, note continued from p 212]). Verbs
meaning 'copulate' are easily borrowed (Coromi-nas
[1942] gives one of many pertinent examples).
If the Italian verb is of German origin, ficcare from G
ficken must have been reinforced by the obscene
meaning of fico 'fig' (fruit and the gesture): ModIt fica
means 'sexually appealing female'; a vulgar word
(Goldberger [1930:64], Pisani
[1979:314-16], and Scarpat [1969, esp 885-89]). Figs
and fig leaves have had sexual connotations since at
least biblical times. See Gold (1995a) on Ital fica and the
several senses of fig. However vague the reconstruction
advanced here may be, one can imagine a German
profanity spreading north and south. More daring
hypotheses turn up in the literature. For example, Stopa
(1972:196) believes that "[t]he etymology of most
obscene words in Slavonic languages (e.g. in the

417
Adz(e) Adz(e)

peasants' slang of Polish) leads to African." This is a

baffling idea.
4. Although English lacked the rich fick- ~ fak— fuk-
crop recorded elsewhere, it had many words of the type
mentioned above; however, they ended in consonants
other than -k. The list opens with fidge (1575),
transformed under unknown circumstances into fidget
(1754; the noun fidget was first recorded in texts in
1674). OED notes that the meaning of fidge resembles
closely that of fike and refers to G ficken, but adds,
"...etymological connexion is hardly possible unless the
form has undergone onomatopoeic modification." The
obsolete verb fig (about) is another synonym of fidge.
Fadge (obsolete and rare; OED gives citations between
1658 and 1876) meant, among other things, 'make one's
way,' and it also occurred in the form fodge. One of the
senses of fudge (1674) was 'thrust in awkwardly or
irrelevantly,' while fudgy (1819!) means 'fretful.' All
those meanings belong to the semantic field of G ficken
and its variants. See a short discussion of fudge and fidge
in Lockwood (1995a:70).
Some words have long vowels. Feague 'beat' (the
end of the 16th century?) had a variant feak (1652). The
second meaning of feague 'do for'
(1688) resembles that of fudge (1674) and of fake
(1812!). The similarity between G ficken and E fidge
occurred to J. Grimm (DW), who wrote the proportion G
418
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Brücke: E bridge = G ficken: E fidge, but positing an old

ancestor of fidge with a geminate is not a good idea, for
the word surfaced late and its /ck/ may go back to /tj/,
as in Greenwich and hodgepodge. Jamieson gives fitch
'move slowly from place to place, touch frequently,' and
OED calls fitch (1637) an intermediate form between fike
and fidge (an alternation like seek ~ beseech?). The
simplest solution would be to recognize in fidge an
expressive variant of fig (see NUDGE for similar occur-
rences). Fitch is fidge with a devoiced final affricate.
The regularity with which fik- alternates with fit- in
German makes E fit a possible candidate for membership
in the group discussed here. The verb fit, presumably
from the adjective fit, emerged late, and their recorded
history presents some difficulty, for both appeared in
1440 and are not attested again for more than a hundred
years thereafter. Nor is it entirely clear whether fit
'canto, division of a poem' and fit 'paroxysm' are related
to each other and to fit '(make) proper' (Jespersen
[1962:167] doubted their kinship). None of those
meanings can be easily deduced from 'move back and
forth.' But consider fitful 'intermittent' and the phrase by
fits and starts. Du vitten 'find fault, carp' corresponds to
EFr and LG fikje ~ fikke (NEW), while OI fitla 'fidget' is
almost the same word as Sw reg fikla 'rummage about'
(N reg fikle; Bugge [1888b:120]), and Icel fjatla is a near
synonym (the same in Far and Nynorsk: ABM). The
419
Adz(e) Adz(e)

much-discussed Du fiets 'bicycle' (1870!) can belong here

too (its meaning will then be 'moving quickly'); see De
Bont's survey (1973), especially pp. 53-54.
Go fitan* 'be in labor, give birth to' is from an
etymological point of view indistinguishable from E fit
(W. de Vries [1923] and Feist3; see also Campanile
[1969:22] on this word). Fetch, from OE fecc(e)an, is
believed to be a late variant of fetian. Both may belong
with fit rather than with OE fxt 'vat' (G Faß) and G fassen
'seize.' The primary meaning of fetch is 'go and bring
back' (that is, 'go back and forth'). Go fetjan* 'adorn' is
of obscure origin, but in light of G ficken 'work with a
needle' it poses no difficulties; see further OI fat 'vessel;
clothes' in AEW and E fetter (OI fetill) in etymological
dictionaries. If E fit 'canto, division of a poem' and
'swoon' belong to the f-p/t/k group, G Fitze 'bundle of
yarn, skein' probably does too. Its cognate, in addition to
OE fitt and OS vittea 'canto,' is OI fit 'the webbed foot of
water birds.' The diminutives G Fitzel and Fitz(el)chen
'little bit' show that the original meaning of fitze was not
'web' or 'yarn' but rather 'a small piece, a product of divi-
sion' which makes the kinship of fit and Fitze, with Gk
met/a 'foot; ankle; hem' unlikely. See fit in AEW and
Fitze in KS.
Final -d often occurs among the postvocalic
consonants in the words of the f + vowel + stop type that
mean 'move in a certain way.' Consider E fiddle (about)
420
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'make aimless or frivolous movements' (1530), fiddle-

faddle 'trifling talk or action' (1577), faddle 'caress; play,
trifle' (1755), less obviously, fuddle 'tipple, intoxicate'
(1588; G reg fuddeln means 'swindle, work sloppily'), and
the meaning of such words as fiddlesticks 'nonsense' and
fiddle-de-dee. Fiddle, the instrument (OE fipele, (M)Du
vedel, OHG fidula, [G Fiedel], OI fidla), must have had a
related root (fid- 'pluck'). Compare the history of E harp
(sb and v) and of G Geige 'fiddle'; assuming that the root
of Geige means 'hesitate, doubt,' that is, 'change
directions' (Hintner [1874:68]), Geige is an excellent
match for fiddle; see KM and KS, which give conflicting
explanations. Medieval Latin borrowed this word as
*vitula. If the borrowing had been from Latin, t would
not have become d in Germanic. (But the origin of
*vitula and viola remains debatable: H. Keller
[1967:299].) The same root can perhaps be detected in
OE fxdel 'play actor?' (once in a gloss). A word
reminiscent of fxdel is Russ figliar 'clown, jester,
buffoon,' from Polish. Figli means 'pranks,' and its root is
probably fig- 'fig' (the obscene gesture). Both actors
'fidged' and 'fiddled' before the public. Spitzer
(1915:213) seems to have guessed the origin of Pol figli
correctly. Trier (1947:257) listed fxdel among the words
he etymologized as 'belonging to the community'; his
derivation can hardly be accepted.

421
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Among the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian words

of the ficken type, root final voiced stops (b, d, g) are
rare (one example is G vogeln, a vulgar synonym of
ficken, evidently not related to Vogel 'bird,' contrary to
the popular view and Fokkema [1959]), but in English
they occur regularly. In addition to fig (v), feague, and
fiddle ~ faddle ~ fuddle, we find fogger (mainly in
pettifogger, 1576), and fib ~ fob ~ fab ~ fub. Fidge, fadge,
and fudge, with a voiced affricate, may perhaps also be
cited here. Nothing is known about the history of
pettifogger; its connection with the merchant name
Fugger (OED) looks like a late pun. Rather, fogger was a
hustler, running all over the place in search of petty
clients. German dialects have fuggern 'trade; deceive,'
and in British slang, funny fugger 'odd fish, rum card' has
been recorded (George [1887:92]). Althaus (1963:69),
like all his predecessors, derives fuggern and Fugger
'merchant, cheat' from the name of the Augsburg
merchant Fugger, but it is more likely that fuggern is an
old verb and that the first Fugger was called this because
he was a fugger (cf Smith, Cooper, and the like).
Fob meant 'impostor' as early as 1353 (Langland).
The verb fob 'cheat' (1593) is akin to Du and G foppen. G
Ficke 'pocket' (now obsolete) has always been known to
belong with ficken: either because a pocket is often
opened and closed or because one constantly puts one's
hand into it, or through an obscene association (Ficke
422
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'vagina' and 'pocket'). Less convincing is the idea that

Ficke got its name because pockets were attached to
one's clothes (from MHG ficken 'attach'). E fob 'small
pocket' was first recorded in 1653 and, like most
European words for 'pocket,' is hard to etymologize (see
OED), but the parallelism G ficken—Ficke, E fob (v)—fob
(sb) is worthy of note. Fib (v) 'strike, deliver blows in
quick succession' (1665) and 'lie, tell falsehoods' (1690)
exemplifies a familiar semantic bundle. It may be that
fipple 'play at the mouth of a wind instrument' and (reg)
'underlip' belong with fib. A direct connection between
fipple and OI flipr (a nickname), and ModI flipi 'underlip
of a horse' is doubtful.
In the study of fik- ~ fak- ~ fuk- words, a complicating
factor is the presence of intrusive consonants between f
and the vowel. As pointed out above, G ficken competes
with flicken. In English, numerous fl- words designate
unsteady movement. Among them are flit (1200), flitter
(1563), flicker (1000), flatter (1386), flip (1616, it re-
sembles fillip, 1543; cf G Fips 'fillip' and E flippant, 1622),
flap (1362), flop (1622), and the verbs meaning 'beat,
thrash, throw': flack (1393), flick (1447),
flog (1676), perhaps even flirt ([sb], 1577; [v], 1583,
originally 'tap, blow lightly, jerk'). Few of them
antedate Chaucer, some are surprisingly late and rose to
respectability from thieves' cant; see also D.
Hofmann (1984).
423
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Intrusive r is especially important for the history of

English verbs referring to sexual intercourse. OE frician
'dance, move briskly' has been recorded once. OE frek
'brave' and E frisk may go back to the same Germanic
etymon (Brüll [1913:129]; dictionaries are vague on this
point). The verbs derived from the zero grade of frician
(such as frick 'move briskly; and frickle 'fidget'; EDD) may
have had sexual connotations, which would perhaps
explain Fricco, the name given to the phallic figure of
Freyr by Adam of Bremen. The
attempts by Bugge (1904) and Jungner (1922:223) to
relate Fricco to Ilpuxnoj failed (see, among others,
Cahen [1923:147] and Loewenthal [1927:288]), but
the idea was sound. Although Fricco is Freyr, the root
of his name is identical with that of OI Frigg (Frigg was
Oöinn's wife). Freyr had a female counterpart, Freyja.
Freyja and Frigg are sometimes hard to distinguish, and
Frigg is a phonetic variant of OHG Frija. The etymology
of Freyr ~ Freyja is disputable (see Go frauja and G Frau
in etymological dictionaries), but insofar as Fricco is tied
to Frigg ~ Freyr, it cannot be shown to be related to
Ilpuxnoj or to *fridkan 'amator' (Loewenthal [1927:288]),
and its association with the verbs discussed above (if it
existed) was a product of folk etmology.
E fridge 'move restlessly' appeared in 1550 and went
out of use two centuries later. OED glosses frig (1550)
'move about restlessly, agitate the body limbs.' But it
424
Adz(e) Adz(e)

also meant 'masturbate' and 'copulate' and was

interchangeable with fuck from the start (Pyles
[1971:243]). Firk ferk) 'carry, urge, move about briskly,
play (a fiddle)' has the longest recorded history of them
all: it surfaced in Old English and died out in the 18 th
century. OED and
AeEW treat it as a cognate of fare. Nares singles out
'strike' as its most usual sense but mentions its other,
often unclear, licentious applications and says that some
people connect it with L ferio 'strike, kill' (he gives no
references). Yet its semantic kernel must be 'move about
briskly, (dance, flaunt),' as in the 1595 citation, unless OE
fercian and E firk ~ ferk are different verbs. Firk, a
widespread synonym of fuck, is probably related to freak
'sudden change of fortune' (1563). Fribble 'stammer,
falter; totter in walking; busy oneself to no purpose, fid-
dle' is even later (1627), and OED offers no etymology for
it.
Like ficken ~ facken ~ fucken, the fl- ~ fr- words
synonymous with them are said to be of unknown origin,
but although each of them has its history traced in OED,
research into their etymology will be of relatively little
use. While it cannot be predicted when l or r will turn up,
the result is clear: f + (short) vowel + stop alternate with
fl- ~ fr- + (short) vowel + stop in verbs designating 'move
back and forth; move briskly, unsteadily, restlessly' and
their derived and figurative meanings: 'dance, dance
425
Adz(e) Adz(e)

attendance, speak insincerely; taunt, annoy, vex;

copulate, masturbate.' Reference to an intrusive
consonant may seem arbitrary. However, such
consonants have always been recognized. EM call c, that
is, [k] in L fricare 'break up into small pieces' emphatic,
as though friare were traceable to fricare 'rub.' Du
blutsen 'beat' is a doublet of botsen (reg butsen,
boetsen), E fag 'droop' is a doublet of flag (v), and
inserted nasals are well-known from Indo-European
reconstruction. See also Gonda (1943:419; examples
from various languages), J. de Vries (1959; a collection of
words with emphatic r in Germanic), Tornqvist (1970:23),
and Falk's list of words with intrusive j in the
Scandinavian languages (1896:212/46; N reg fukla, fjukle,
fikla, firla, fjarla and Sw reg fakkla, fikkla, all meaning
'work sloppily').
These are the words of Modern English mentioned
above; the ones no longer in use (except sometimes in
dialects) have a dagger: fddle, fdge, fake, ffeague, feak,
fetch, fib, fickle, fiddle, ffidge, fidget, ffig (v), fke, fillip,
fipple, ffirk, fit, ffitch, fflack, flap, flatter, fflick, flicker, flip,
flirt, flit, flitter, flog, flop, flutter, fob, ffodge,
(petti)fogger, fop, freak, fribble, frig, fuddle, fudge,
fudgy. It is tempting to add fumble to the list, even
though its root ends in -m (b is excrescent). Not all forty
of them are fuck's next of kin, but they form one family.
This was clear to Wedgwood (1852-53): see flap and
426
Adz(e) Adz(e)

fickle on pp 144 and 146; fuck is, of course, not discussed

in the article. Unfortunately, Wedgwood allowed his
ideas to carry him away and he made his list all-inclusive,
but in retrospect it is his feeling for language as a living
organism rather than his lack of critical judgment that
impresses us today (a splendid car without brakes). If
Hoptman's etymology of finger and flunk is correct
(2000), that family is even larger.
Finding one's way among the cognates and
homonyms of fuck is not always easy. The word fuck (adj
and sb) occurs with the following meanings in only one
German dialectal dictionary: 'immovable; ripe (about
grapes), beginning to decay (about pears)' (German may
have Muckefuck 'ersatz coffee' from fuck 'rotten,' with a
possible pun on F mocca faux); 'hunger; bow in a girl's
hair.' Close by we find Fucke 'willow pipe; weir basket;
very short knitted undershirt'; Fücksel 'fir cone' (from
Fichte 'fir tree'?); fucken (v) 'copulate; sell cattle (said
only about Christian traders); jump, swing, whack, etc'
(RhW II). The etymology of each of those words is
problematic. The German last names Fick, Fuck, Fix, Vix,
and Figg seem to have nothing to do with the verb in
question (Gottschald [1954], Brechenmacher [1957]).
5. Vulgar verbs of copulation and breaking wind may
have cognates in more than one language group and
suggest a Proto-Indo-European origin. Skt ydbhati

427
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'copulates,' Gk oi'cpco, and OSl *jebati are apparently

related (Polome [1952:470];
Mayrhofer III:7, Frisk, Chantraine, WP I:198; IEW,
298; Arbeitman [1980:79], ESSI VIII:181; Bain [1991:72-
74], with a superb bibliography). F.
Müller (1897:9) and Möller (1911:109) believed in
the existence of Semitic cognates of those words.
Reference to taboo in the history of jdbhati and its
cognates is not necessary, for taboo need not be the
cause of the aberrant vowel in Greek. Variation in a
word of this type would be as natural in Greek as it is in
Germanic. If *jebhati was a low word, it would have
been avoided in writing rather than tabooed. Its sounds
would even have been 'scrambled' in play. A typical
example is OI serda 'copulate, often, with the notion of
Sodomitic practices' (CV, and see serda in ODGNS). Its
principal parts are sard and sordinn, but sordinn has the
doublet strodinn, from which the infinitive streda was
formed, while serda has the quasi-synonym sarda
'polish.' The verb streda 'copulate' surfaced in the 17th
century, streda 'work hard' in the 18th century; sarda is
also an 18th-century word. Strodinn has been explained
as a metathesized by-form of sordinn, with excrescent t
between s and r (or a regular continuation of serda; see
all the Icelandic words in ÄBM). That explanation carries
no more conviction than the taboo theory.

428
Adz(e) Adz(e)

According to Hamp (1988b:181), we have no

indication that PIE *iebh- was obscene, but the stylistic
connotations of no word can be discovered without
texts. The difference between so-called low and solemn
words has always existed; the same does not necessarily
hold for obscene. Verbs of copulation describe the
physiological aspect of the sexual act, while ignoring its
emotional side, and this (rather than reference to an
activity of a certain type) tends to make them obscene.
OE (ge)bru can, (ge)ne alxcan, licgan mid, and others are
not euphemisms for 'copulate,' as J. Coleman (1992)
suggested, but expressions of love, physical union, and
naturalness of sex in married life (Coleman admits the
same at the end). Likewise, husband, spouse, partner,
and boy friend are not euphemisms for Fucker.
The Indo-European background of jdbhati suggests
that fuck, too, can have connections outside Germanic.
OE fa cen and ficol appear in WP II:10-11 and IEW (795;
*peig-, *peik-); see also Ambrosini (1956:146).
Holthausen (1955:204/51) compared Westph fiuken
'mate' (said about birds) with L pungere 'prick, sting' and
pu gio 'dagger,' as well as with Lith pisti 'copulate' and L
pinsere 'grind.' Pugnare 'fight, struggle' seems to be a
better phonetic match for fuck than pungere (Holthausen
derived fiuken from *fukan). Makovskii (2000a:144, note
12, continued on p. 145) cites PIE *(s)pien— *poi- 'pour,
let one drink' as a cognate of fuck, but he has to change
429
Adz(e) Adz(e)

their meaning into 'pour semen,' 'drench with semen,'

which makes the comparison useless.
The first to trace fuck and pugna re to the same
etymon was probably Loewenthal (1915:153). The same
etymologoy occurred to Celander (1925:117), but long
before them, Moller (1879:464-65) compared,
mistakenly it seems, OE fa cen and L pugna re (he did not
discuss fuck, but fetch is mentioned on p. 465). Read
(1934:268) suggested that the original meaning of fuck
had been 'knock' and cited E knock up. Bernard Bloch
defended Read's idea in his lectures in the 1960's (Lass
[1995:105, note 8]),
whereas Lass (1995:104-05) related fuck to both
pungere and pugna re (p. 108). Whallon (1987:35) calls L
pugna re and pungere the most commonly mentioned
cognates of fuck. See a semantic parallel in Fay's
speculation on L ama re 'love' originally meaning 'pierce,'
and, consequently, 'get a woman pregnant' (1906:20-23).
He had the same association as Read: 'strike' = 'knock up'
(Fay [1905:191/28]). However, pugnare, unlike prick and
thrust, is a durative verb: it meant 'fight, struggle, argue,
quarrel, strive eagerly,' not 'strike, give a blow' and could
hardly alternate with futuere outside the discourse on
'the battle of love.' Pugnare and ficken belong to
different styles. For a similar reason, WH found Gk
φυτεύω 'plant' (v) incompatible with futuere.

430
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Wachter compared ficken and frega re 'rub' (which

he correctly derived from L fricare) and both of them
with OE fagung 'scabies, lepra.' The word he meant is
fagness 'scab, ulcer, eruption,' that is, 'redness,' from OE
fag 'variegated, spotted.' It has nothing to do with the
fick- / fack- verbs. Faulmann, the author of a wholly
unreliable German etymological dictionary, was,
however, right in comparing G Fickfacker 'unstable man,
windbag, intriguer' and G Ficke 'pocket' with E fickle, but
he made a fanciful guess that they are related to OHG
gifehan 'be pleased with something.'
The most vexing problem in the search for the Indo-
European etymon of fuck is the lack of one Germanic
form to be etymologized. It will not do to say that fuck is
a cognate of pungere or pugnare, while ficken and
facken represent other grades of ablaut. The Germanic
material rather suggests that ficken is the main word,
whereas facken and fucken (and fokken), along with fl-
and fr- forms, are its modifications. Also, the well-
documented meaning of all the Germanic f-words is
'move back and forth,' not 'prick' or 'fight.'
In Shipley's opinion, "the current term arose, by the
natural looseness of uncultivated and coarse speech, and
a simple semantic shift, from the word firk" (1977:24).
He pooh-poohs possible objections and pronounces a
harsh verdict on his immediate predecessors: "No
connection can be traced to G ficken or Du fokken.
431
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'Middle English type *fucken not found' is the figment of

a lexicographer's fancy. Firk is there" (p. 26). (Paros
[1984:9-10] also prefers the derivation of fuck from firk.)
However, Shipley (1984:42, 293) makes no mention of
firk and assigns fuck to two roots at once: *bhreg- ~
*bhrei-'rub, prick, break' and peig- 'hostile'; neither con-
nection can be justified.
By coincidence, L futuere is also an f- word. A
convincing etymology of futuere has not been offered
(ML, 3622). Perhaps Latin had echoic words like E phut-
phut-phut (phut = fut) and phit-phit-phit
(see them in OED: phut, 1888; OED cites Hindi and
Urdu phatna 'split, burst'; phit, 1894) or G fick-fick,
fickfack, or futsch ~ pfutsch 'quick!' If such was the case,
futuere did not have real cognates. Nor is there any
evidence that futuere was borrowed from Germanic. It
was an expressive word (EM) and has come down to us
mainly from low comedy.
The same is true of fuck: "[A]ll the recorded
examples of the verb and its derivatives are in contexts
which are in some sense satiric or at least comic" (E.
Wilson [1993:32, and see p. 35]).
The Common Germanic word for 'vagina' provides
other false clues: OI fud- (in compounds; Modi fud"),
MHG vut (Modern German has Fotze and Hundsfott
'dog's vulva,' a swear word), and E reg fud (1785;
ModAmerE slang fatz is from Yiddish: Gold [1985]).
432
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Whatever the origin of fuö ~ fud ~ vut (Van Helten [1908-

09:195]), these words and Gk πϋγή 'buttocks' are
unrelated to fuck (for a different opinion, not supported
by any arguments, see Lass [1995:105, note 9]). A
bewildering passage graces Partridge's book on
Shakespeare (1947a; the same in the later editions):
"Fuck is probably one of the sadistic group of words for
the man's part in copulation (cf. clap, cope, hit, strike,
thump, and the modern slang term, bang), for it seems
to derive from Ger. ficken, 'to strike,' as Klüge [sic] main-
tains. Probably confirmatory rather than contradictory is
Skt ukshan (a bull; lit. impregnator), which Bopp, in his
Comparative Grammar, maintains to have originally
been fukshan (where shan = the agential -er): with
cognates in Gk phutuein and Ger. Ochse."
Makaev (1970:236) believed that the etymology of
fuck must begin with ficken and compared fick with Sw
spik 'nail.' Longman Dictionary of the English Language
lists a few Scandinavian forms, suggests the
Scandinavian origin of fuck, and (probably following
Read) gives L pungere as a possible cognate. WNWD
mentions Sw reg fokk 'penis.' Bury (1883:79/9) traced
πϋγή to φυχή and compared it with OHG elinbogo
'elbow' and E bugger ("a genuine word, though the
prudish authors of English dictionaries do not usually
include it"), and Makovskii (2002:75) cited Tocharian A
puk 'believe, respect' as a cognate of fuck. No Tocharian
433
Adz(e) Adz(e)

sources consulted cite puk with such a meaning.

Sheidlower (1999:XXV-XXXII) gives a detailed survey of
recent conjectures on the origin of fuck. The most
reasonable conclusion from the foregoing survey will be
that fuck has no Indo-European cognates. If so and if the
many Germanic words given here are related, their
putative Proto-Indo-European origin is illusory. Du vaak
and Gk πυκνός 'thick; frequent' (cited in Möller
[1879:465], and Kluge [1884:182]), G Fach, Gk πήγνϋμι
'thrust,' and L pugna re, pungere, and E fuck go their
separate ways. Stone (1954) set out to show the
influence of suck on fuck. His attempt will appeal only to
other practitioners of psychoanalysis.
6. The word fuck has not always been unprintable. It
appears in Florio (1611) as one of the glosses of Ital
fottere. Minsheu (1617) included it in his dictionary and
compared it with F foutre, Ital fottere, and L futuere.
Skinner's posthumous editor Thomas Henshaw derived
fuck from the same Romance etymon, assumed their
kinship with Gk φυτεύω 'plant' (v), and added Fl
("Teutonic") fuch-ten from G Futz or Du fotte, or Dan
foder. (Did he mean Dan f0de 'breed' or foder 'fodder'?)
According to Read (1934:269 and note 22), Henshaw
took much of his material from Junius's treatment of the
unrelated Gothic word fodr 'vagina.' But Go fodr, which
occurs only in John XVIII:11, means 'sheath'; Gk θήκη
'casket; coffin, grave; sheath' did not mean 'vagina'
434
Adz(e) Adz(e)

either in recorded texts. The Gazo-phylacium, as always,

copied from Skinner and glossed Dan foder as 'beget.' N.
Bailey (1721) defined fuck as 'fasminam subagitare' and
reproduced the entry from the Gazophylacium almost
verbatim, but in his 1730 dictionary he wrote "a term
used of a goat" and tentatively traced fuck to Dutch.
Fuck also occurs in Ash.
Read consulted those dictionaries (except the
Gazophylacium) years before they became available in
modern reprints, and from him the story of the early
attempts to etymologize fuck became known to other
linguists. See a more recent version of this story in
Rawson (1989:161). One often hears that fuck is an
acronym: fuck = for unlawful carnal knowledge
(Eisiminger [1979:582]) or fuck = fornicate under
command of the Xing (allegedly, going back to the times
of Black Death; G. Hughes
[1988:25]). Sheidlower (1999:XXVI-XXVII) has
more to say on such popular etymologies.
Then for over two hundred years the verb dis-
appeared from English dictionaries. Anonymous
(1865:181) states that Dwight (1859), in discussing
the word fauxbourg, "adds to his list the most ob-
scene word in our language"; no such list appears in the
New York edition of Dwight's book. On two printed
occurrences of fuck dated 1882 see Sheid-
lower (1999:XXXI-XXXII).
435
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Lexicographers are expert in dodging obscenity laws.

In the first edition of OED, fuck is conspicuous by its
absence, but one finds windfucker, an obsolete name for
the kestrel, or windhover (G. Hughes [1991:3, 161]). The
single example from 1599 (the kistrilles or windfuckers
that filling themselues with winde, fly against winde
evermore) seems to suggest that to fuck the wind meant
'fly despite headwinds.' Du fok 'foresail' and fokkemast
'foremast' carry a similar idea. Swelling and thus being
able to make headway looks like a perfect description of
intercourse. Both E fuck the wind and Du fok might be
metaphorical applications of fuck(en) ~ fokken
'copulate.'
Heeroma (1941-42:52) treats Du fok and fokken as
related; however, he is probably wrong in reconstructing
the original meaning of the root as *'rag.' OED gives no
etymology of windfucker but compares it with northern
reg fuckwind 'a species of hawk.' See fuk, fuk-mast, and
fuk-sail in Sandahl (1958:38-41; their etymology is
discussed on p. 41). For 1602-1616 OED cites several
examples of wind-fucker as a term of opprobrium.
Fuck, printed fck, reemerges in Partridge (1961),
where it is said to be related to both L fu-tuere and G
ficken, and in PED. In the United States, AHD seems to
have been the first to break the ban. According to that
dictionary, the Germanic verb in question originally
meant 'strike, move quickly, penetrate,' with ME fucken
436
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(given without an asterisk) being akin to or perhaps bor-

rowed from MDu fokken 'strike, copulate with.'
When the taboo on fuck was lifted in England,
Burchfield felt such elation that he discussed this event
in the introduction to Volume 1 of the Supplement to
OED and two more times (Burchfield
[1973:33, delivered in 1971; 1972]). See a short sur-
vey of censors' efforts to ban the word in Lebrun
(1969-70) and McArthur (1996:54-58). The etymo-
logical note in the entry fuck in OED is disappointing. Its
author reconstructs the form *fuk and states that the
word's ulterior etymology is unknown and that
"synonymous G ficken cannot be shown to be related."
The etymology of fuck is obscure, but not hopelessly
so. Most likely, this verb was borrowed into English in
the second half of the 15th century from some Low
German dialect. *Fuck(en) is one of many similar verbs
known from Switzerland to Norway meaning 'move back
and forth.' Frig, fiddle, fidget, obsolete firk, and possibly
fetch belong to the same group, and so do numerous
other verbs in Frisian, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian
whose root begins with f and ends in a stop or an
affricate. Vowels vary in them. None of those verbs,
including fuck, has indubitable cognates outside
Germanic. Judging by the entries fuck in G. Williams,
HDAS, and Sheid-lower, this view of the history of the
English f-word is gaining ground (Liberman [1999a]).
437
Adz(e) Adz(e)

A Note on Allen Walker Read's Correspondence

about the F-Word
In 1971 Read sent letters to more than fifty people,
asking them what they thought or knew about the origin
of fuck. He was especially interested in the meaning of
John le Fucker's name (mentioned in Buck) and in the
reality of ME fucken (cited in AHD1, fuck). Part of his
correspondence, probably everything of importance, has
been made
public in Read (2002:277-300). No one offered a
definitive etymology of fuck, but Read found con-
firmation of his belief that Fucker in John le Fucker has
no relation to fuck and that ME fucken is a ghost word.
Several of his most distinguished correspondents cited
the Proto-Indo-European etymon of fuck (*peuk- or
peug-, or *pug-). A. J. Aitken mentioned fucksail (p. 282).
F. Cassidy remembered windfucker (though the form he
gives—fuckwind—is wrong) (p. 285). Geart Droege
mentioned E fridge and fickle, G ficken and vögeln
(allegedly, a polite form), along with Fr fojke and fokke,
which he considered to be the etymon of Du fokken
'breed or raise animals' (otherwise, initial v- could be ex-
pected) as belonging with the English verb. He offered an
Proto-Indo-European etymon of the fok-ken group but
called E fick (did he mean fuck?) "natively English" (p.
286). In Sherman Kuhn's opinion, fuck is "a borrowing

438
Adz(e) Adz(e)

from Dutch, not earlier than the sixteenth century" (p.

279).
GAWK (1785, 1837)
Gawk and its derivatives were recorded in English
late, and the date of their emergence in the language
can no longer be determined. However, most of them
must have been current as regional slang for several
centuries. In addition to gawk 'fool; simpleton; clumsy
person' and 'stare stupidly,' gawk 'left (hand)' exists in
dialects. According to the hypotheses mentioned and
partially defended in Skeat and OED, gawk 'left' is either
a contraction of its regional synonym gaulick ~ gallock
(then from 'left-handed' to 'clumsy') or gaw + k, the root
being a borrowing of the Scandinavian verb gä 'stare.'
Both hypotheses are probably wrong. The contraction
gaulick or gallock > gawk has no parallels among many
regional words with the suffix -ock, while the derivation
of gallock from F reg göle 'benumbed' contradicts the
usual way adjectives for 'left' acquire their meaning. The
second etymology also runs into difficulties. The suffix -k
is highly productive in the Scandinavian area, but gawk is
unknown in the Scandinavian languages. In English, -k
has never been productive, so that gawk as a native
formation with this suffix is unlikely. Most early
researchers traced gawk to gowk 'cuckoo,' a borrowing
of Scandinavian gauk(r).

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The Old Scandinavian diphthong au, pronounced as

[asu] or [öy], became ou in gowk ~ gouk. It may also
have been reflected as [au], which, in English, would
develop into a long vowel, as in the modern form gawk.
It is not unthinkable that gowk and gawk are doublets,
two variants of the same word. The cuckoo has been
called a fool and a simpleton for millennia. But gawk
may have arisen independently of gowk. It is one of
many words having the root g-k or g-g and designating
half-wits, clowns, and inept persons, such as E geck (from
Dutch) and geek (presumably from Low German), G
Gaukel 'trickery,' and MHG giege 'fool,' as well as sudden
movements and swerving from the course (for instance,
OI geiga), peeping (for instance, G gucken), foolish
laughter (E giggle and its analogues in German and
Dutch), and the like. All of them are onomatopoeic or
sound symbolic formations and can be called related only
in the loosest sense of this term. Gaukr and cuckoo are
also onomatopoeias. Regardless of whether gawk is
traceable to a bird name or is an independent creation of
the geck ~ geek type, when it emerged in English, it
began to interact with gowk; hence the multitude of
meanings in gawk and gawky, including gawky 'left.' F
gauche 'clumsy,' known since the 16th century, is not the
etymon of gawk. It may be a borrowing of some
Germanic word having the structure *gok and

440
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pronounced with an expressive geminate that later

yielded -ch(e).
The sections are devoted to 1) the meanings and
attestation of gawk and its derivatives, 2) the two
current hypotheses on the origin of gawk, 3) the
possibility that gawk continues the bird name gauk(r), 4)
other attempts to explain the origin of gawk, 5) German
and Dutch words resembling gawk, especially G Geck and
Gaukel, and 6) the conclusion that gawk may have been
a reflex of a bird name or an independent formation.
1. The relevant words, in the order in which they
appear in OED, are as follows: gawk 'awkward person;
fool; simpleton' (1837); gawk ~ gauk 'left,' competing in
many northern English dialects with gaulick-, gallick-,
gaulish- (hand, handed) (1703); gawk 'stare or gape
stupidly' (first recorded in American dialects; 1785);
gawkish 'awkward, clownish' (1876); gawky 'awkward
and stupid; ungainly,' said about people (1785) and
about things (1821); 'awkward, foolish person; lout;
simpleton (1724); gaw 'gape, stare; look intently' (1200;
the latest citation from a literary text dates back to 1566,
but it appears in Jamieson's 1879-82 dictionary); gowk
'cuckoo' (1325) and 'fool; half-witted person' (1605;
originally Scots and English northern regional); gowk
'stare stupidly' (rare; two citations in OED: 1513 and
1873), and gawked 'foolish' (1605; no citations
after 1790).
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Other dictionaries give the same or similar

definitions of gawk and gawky. However, some note
that gawky is applied to shy, tall, and overgrown
individuals (for instance, a gawky teenager). Wyld (UED)
uses this word in the definition of hobbledehoy. The verb
gaw is a borrowing of O-Scand gd 'heed, mark.' It
surfaced in Ormulum and survived only in the north. The
age of the other words is beyond recovery. They may
have been current in dialects indefinitely long before
making their way into print; in any case, it is unlikely that
gawk (in either meaning) or gawky was coined only
around 1703 or 1837.
2. The main etymological problem consists in
disentangling this knot of synonyms and (near)
homonyms. OED offers suggestions on the origin of gawk
and its kin. It notes that Johnson confused gawk 'fool'
and gowk 'cuckoo,' with later lexicographers following
him. By implication, this confusion should be avoided.
According to OED, gawk 'fool' was perhaps derived from
gawk 'left,' which is "of difficult etymology," possibly a
contraction of some form like gaulick. Gawk 'stare' is
said to be perhaps from the noun gawk or an iterative
form of the verb gaw, with the suffix -k, as in tal-k, wal-
k, lur-k (stalk and hark, the latter with its German cog-
nate horchen of the same meaning, may be added to this
list); cf FILCH. The second explanation (gawk < gaw + k)
recurs in all the "Oxford" dictionaries. Gawky, which can
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be a noun or an adjective, is supposed to derive from the

noun gawk or from the verb gawk. By contrast, the
history of gowk 'cuckoo' is clear: here we have a
borrowing of a Scandinavian bird name (OI gaukr, etc),
which has multiple cognates: OE ge ac (now extant only
as reg yeke), OFr gak, OS gdk ~ gak, MDu gooc, MLG gok,
and OHG gouh (ModG Gauch). Most likely, *gauk-is an
onomatopoeia like cuckoo, the word that replaced gaukr
and its congeners in several languages, including
Standard English.
The two aforementioned hypotheses on the origin of
gawk, even though they have been repeated in
numerous dictionaries (with or without perhaps), carry
little conviction. The verb gawk was hardly produced
from gaw by means of adding the suffix -k. This verbal
suffix, common in the Scandinavian languages (see
Johannesson
[1927:56-58], D. Hofmann [1961:112], and see the
list in DEO3-4: -ke), is rare in English. The origin of
lurk, stalk, and walk is obscure (their base is hard to
isolate). Talk is certainly from tal-, as in tale, but it
appeared in English texts only in the 13 th century and
may have been formed around that time on a
Scandinavian model. If gawk had emerged as gaw + k, it
could have been expected to have a history similar to
that of talk, rather than being a borrowing from
Scandinavian, because no similar verb has been recorded
443
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in any Scandinavian language and because among the

verbs formed from verbs that Johannesson lists none
occurs with the suffix -k following a vowel, if we
disregard OI pjdka 'exhaust' from pjd 'enslave' (p. 58).
Yet no native model has been found for gawk either.
The idea that gawk 'left' is a contraction of gaulick is
also implausible. The phonetic development gaulik ~
gallock > gawk would be regular (cf walk, talk, chalk)
only if the loss of the unstressed vowel could be taken
for granted. Syncope in those words would be somewhat
unusual, yet not improbable, but the presumed semantic
development from 'fool(ish)' to 'left (hand)' would be
without parallels. It is the word for the left hand (from
'bad; twisted, crooked; weak' or conversely, 'auspicious')
that is always derivative. One can imagine the path from
'perverse; inept' to 'left hand' but not in the opposite
direction. Therefore, it is better to separate gaulick ~
gallock from gawk despite the arguments that have
been advanced for their identity and even despite the
frequent occurrence of the spellings golk and goilk for
gowk 'fool' in Lowland Scotch (Flom [1900:44]).
Skeat initially did not doubt that gawk is a variant of
gowk (Skeat1 and Skeat [1892:463, sec 424]) but later
changed his mind (Skeat [18991902:278; reported in
1899: see Skeat [1901:114] and Skeat4). According to his
later view, gawk is "a mere contraction from the fuller
forms gallock, gaulick, and the like; where -ick, -ock, are
444
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mere suffixes. Hence the base is gall- or gaul-. This is

evidently allied to the F. dial. gole, 'benumbed,'
especially applied to the hands." If gole is the base of
gaulick or gallock, the "mere suffix" must have been
added to an adjectival root, but -ock forms diminutives
only from other nouns. Gawk is not a word like bullock
or hillock. Besides this, 'benumbed' would hardly have
yielded 'left.' Whatever the origin of gaulick, -ick in it
was mistaken for a suffix, because otherwise the form
gaulish, also attested in North Country dialects, would
not have arisen. However, this is a secondary
development, and we need not be deceived by folk
etymology.
3. The question that will of necessity remain
debatable is whether gawk and gowk should be kept
apart. At present, neither gowk nor gawk has the
reconstructed vowel of OI gaukr. In the East
Scandinavian languages, *au was contracted: cf Sw gbk
and Dan g0g 'cuckoo.' In the Norwegian Bok-mál, au has
the approximate value of [aeu]; in Modern Icelandic, of
[oy]. Both pronunciations (especially the one with an b-
like nucleus) are old (for Icelandic see especially
BoBvarsson [1951:163] and H. Benediktsson [1959:296]).
Some details in the adoption of *au in Middle English
remain unexplained. Sievers (1884:197) noted that even
in Old English Scand ou was occasionally represented by
the vowel o, and Stratmann
445
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1883:441-2) cited several Middle English forms of

the same type (ME go k among them). Especially
revealing are J. Zupitza's observations (1884). Skeat
(1892:93 and 463) says that Scand au "was heard" as
long o in stoop 'beaker' and loose. Grammars give
several more examples and account for this
correspondence by the absence of ou in Middle English
except in word final position. The general assumption
seems to be that this diphthong had the realization close
to that in ModE cow and town. J. Zupitza (p. 155)
suggested that at the time when words like ME loos
(from lauss) appeared in English, it had three realizations
in the speech of Scandinavian settlers: au, ou, and o .
This is a self-serving conjecture.
Although E /ou/, as in ModE no and woke, does not
precede the Great Vowel Shift, it is unclear why English-
speakers of the middle period could not replace the
biphonemic Scandinavian diphthong by some
combination of vowels. The phonetic history of trust and
fluster, both from Scandinavian (Skeat [1892:463]), is
obscure and provides no help in investigating the
development
of au in Middle English. See Bjorkman (1900:69),
Luick (1964:388, sec 384.2), Jordan3 (1968:sec 130.3),
and Berndt (1960:76) for a brief discussion of this matter.
The northern English form gowk that Wall (1898:104)
and Luick mention (gauk ~ gowk) must have been
446
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borrowed either from Danish before the contraction of

[au] or from Norwegian. Whichever language served as
its source, [ou] is an imperfect rendering of a
Scandinavian diphthong. The same holds for the original
vowel of gawk if the word is of Scandinavian extraction,
but this is precisely what we do not know. Despite the
admonition of OED, the idea that gawk and gowk are
variants of the same etymon (doublets) is not totally
groundless.
If gowk and gawk go back to Scand gauk-, their later
history can be envisioned in the following way. The
Germanic word for 'cuckoo' (for instance, OHG gouh) has
meant 'fool' for centuries. The folklore of the cuckoo is
incredibly rich: a harbinger of spring, a bird prophesying
people's age, the incarnation of the devil, a coward
unable to brood and sustain its young, the slyest of all
living creatures, and the stupidest of them all, to
mention a few characteristics recorded in innumerable
legends, songs, and proverbs. The cuckoo's name has
been applied to every blameworthy creature and thing,
from prostitutes to bad beer (Seelmann
[1932-33:746-47]; Brand [1849:197-202: "Of the
Word Cuckold"]).
The development may have been from 'someone
doing a reprehensible, devilish thing' to 'outcast,'
'someone crazy; idiot; half-wit,' 'fool,' and

447
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'simpleton.' (When cuckoo supplanted the reflexes of

OE geac, it inherited some of the old word's
connotations, especially 'crazy.') Hence gawk (v) 'look
stupidly,' as a sign of retardation ("To gawk is to 'stare
about' like an awkward greenhorn. A gawk is properly a
cuckoo and comes from the Old Norse." Greenough and
Kittredge [1901:368]), and gawky 'stupid; clumsy,
ungainly, hobbledehoyish; inept; left (hand).' The noun
gawky looks as though it were an ironic diminutive of
the hubby type. But this is not the only possible
reconstruction. Cf Sec 6.
4. The hypotheses on the origin of gawk and gawky,
apart from those mentioned in OED, are not many. The
first to suggest that gawk is 'cuckoo' was Skinner, who
cited G Geck 'fop, dandy' (pejorative) as its etymon and
believed both to be onomatopoeic. Minsheu and N.
Bailey do not list gawk. Junius, Johnson, Richardson,
Mueller, Skeat1, KL, and all the editions of Webster's
dictionary through 1890 follow Skinner, though Geck as
the etymon or a cognate of gawk is not included in their
etymologies. AEW (gaukr) also mentions gawk.
W1 and W2, despite some hedging, copy from Skeat
and use gawk 'left hand' as their starting point. W3
derives the verb gawk from gaw- (which is said to have
perhaps been influenced by E reg gawk 'left hand') and
looks on gawk 'left-handed' as a possible source of gawk
'ungainly, clumsy, stupid fellow.' Despite Ogilvie's
448
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dependence on Webster's etymologies, he had two new

suggestions (ID 1850; not repeated in ID 1882). In the
entry gawky, he referred to F gauche 'left, awkward;
warped, crooked' as a possible parallel and added that F
gauchir 'shrink back or turn aside, use shifts, double,
dodge' (those are the glosses in the dictionary) well
express the actions of a jester or buffoon. Ogilvie also
mentioned E awk as a form reminiscent of gawk. Awk,
now associated only with the root of awkward, meant
'directed the other way or in the wrong direction, back-
handed, from the left hand; untoward; froward [sic];
perverse, in nature or disposition; untoward to deal,
awkward to use, clumsy' and is almost certainly of
Scandinavian origin. It surfaced in texts in 1440 and
seems to have died out by the end of the 17th century (no
citations after 1674; the dates and definitions are
from OED).
The similarity between gawk and awk is indeed
striking, and the meaning 'ungainly, clumsy,' so
prominent in gawky, may have arisen under the
influence of awk, assuming that gawk was old enough to
get partly confused with awk. Ogilvie's idea has been
lost in later scholarship, except that E. Edwards (1881)
wrote: "Gawky... from awk, the left hand [sic], awkward,
with the prefix g," and FW (1947) declared gawk 'left-
handed' to be a blend of F gauche and ME awk 'back-
handed.' This etymology is all the more surprising
449
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because in the treatment of gawk(y) the previous and

later editions of FW do not deviate from OED. As noted,
some interaction between the two words is not unthink-
able, but 'clumsy' is probably too narrow a base for the
multitude of meanings present in gawk and gawky. OED
finds a connection between gauche and gawk
improbable on phonetic grounds. (Skeat concurs with
OED.) However, as will be shown in Sec 6, the question
merits further investigation.
In Wedgwood2-4, F gauche and gauchir are men-
tioned at gawk but, it seems, only as a semantic parallel
(from 'warped' to 'left'), for next to gauche, unrelated
and irrelevant OI skjdlgr 'wry, oblique; squinted' is given.
Wood (1899a:345-46/19) referred to gawk in his
discussion of G gucken 'look; peep, peek.' "This word
[gucken]," he says, "implies either stealth or foolish
curiosity." Spitzer (1925:156) did not touch on gawk but
suggested that gucken was a doublet of the verb kucken
'cuckoo.' In EW1, only gawk (v), allegedly from gaw (OI
gd), is given; the entry was removed from the second
edition, but in EW3 gawk 'cuckoo' [sic] and 'fool' are
reinstated and traced to OD [sic] gaukr. Weekley (1921;
1924) makes do with the statement that the meanings of
gawk "correspond with" gauche and is of the opinion
that gallock may be the etymon of both gawk and
gauche. Partridge (1958) cites gawk 'left-handed' and its

450
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regional synonym cack- ~ keck-handed (which has

nothing to do with gawk: see KITTY-CORNER).
Some etymologies appear as though from nowhere.
Such is the assertion in FW (1947) that gawk is a blend of
gauche and awk (see above). Equally unexpected is the
statement in RHD and ACD, affiliated with it, that gawk
'fool' and 'stare stupidly' apparently represent an Old
English word meaning 'fool,' from gagol 'foolish' + -oc (-
ock), used attributively in gawk hand ~ gallock hand 'left
hand.' OE ga(gol), or ga l 'lust, luxury, wantonness, folly,
levity; merry, light, wanton; proud, wicked' has cognates
in several Germanic languages (G geil, etc) and is related
to neither OI gd nor E gawk; cf the discussion of the
suffix -ock, above. All the editions of WNWD say that
gawk, from OI gaukr 'cuckoo,' is akin to G Gauch, with
the etymological crux created by forms gawk-hand,
gallock-hand 'left hand' being probably illusory (cf forms
golk, goilk of gawk). This statement is hard to interpret.
Other than that, polemic does not go beyond
cautious guesses and doubts as to their validity. For
example, Mutschmann (1909:61, sec 168) derived Scots
ga ke 'gawky, silly' from Old English or Scand *gakk and
compared it with G Geck, but Bjorkman (1911:451) was
not convinced. Hewett (1884:244) advised Kluge to list
gawk among the cognates of G Gauch 'cuckoo,' and K.
Malone (1956:349) gave similar advice to Alexander
Johan-nesson (though without certainty) in connection
451
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with gokr. Jamieson objected to the identification of

even gowk ~ gouk 'fool, simpleton' with the bird name.
According to him, the congeners of gowk are G Geck and
Icel gikkr 'fop; arrogant or intractable man' (he
misspelled the Icelandic form and probably did not
realize that gikkr is a borrowing from Middle Low
German; so AMB). See the critical remarks on that score
by Montgomerie-Fleming (1899:56), who pointed to the
never-ending confusion of the two words: for instance,
an English commentator of Burns misunderstood gawky
'foolish' as 'cuckooing.'
Thus, the choices open to a contemporary researcher
who would like to pursue the origin of gawk and gawky
are today nearly the same as at the end of the 19 th
century. The lines were drawn in OED and Skeat. Ties
between those English words and gowk 'cuckoo' / gawk
'left-handed' have been accepted by some and denied by
others.
5. Gawk is less isolated than it seems, and its
environment, however uncertain, may throw a sidelight
on its origin. Skinner was the first to compare gawk and
G Geck, which leads to E geck and several other Dutch
and English words. Skeat (1885-87:300-01 = 1901:115,
first presented in 1885: see anonymous a, b) showed
that E geck was borrowed from Dutch. In the last edition
of his dictionary, he made a special point of the
distinction between geck and three other words: gowk,
452
Adz(e) Adz(e)

gawky, and OE geac. However, CD, which usually follows

Skeat, shows greater reserve and only says that the
connection between geck and gowk is doubtful.
E geck 'fool, simpleton, dupe' (1515) coexists with
geck 'gesture of derision, expression of scorn or
contempt' (Scots and northern regional, 1568; no
citations after 1597, except in the phrases get a geck 'be
deceived' and give the geck 'deceive,' but here, too, the
only post-17th-century example is from Ja-mieson), and
the verb geck 'scoff' (1583; the same provenance). OED
cites Du gek and LG geck (sb) and gecken ~ gekken,
related to G gecken 'croak.' The group turns out to be
onomatopoeic, a fact made especially clear by the
synonyms of gecken: gecken, gacken, gicken, geckzen,
kecken, and gdcken ~ kacken (with long vowels: DW).
Geck was originally a Low Saxon word. In 1385 geck
turns up as the name of a court jester. The word has
survived: Gecken ~ Jecken are the modern carnival 'fools'
in the Lower Rhenish area. In its spread south, MHG geck
encountered its synonyms gagg, gaggel, gagger, gacks,
and the like (KS, Geck; gacks must be *gagg-s, with the
addition of the ending -s, on which see Bergerson
[2004]). At present, there is a near consensus that in
geck and other such words ge- and ga- render the
inarticulate speech of the mentally retarded.
Knobloch seems to be only one to deny the
onomatopoeic origin of Geck (Knobloch [1972:989990
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Adz(e) Adz(e)

and 1995:148]; the latter is part of a list, with a

brief reference to the earlier work), for he connected
the rise and spread of this word with the cult of St. Jacob
(G Jakob[us]). In so doing, he
joined Wackernagel (1860:343-345 = 1874b:163-64),
whose suggestions were not so far-reaching, how-
ever. Knobloch traced the names of many objects,
including some of those called jack in English, to that cult
and explained how 'fool' merged with 'blockhead' and
simply 'wooden object.' His etymology runs into the
same difficulty as the one that derives gawk from a bird
name: each is separately convincing, but they ignore the
larger picture.
W. Barnes (1862:71) derived hundreds of words from
imaginary roots, and Geck ended up among the
descendants of g*ng. This idea was of no value even
when it was put forward, but his statement is not
entirely devoid of interest in light of Knobloch's findings:
"I hardly think that Jack, which is an element of many
English words, is a form of the name John. It seems to
carry some meaning of to go, to stir, or to act as a
machine, or ineundi, as applied to the male of some
animals." Thomson also wrote at geck: "See gawk and
jack." He must have meant his jack 2 'mechanical instru-
ment,' which he derived from go, but did not elaborate.
Thus we are advised not to confuse gawk with gowk
(OED), geck with gawk, geck with gowk (Skeat), and
454
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Geck with various onomatopoeic words (Knobloch). If

Knobloch is right, geck ~ jeck should be kept apart from
gagg, gacks, and so forth, but this is an undesirable
approach to the entire group.
Several proposals concerning the origin of Geck turn
up in older literature. In Schwenck's opinion, Geck is
allied to G Gaukel 'trickery' (< MHG goukel ~ gougel),
gaukeln 'flit, flutter,' historically 'show tricks,' Gaukler
'medieval itinerant entertainer, juggler,' and geigen
'move back and forth' (now only regional; the meaning in
the standard language is 'play the violin'). He
reconstructed the initial meaning of the root as
'fluttering movement.' Kaltschmidt also listed most
words, including MHG giege 'fool,' that were later
compared with Geck and added gähe 'quick' (Standard
German jäh ~ jähe 'sudden'), about whose origin nothing
is known to this day. Lexer compared MHG gek and
gougel ~ goukel, referred to Wackernagel's derivation of
gougel from L cauculus 'magician's vessel (glass)', and
concluded that two words had merged in the history of
German: L cauculator 'magician' and some nomen
agentis from giugan ~ giu-kan 'make a quick movement,'
as in G jucken 'itch'
(v).
Ten Doornkaat Koolman suggested that LG gek 'fool,
simpleton' and gek 'revolving pole' (a sailors' term) are
two meanings of the same word united by the idea of
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Adz(e) Adz(e)

instability and cited MHG giege 'fool' and several Low

German cognates of Gaukel and gaukeln as belonging
with gek. He thought that both were like weathervanes.
A similar idea occurred to Zabel (1922:11-12), who
showed that 'mad' is often tantamount to 'turned;
twisted.' According to Uhlenbeck (1901:297-98/22), Geck
is related to OI geiga 'take a wrong direction,' OE
(for)gxgan 'transgress; trespass; pass by, omit,' and Go -
geigan in *gageigan 'desire.' (Feist doubted that the
Gothic verb was akin to geiga, but Lehmann [Feist4]
found their kinship probable.) Uhlenbeck's etymology is
neither better nor worse than those of his predecessors.
At gaukeln, Mitzka (KM) mentions Austrian gigerl
'fop, dandy, masher, dude' (which Nutt [1900] compared
with E gawk). He traces Gigerl to MHG giege 'fool,'
allegedly related to Du guig 'grimace' (in de guig
aanstecken 'poke fun' and other similar obsolete
expressions), but denies it at Gigerl (see also KS: no
connection). According to EWNT, guig is indeed allied to
Du gochelen 'juggle, conjure' (a cognate of G gaukeln)
and giecheln 'giggle.' E giggle, Du giecheln, G kiechern,
Russ khikhikat' (stress on the second syllable) are among
the most obvious onomatopoeias, like, for example,
gecko, a Malay lizard, named so for its cry.
Faulmann derived all the words from strong verbs,
sometimes attested, sometimes imaginary, but, as
happens to most authors of erratic conceptions, he
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Adz(e) Adz(e)

occasionally had rational ideas. He, too, thought that

Geck and E giggle are related, while MHG gehen 'say,
speak' (pronounced and sometimes spelled jehan),
which he treated as their source, although not the
etymon of Geck, may not be too distant from it, for it is
usually compared with L jocus 'joke,' their reconstructed
onomatopoeic root being *jek- 'chat' (see Beichte
'confession,' from OHG bijicht, and Urgicht 'statement,
declaration, confession' in German etymological
dictionaries). Long before Indo-European scholars
isolated the root of L jocus, E joke as a cognate of G
Gauch and Geck occurred to Meidinger (1836:167).
Kluge (EWDS1-7) refused to see a connection between
Geck, gaukeln, and MHG giege. In EWDS4-6, he suggested
combining G Geck and 'revolving pole' under one
etymon. He did not refer to Doornmaat Koolman, whose
dictionary he must have known well. Götze (EWDS11,
Geck) copied Uhlenbeck's etymology (OI geiga, etc).
When
Mitzka took over EWDS (beginning with the 17th
edition), none of those words remained in the entry
Geck, and Geck was treated as an onomatopoeia without
ascertainable cognates. Both J. de Vries
(NEW) and Seebold (KS) accepted Mitzka's treat-
ment.
For completeness' sake a few more etymologies of
Geck should be mentioned. Helvigius derived Geck from
457
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Gk eiKCXicoj 'vain, useless, futile; reckless,

featherbrained' and Hebr qpn (chakk) or pin (chok)
'portray, carve,' and Wachter identified Geck with Gauch
'cuckoo.' He included three entries: Gauch 'cuckoo,'
Gauch 'fool,' and Gauch 'juggler.' For the last of them he
suggested the Welsh etymon coey 'empty, vain, good for
nothing, insipid, foolish;' (cf COCKNEY). Wedgwood1
reinvented Wachter's etymology; however, he removed
it from the later editions. Jamieson misquoted Wachter
but understood his idea correctly and found it
unacceptable. Nares gave both occurrences of geck in
Shakespeare (in Twelfth Night and Cymbeline) and
remarked: "Capel says from ghezzo, Italian; but it is
rather Teutonic, as Dr. Jamieson suggests." Capel must
be a misspelling of E.W. Capell's name. This derivation
could not be found in any of Capell's major works. In any
case, ghezzo 'black' goes back to Gyptius, the aphetic
form of Agyptius 'Etyptian.' The development was from
'Africa' to 'black-colored' and 'fool' (cf E blackamoor).
Finally, there is E geek 'socially eccentric person' and
'someone engrossed in a single subject' (in combinations
like computer geek). This meaning had such little
currency even in the late sixties of
the 20th century that AHD1, published in 1969, does
not mention it. For a long time only geek 'performer
whose act consists of biting the head off a live chicken or
snake' was known. "Cf geek n[oun]. A freak, usually a
458
Adz(e) Adz(e)

fake, who is one of the attractions in a pit-show. The

word is reputed to have originated with a man named
Wagner of Charleston, WV, whose hideous snake-eating
act made him famous. Old timers remember his
ballyhoo, part of which ran: 'Come and see Esau / Sittin'
on a see-saw / Eatin' 'em raw'" (Maurer 1981:30).
The dependence of geek on LG Geck is undeniable
despite the unexplained difference in vowels. OED (geck,
sb) quotes an entry from an 1876 glossary of Whitby
words (in the former North Riding of Yorkshire): "Gawk,
Geek, Gowk or Gowky a fool; a person uncultivated; a
dupe." The dictionaries that do not say "origin
unknown" suggest that E geek is perhaps or probably a
variant of LG Geck. The quotation from the Whitby
glossary does not confirm this derivation, but it shows
that geck, geek, gawk, and gawky were used
interchangeably long
ago.
6. Thus we have Gmc *gauk- 'cuckoo' (G Gauch, E reg
gowk, from Scandinavian, as well as the native form
yeke) and from time immemorial 'simpleton'; G Geck and
Du gek 'fool, jester,' both current for centuries (whence
E geck); their southern German regional synonyms with
the root gagg-; G Geck ~ Du gek 'revolving pole,' G
Gaukel 'trickery,' also known since the Middle Ages;
MHG giege 'fool,' Du guig 'grimace,' along with E gawk
and geek, both recorded late. Several verbs may also be
459
Adz(e) Adz(e)

considered, though their affiliation with the previous

loose group is doubtful: OI geiga 'take a wrong direction'
(and its cognates in Old English and perhaps Gothic),
Gmc *jukjan 'itch,' MHG gehen 'speak' (< *'wag one's
tongue'?), E giggle with its counterparts in German and
Dutch, and perhaps even G gucken 'look' ~ kucken. The
German adverb gähe ~ jähe may belong here too. Nor
should gauche, though a French word, be disregarded.
All those words are probably onomatopoeic or sound
symbolic; the two types tend to merge. For example, G
Geige 'violin' is usually traced to geigan 'take a wrong
direction,' but Seebold (KS) cites MHG gigen and gieksen
and explains Geige as a humorous name of an
instrument making shrill music. If the history of fiddle
provides a good parallel (see it at FUCK), the old
hypothesis appears more persuasive, but the existence
of gieksen, etc is a fact. See what is said about gecken
and its synonyms, above. According to Skeat (1885-
87:311), Du gek "is formed on a basis *GEK- that should
be distinguished form GAUK-." In words like Geck and
Gauch, clearly differentiated bases exist mainly on
paper. While dealing with such formations, one is usually
lost among countless pseudocognates; cf the forms
discussed at FUCK and MOOCH. There is no need to
derive gawk from Geck or Geck from giege. These words
are like mushrooms growing on the same stump: they
are members of one rootless family.
460
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Onomatopoeic and expressive words do not obey

sound laws. They travel easily across language borders,
their age is usually indeterminable, and it is often hard to
decide which of them are native and which are
borrowed. Wackernagel and Lexer believed that G
Gaukler goes back to L caucu-lator. (Du Cange cites
cauculatores glossed as cauc-learii, coclearii, caucularii.
He does not give cauculus with the meaning ascribed to
it by Wackernagel.) Cauclearii or coclearii were conjurers
versed in weather magic. The Latin and the German
word are almost homonyms, and so are OHG gouggaldri
~ MHG goukaldri and L iocularl, another possible etymon
of the German noun (see Mordek and Glatthaar
[1993:39, note 29], where some references to the
scholarly literature are given). Cf also the much-
discussed history of E jig in its relation to OF giguer
'gambol, sport.' If, however, *jek-, *jeg-, *gek-, *gak-,
*gag-, *gok, and so forth were the 'bases' on which
slang words designating movement back and forth,
sudden (quick) movement, and all kinds of
prestidigitation were formed in Germanic and Romance,
borrowing need not be posited every time such
similarities turn up. Words like gawk, geck, and geek
may emerge at any time, stay in the language for
millennia, drop out, and be coined again. At the end of
the 19th century, gaga 'mad, crazy' appeared in French

461
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and soon gained popularity in the English-speaking

world.
Perhaps F gauche had a history similar to that of
gawk and the rest. Gauche is believed to be a borrowing
and reflect the Germanic root *walk- (as in E walk). This
etymology is hardly right. Weekley (1921, gawk)
suggested that gauche is traceable to E gaulick 'left
(hand)'; his hypothesis is even less plausible. If we
assume that an old European slang word *gawk was
current in the 15th century (no earlier attestations of F
gauche are known) and was borrowed by French with an
emphatic pronunciation *gokk, it would develop like
*vacca that yielded F vache 'cow.' Gauche would remain
a Germanic word but of a humbler origin than has been
supposed. However, the ground on which we stand here
is so boggy that dogmatic exercises for students like:
"Connect etymologically gawky, gauche, and left-
handed" (so Hixson and Colodny 1939:117/11) should be
avoided. Also to be avoided are equally misleading
statements that "[g]awky is the same word as the
French gauche, and means left-handed, and therefore
awkward"
(Bett [1936:193]).
We have to return to the question whether E gawk
may owe its origin to a bird name. Bird names not
infrequently acquire the meaning 'fool' in various
languages (cf E goose, booby, and gull among others), so
462
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that the path reconstructed tentatively in sec 3 is not

improbable. Since such names are often onomatopoeic,
it is no wonder that they can also be used to imitate
inarticulate speech and refer to mental retardation.
Booby is a typical example; gowk is another. The history
of gawk and its derivatives could have begun with
*gauk-. However, it is possible that gawk was coined
side by side with gowk. These would have been two
variants of the same process. Gaga 'crazy' need not have
been derived directly from a verb for gaggling, but an
association between them exists regardless of the details
of the process. Be that as it may, once gawk and gowk
appeared in English, they began to interact and produce
new words, one of them probably being gawk 'left
hand.' Little is gained by the fear of avoiding the
confusion between gawk, gowk, and geck. Language
"confused" them long ago.
The chances that gawk 'left hand' is a contraction of
gallok or gaulick are low. In Wood's list of so-called k-
formations (1913; ModE words: pp. 1452), not only
gallack and gallock (31/182) but also ballack ~ ballock
'left-handed, clumsy' (14/108) is given, so that it is
unclear where to look for the original form. Wood lists a
sizable number of nouns like hullack ~ hullock 'lazy,
worthless person' (23/214), with -ack ~ -ock after l; none
of them has a contracted variant. This suffix occurs with
great regularity in words meaning 'trash; slovenly work,'
463
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'mistreat'; 'gad about in an untidy way' (cf flammock and

flummox 20/173, 174; the latter is known in modern
slang with the meaning 'perplex'), 'fool; slattern; person
with a dainty or fastidious appetite or manner,' and so
forth. The presence of such a transparent suffix would
probably have hindered contraction. Wood does not
suggest any origin of gallock. It is unlikely that gallok
was borrowed from regional French. This word should
stay in etymological limbo, at least for the time being.
GIRL (1290)
Attempts to trace girl to an Old English, Old
Germanic, or Proto-Indo-European etymon have not
yielded convincing results. Girl was probably borrowed
into Middle English from Low German approximately
when it surfaced in texts. The closest Low German form is
G6r(l) 'girl.' In girl, l is a diminutive suffix, and gir-, along
with gor(r)- and gur(r)-, occurs in many Germanic words
that designated children,
(young) animals, and all kinds of creatures
considered worthless.
The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest attestation
of girl, 2) words deriving (or believed to derive) from the
gor(r)-~ gur(r)- root, 3) the suggested Old English and
Proto-Indo-European etymons of girl, 4) the most recent
suggestions about girl, and 5) suggestions about the
origin of girl in old dictionaries.

464
Adz(e) Adz(e)

1. In Middle English, girle, gerle, and gurle (u

had the phonetic value of [y]) denoted a young
person of either sex and was more often used in
the plural ('children'), a situation also known from
the history of wench. A certain ambiguity in the
meaning of girl seems to have continued into the
present. In some British dialects, a common word
for 'girl' is child ("Is it a boy or a child?"). The first
literary example of this usage occurs in Shake-
speare. Considering the earliest attested meaning
of girl, the Old English gloss gyrlgyden to L uesta,
that is, Vesta, cannot have meant 'virgin goddess'
(so Sweet [1897] and Holthausen [1923:345/204];
corrected in AeEW, at gierl-gyden). Anonymous
(1897:611) called into question this interpretation in
a review of Sweet's dictionary. According to
Meritt (1959:69), "It seems most likely that the
glossator associated the lemma with vestis, as did
Isidore, Etymologies 8, 11, 61, and that the first part
of the gloss is equivalent to gyrela, 'garment'; note
that at note 679 stola is glossed gyrlan" (the same in
Schlutter [1908a:62-64]; it is less clear whether Ek-
wall [1903:27, note 1] approved of Sweet's idea).
W1 follows Sweet, and so do Hirt (1927:145, note 1),
ACD (1947 and later editions), FW, and RHD 2.
WNWD1 refers to OE *gyrelle and gyrela "recorded as
gyrl." The words "recorded as gyrl" no longer appear in
465
Adz(e) Adz(e)

WNWD2-3, but OE *gyrele does. The etymologies

proposed for girl vary according to whether the earliest
attested Middle English forms are said to have had a lost
antecedent in need of reconstruction or to have sprung
up (or been borrowed) approximately when they were
first recorded.
2. Most likely -l, in girl is a diminutive suffix.
The root of numerous regional words designating
animals, people considered worthless, and chil-
dren is gur(r)- or gor(r)-. Some occur in Wedg-
wood; many more turn up in Rietz, NEO, EDD,
and OED. Bjorkman (1912:260-61) gives a list
compiled from various sources. It is partly repro-
duced below: 1) English regional: gorr 'seagull; red
grouse; clownish fellow,' gorr 'unfledged bird,'
gurr 'fish shanny; strong, thickset person; rough,
knotty stick or tree.' Gorrel 'young pig; fat-
paunched person' was borrowed from French, but
Anglo-French animal names like gore, gorre, and
gourre 'pig, sow' are possibly of Germanic origin.
Nothing is known about the history of E reg gorlins
'testicles of a ram.' Gorr 'unfledged bird' may not belong
here at all, for it has a variant gorb. The same holds for
gorlin 'unfledged bird, nestling; very young person,' a
variant of gorblin. Nicklin (1904) cited E grilse 'young
salmon,' whose first recorded use is dated 1413.
Jamieson (1879-82) gives grilse and girlss, the latter
466
Adz(e) Adz(e)

being perhaps a misprint for girlse, and EDD adds girling

and gerling, but it is doubtful whether grilse has the
same root as gorr ~ gurr (see OED). 2) Northern Frisian:
gör 'girl.' 3) Dutch regional: gorre 'horse, mare, es-
pecially old jade.' 4) German: MHG gurre 'old jade, bad
horse' (so still in some modern dialects), MLG gorre ~
gurre 'mare,' SwiG gurre 'depreciatory term for a girl.'
Duden 8 (p 373) gives SwiG Gör ~ Göre among synonyms
for Kind 'child.' 5) Norwegian regional: gurre 'lamb,'
gorre 'wether; little boy; lazy person; glutton.' 6) Swedish
regional: gorre, gurre 'boy.' WNWD1-2 suggests
tentatively that OE gyr(r) 'pine tree' is a cognate of girl,
but Holthausen (1918a:254/30; AeEW) explained gyr(r)
as meaning 'prickly' (E gorse contains the same root).
In
Holthausen (1918a:254), Old English gyr and Modern
English girl follow one another (nos 30 and 31). The
etymological editor for the first edition of WNWD may
have misread the two paragraphs as belonging together.
It is a commonplace of Germanic dialectology that
some of the words listed above are akin to girl. See
Outzen (1837 [completed before 1826], gör), Wedgwood
(who was the first to note several cognates of girl in
German), Mätzner (1860:241; English and Low German),
W. Barnes (1862:91; his entry is confusing: "gör Fr. a girl,
a grower," but girl is called a diminutive of gör), Koch
(1882 [originally published in 1863]:363), Webster (be-
467
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ginning with 1864; especially in 1890 and later), Rietz (at

gärrä, he gives Fr gör 'girl,' SwiG Gorsch 'child,' and Br
gour 'man' in addition to the Scandinavian forms), MW
(gör), Skeat (Gürre, "depreciatory term for a girl"; the
same in Skeat [1887 = 1892:487, 489]: girl is said to be a
borrowing from Low German), SwiG Gürrli 'mare' and
Gurreli
'whore, etc' (SI II:409-10), WHirt (Göre) and Hirt
(1921:21, 208), Holthausen (1900:366; he presents
the relatedness of girl to MHG gurre 'old jade' as a
new idea), EWDS (Kluge first mentioned girl at Gör in the
seventh edition; since G Gör emerged in print only in
1593, he had doubts about its being a cognate of girl, yet
he kept the reference in the later three editions; Götze
removed it, but Mitzka [KM] restored it, and Seebold
[KS] does not exclude the possibility that Gör(e) is
related to girl; he offers no conjectures on the origin of
MHG gurre: see Gaul), Björkman (1912:278), BZ, and CD.
OED and ODEE mention the Low German form, but both
are noncommittal on the etymology of girl. See Söhns
(1888:7), Schumann (1904), and Sprenger (1905) for
more information on LG Göre; Sprenger mentions E
girl. Later dictionaries that say anything at all about the
origin of girl (many of them only cite the Middle English
word and call its origin unknown) usually mention LG
Gör(e) and invite us to "compare" it with girl.

468
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Among other gor(r)- ~ gur(r)- words, the name of the

fictional Scandinavian sea king Gorr is worthy of note.
Gorr appears in an Old Icelandic poem in immediate
proximity with Norr, and if it acquired o, only to
accommodate the rhyme, the original form *Gorr may
have meant 'urchin' and be identical with N reg gorre.
(Sigfüsson 193435:130; AEW does not find his etymology
of Gorr improbable, but ABM rejects it, and VEW does
not mention it.) Then there are Du reg garldegooi 'trash,
small fry,' garlgoed 'offal, trash,' garlement 'shivers,
small fragments,' gorrelen 'pulverize, crash,' and garl
'piece' (in aan garlen gooien 'break to pieces'); the
adjectives gierelgooiig 'thin' (said about soup) and
gierlegoi 'thin' (said about coffee), gorrel 'thin' (said
about cereal, porridge). Gorlegooi 'bad food' occurs in
Middle Dutch (Van Lessen [1934]). Those words are
apparently related to Du goor 'slimy, dingy.' See Du
goor, OE gor 'dung,' OI gor, gjor 'dregs, sediment,' and OI
gor 'half-digested food' in etymological dictionaries, WP
I:685, and
IEW, 494; Rooth (1962:62-65) also contains some
relevant material.
If we stay with the most obvious cognates, we are
left with a small nucleus of Swiss German and
Scandinavian words resembling gur-, the root of ME
gurle, in form and meaning and beginning with gor(r)- or
gur(r)-. They designate young children and animals,
469
Adz(e) Adz(e)

people held in contempt, and all kinds of trash. (Cf the

history of COB, CUB, and
GAWK.)
Ties between gor(r)- ~ gur(r)- and gaur-, as in OI
gaurr 'rough, uneducated man,' are more problematic.
Torp (NEO) cites N reg gaura 'grow too fast, become
lanky.' In Modern Icelandic, gaur means 'pole, post;
rotten floating log; long thick bolt; thick (useless) needle;
reproof, reproach; tall good-for-nothing; hayseed.' The
only certain cognate of gaur is Far geyrur 'stalk of a large
seaweed' (ABM). Johannesson (1942:221 and IsEW 360,
389) considered OI gaurr and Go gaurs 'sad, mournful' to
be related (CV had the same suggestion), but doubted
whether OI gaurr and ModI gaur could be called
cognates. AEW posits the not uncommon development
from 'pole, peg' to 'fellow, man,' but the kernel of most
meanings of gaurr ~ gaur seems to be 'worthless
(object).' The existence of ME gaure(n), gawren, gowren,
and gare 'gape, stare; shout' (v) complicates the
question. They are apparently from Scandinavian,
though related to OE gorian ~ gorettan 'gaze, stare
about.' That verb may be a cognate of N reg gaura 'pants
with an opening behind worn by small children' and
ModI gaur 'incomplete opening' (only in standa upp d
gaur 'ajar,' first recorded in the 19th century: ABM), for
both gaping and shouting imply a mouth wide open.

470
Adz(e) Adz(e)

E reg gowry 'dull, stupid-looking' (Liden [1937:]) goes

back to ME gaure(n), which allowed Liden to suggest
that OI gaurr originally meant
'gaper' (discussed in Bj6rkman [1900:188-89]).
Holthausen (1901:379-80) supported Liden's idea
and gave up his previous etymology (girl from 'mare'), to
which Braune also objected (see below). He now
explained E girl and OI gaurr as representing different
grades of ablaut of the same root. In Holthausen
(1903b:38), girl appears as a cognate of garish, but the
relatedness of gaur- and garish needs proof. If OI gaurr
'rough, uneducated man' is from 'gaper,' it cannot have
anything to do with ModI gaur. Nor are then the gorr- ~
gurr- words related to gaur: however worthless, old
jades, and so on, are not 'gapers.' But if, as seems likely,
OI gaurr and ModI gaur are traceable to the same
etymon, they should be separated from ME gauren,
ModI gaur 'opening,' and N reg gaura (sb).
One can imagine a word with the meanings
'unwieldy, worthless object; thick needle, long thick bolt'
applied to an able-bodied loafer and a yokel. Gaurr must
have been a partial synonym, rather than a cognate, of
gorre. ABM finds a genetic connection between gaurr
and gorre improbable. The connection between OI gaurr
'rough, uneducated man' and Go gaurs 'sad' is even less
probable. We can expect no clarity here, but it is
advisable to keep apart girl and the g-r words with au in
471
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the root. WNWD1 says that E reg girls 'primrose

blossoms' and girlopp 'lout' (EDD) "substantiate
strongly" OE gyrl- 'girl,' but girls appears to be a
metaphor ('fresh and sweet'), while girlopp (known only
in Devon) probably has the same root as the gor(r)- ~
gur(r)- words. That phrase and reference to girlopp
disappeared from WNWD2, though both E reg girls and
LG gore remained. PIE *gher- 'small' is cited as their
possible etymon. It is also unclear how much importance
(if any) should be attached to girl 'roebuck in its second
year' (hunters' usage; recorded in 1486).
3. Following Moller (1880:542, note 1) and A. Noreen
(1894:194), Luick (1897-98) and Kluge (KL) reconstructed
Gmc *gurwilon and OE *gyrele (f), *gyrela (m) 'girl.' In
Moller's opinion, Go *gaurwi was like Go mawi 'child,'
and Gmc *gaurwilo like Go mawilo 'girl.' According to
Luick, *gyrele developed along the same lines as OE
byr(e)le > ME birle 'cupbearer.' Both Luick ([1964:314]
and Berndt [1960:34]) give gyrl along with pyrl 'hole,'
circe 'church,' and other words that underwent syncope.
On p. 837 of Luick's book, gyrele appears without an
asterisk. The form *gyrela ~ *gyrele allowed Luick to
explain why Middle English had the forms gerle, gurle,
and girle (OE y allegedly yielded ME i, e, and y, spelled u,
depending on the dialect). OED offers no etymology of
girl, but ODEE agrees that the Middle English variants
suggest an original u (the same in Hoad). Even if ME i, e,
472
Adz(e) Adz(e)

u go back to "an original u," it does not follow that OE

*gyrela, to say nothing of Gmc *gurwilon, ever existed.
Also, the diminutive suffix -il was absent from Old
English (see ODEE, -le1). Consequently, whatever the
etymon of ME girle, gerle, and gurle, it could not be an
Old English form resembling Go mawilo 'girl' (from
mawi) or Attila 'father' (from atta).
Girl rarely occurs outside the Standard: "the word
now used by the poor is wench" (anonymous
[1829:143]). In dialects, lass, wench, and maid, not girl,
are the words for 'female child' (M. Keller
[?1938:18-22], and Ellert [1946:39-40]). Despite Ek-
wall's statement (1903:27) that girl is "doubtless
native," the Middle English word was most probably
borrowed from Low German, though a few details
remain unclear. Thus, Gurrli and Gur-reli are Swiss
German, not Low German words; the first means 'mare,'
the second is only a term of abuse. LG Gdr(e) 'girl' has no
diminutive suffix, and its kinship with (MH)G Gurre 'old
jade' cannot
be taken for granted. Braune (1879:94) and DW
deny a connection between Gor and Gurre. It was
partly under Braune's influence that Holthausen
(1901:379-80) modified his views on the origin of girl
(see above). OED also preferred not to combine a 13th-
century English word and a word first recorded in Low
German in 1652. A 1593 occurrence of Gor is now known
473
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(see the relevant passage in WHirt and Kluge7-10). At the

end of the 16th century, gor was current in Pomerania as
a depreciatory or pejorative word for 'child,' and it still
means 'saucy girl.' In 1697, gure 'mare' was recorded in
Westphalia (KM, Gore).
With so many gur(r)— gor(r)- words in existence, it
does not seem too daring to suggest that G Gurre and
Gör(e) are related. Pisani (1968:125) states,
unfortunately without discussion, that girl is a borrowing
from Low German, a diminutive of Gör, which he glosses
'ragazzo' [sic]. Whatever the origin of Gör(e), it will
remain the most probable immediate etymon of E girl. In
a late note, Skeat (1911-16:28) traced girl to Fr gör. He
believed that both boy and girl came to English from
Frisian. But gör, whose source also seems to have been
Low German, has such limited currency in Frisian dialects
that the chance of its being the etymon of the Middle
English word is low. Göre may have been borrowed into
late Old English or entered Middle English in the 13 th
century. Then the variants i, e, u reflect the uncertainty
attending the pronunciation of a foreign word with the
vowel ö rather than the split of "an original ü." In any
case, no word resembling *gyrle turns up in the Old
English material assembled by Bäck (1934).
G Gören (pl), like ME girles, means 'children,' but the
singular is applied to a female. Middle English
distinguished gay girl 'young female' from knave girl
474
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'young male.' One and the same word often designates

'boy' and 'girl' (that is, 'child of a certain age'). Examples
from Biblical Hebrew, Classical Greek, and modern
languages abound (Gibbens [1955]). Later such words
tend to narrow their sphere of application. Weekley
(1921) suggested that the association between girl and
females is due to the influence of Gill. His hypothesis is
unverifiable. Perhaps LG Gör(e) and ME girle preserved
their undifferentiated meaning because they were more
commonly used in the plural. But the gurr— gorr- words
always refer to physically weak creatures, a
circumstance that may have determined the ultimate
choice of the referent. (However, Sw and N reg gorre
means 'boy'!) In the later history of girl, only the
pronunciations [gEsl] and [gœ:l] and the affected variant
with palatalized g have to be mentioned (Luick [1897-
98:131; 1964:118, note 1; 1118, note 1], Horn [1935:49],
and HL, 468-69, 1009).
Perhaps some connection exists between the girl
group and F garçon 'boy.' The origin of the French word
is obscure. See surveys of old conjectures in Roquefort
I:148 and of more recent scholarship in FEW XVII:619-20,
DCECH (garçon), Meier (1976:473-76; he derives garçon
from versus, pp. 484-87), and Larson (1990). Kluge
(1916b; 1921:68485; 1922) traced garçon to southern
Gmc *wrakjo (OHG reccheo, OE wrecca—both mean
'exile, fugitive': ModG Recke 'warrior,' ModE wretch).
475
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Presumably, garçon entered French through VL

*(g)w(a)racio(n). His etymology, which was first met
with reserve, now appears in most dictionaries of the
Romance languages (Ital garzone 'apprentice, errand
boy'; in poetical use, 'youth'; Sp garzón 'boy, youth'; Port
garçao 'boy').
Kluge reproduced the relevant passage from his 1916
article in EWDS9. Only Seebold (KS) removed it. ODEE
calls garçon a word of disputed origin (at garçon), but at
wretch repeats Kluge's etymology. It is hard to
understand how a word meaning 'exile' came to mean
'groom' (see a similar objection in Spitzer [1917:302]).
Kluge rightly emphasized the inferior status of the
people called reccheo and garçon, but an exile was the
lowest of the low, whereas garçon, in Chanson de
Roland, where it first occurred in Old French, is the name
of a respectable occupation. Is it not possible that,
whatever the ultimate origin of garçon < gars (garçon is
an oblique case), its meaning and form were affected by
some of the Gmc gor(r)- words? The influence of garçon
on any Scandinavian name for 'boy' is unlikely, though
Bugge (1888a:121) thought that Sw gosse 'boy' was a
"nationalized" form of garçon. (Compare Anglo-Irish
gossoon 'youth, boy,' ultimately from garçon.)
If the view of girl as a borrowing from Low German is
justified and if LG Gör is one of the many recorded gor(r)
— gur(r)- nouns, attempts to reconstruct not only a
476
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Germanic but even a Proto-Indo-European etymon for

girl should be abandoned. Möller (1880:542, note 1)
related Gmc *gurwilon to L virgo 'virgin' and Gk
παρθένος 'woman' and came up with PIE *ghuérghu. The
approval of Prellwitz (1889:155) and A. Noreen
(1894:194) lent glamour to Möller's reconstruction
(though Prellwitz accepted *ghuérghu without recourse
to Germanic). Pedersen (1893:257), Fay (1895:9, note 2),
and Hirt (WHirt, Göre) supported it, though Hirt was
aware of Brugmann's work on παρθένος (1906:173). Hirt
(1921:21, 208) specifically praised the power of sound
laws that brought to light the bond between παρθένος
and girl, and later
(Hirt 1927:145, note 1) called the Indo-European
etymology of girl uncertain but revealing. However,
OED and Björkman (1912:278, note 2) treated
girl as unsuitable material for Indo-European re-
construction, and Pedersen (1930:61) disavowed his
earlier views. In Pedersen (1949-50:5-6), he gave a
different etymology of the Greek word. WH (virgo)
mention girl but express no opinion on its origin.
Wood's idea to trace girl to PIE *gheu- (and further
to ghouqw- ~ ghuoqw- 'move rapidly') and
Tucker's derivation of girl from PIE *gher- 'grow' will
be discussed below. Bugge (in A. Noreen [1909:232, note
on p. 66]) compared Sw and N reg gorre 'boy,' E girl, and
LG Gör(r) with Ir gerr 'short,' Skt hrasvä- 'short, small'
477
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(and Skt hrasati 'diminish'). Torp (NEO, gorre) mentioned

Bugge's idea without referring to the source.
Johannesson (1942:221) and IsEW, 360, 389, traced Ir
gerr ~ OIr gair and Skt hrasvä- to PIE *gher-. Since Go
gaurs often turns up in this context, two reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European roots come into play: *gher-'small'
and *ghomos- 'dreadful' (WP I:604-5, 636; IEW, 443, 453-
54). When LG Gör(e) is said to be akin to G reg gorig
'small, miserable' (< OHG gorag), we again end up with
Go gaurs 'mournful,' Skt ghoräs 'dreadful, awe-inspiring,'
and their cognates.
4. Several etymologies of girl are more recent. The
Middle English forms gerle, girle, and gurle resemble OE
gier(e)la, (ge)ger(e)la, (ge)girla, and (ge)gyr(e)la (m)
'dress, apparel, adornment,' from *garwila, that is,
'thing made ready (to wear).' OE gearo ~ gearu mean
'ready, prepared, equipped, finished' (Stroebe [1904:72];
AeEW, gierela); its feminine counterpart gierelu also
existed. It has been suggested that ME girle is the
continuation of OE girla 'dress.' See Rapp (1855:II/301);
Mueller (he compares LG Gör, allegedly from G Gehre
'edge of a skirt; triangular piece' [akin to E gore
'triangular piece of cloth'; historically, 'triangular piece of
land'], with Gör being understood as Schoßkind
'pampered child, child sitting in its mother's lap'; more
guardedly in the second edition); Törnkvist (1959:15);
MED ("? < OE *gyrela < *gurw-, akin to OE gierela
478
Adz(e) Adz(e)

<*garw 'a garment'"; the volume with girle appeared in

1963); Robinson (1967; the main advocate of this
etymology); Barnhart (prefers this etymology;
tentatively considers Gör and so on to be either cognates
or "simply accidental, vaguely similar forms"); Makovskii
(1986:77; 1989b:80), and RHD2.
Makovskii (1971:21) cites Sc and E reg (northern) girl
'neckcloth' (see EDD, girl v1), but that noun, as well as
girl or gorl (v) 'girdle; surround the roof of a stack with
straw ropes...,' is a variant of girdle and has nothing to
do with OE gierela. Makovskii (1992a:43) connects girl
and the root *ker 'produce sounds' with L circulus 'circle'
(young women were allegedly associated with the circle,
a symbol of infinity and chastity), but does not explain
how all these etymologies can be combined. He further
develops his fantasies in Makovskii
(1999a:149-50). Now we are told that early Indo-
Europeans buried their women according to the full
military ritual, a fact that allegedly justifies the
comparison between OE girela and L gerere 'fight,'
because possibly gerere arma 'bear arms' is meant. The
entry contains several wrong glosses, such as OE gyrel
'armor,' G gären 'move fast and chaotically,' and so
forth. G Groll 'anger,' G Gier 'greed, lust,' the Sanskrit
verb for 'to swallow,' and Oss gyryn 'give birth' appear as
supporting evidence, with the conclusion that girl
originated as 'someone swallowing the penis.'
479
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The development from 'clothes' to 'a person wearing

such clothes' (synecdoche) has often been recorded:
compare E skirt 'woman,' calico 'woman' in colonial
American English (Babcock [1950:138]),
South African E nylon 'woman' (Gold [1992:107]),
gyp 'college servant' (at Cambridge and Durham),
believed to be from gippo (obsolete) 'tunic' (OED), and
possibly G Schranz(e): from 'torn clothes' to 'sycophant.'
All such words are invariably slang.
G. Neumann (1971:12), Markey (1983:103-4;
1987:282), and Terasawa (1993:338-41) supported
Robinson, but Diensberg (1985a) and especially
Moerdijk (1994) rejected his etymology.
The main arguments against it are as follows. Judging
by the examples in BT, MacGillivray
(1902:129 and sec 232), and Stroebe (1904:72-73),
OE gierela at no time designated an article of chil-
dren's clothing, as Robinson also admits. None of the
numerous Old English words for 'boy' and 'girl' has its
origin in a synecdoche. Robinson's etymology does not
explain why ME girle mainly occurs in the plural. If OE
gierela meant 'child,' it is surprising that this meaning
found no reflections in written texts, considering how
many informal Old English words for 'child' have come
down to us. It is even more surprising that girle burst
into bloom long after gierela was forgotten. Luick's Old
English form *gyrele would have been pronounced with
480
Adz(e) Adz(e)

initial [g] (umlauted vowels withstood diph-thongization

after velars), but OE *[ji(3)rls] would not have become
[girl]. Robinson (1967:240) postulates northern influence
on girl, though no evidence points to its being a northen
word. In the
1992 postscript, Robinson (1993:180-81) subjects
Diensberg to severe criticism, but the problems
mentioned above remain unsolved. Bammes-berger and
Grzega (2001:1-4) have shown that in some Old English
dialects g- could have remained velar in the reflexes of
Gmc *garw-ilan, but they did not refute the other
arguments of Robinson's opponents. The main flaw of
Robinson's etymology is that it disregards ties between E
girl and similar words all over the Germanic-speaking
world. Nor do Bammesberger and Grzega address that
question; they only refer to "[a] particularly rich over-
view of past attempts at clarifying the etymology of girl
in Liberman (1998)."
ME girle seems to be unrelated to OE gierela.
Pedersen (1941-42) thought that E wife (< wif) went back
to a word meaning 'piece of clothing, kerchief,' but also
without sufficient reason (Schmidt-Strunk [1989:253]).
Robinson praises Berndt's hypothesis (1960:339-40),
according to which ME girle, from *gyr(w)ela (-e), was
derived from OE gyrwan in the sense 'maturing, growing
one.' However, OE (ge)gyrwan and its variants
(ge)gierwan ~ (ge)gerwan meant 'prepare, cook; dress,
481
Adz(e) Adz(e)

adorn; direct,' not 'ripen' or 'grow.' Tucker (n.d.:9)

anticipated Berndt: he traced girl to PIE *gher- 'grow, be
young, fresh, lively.' Another version of Tucker's idea is
Nicklin's derivation of girl, garth, yard, green, and grow
from the same stem
(1904:246).
Schlutter (1908a:62-63, 1913a:153-54) sought the
etymology of girl in Gk χερ- (χεράς 'stream carrying
stones and sand') and referred to the Old English gloss
gerae in riui aggerum. congregatio aqua-rum i. gerae
'the now smoothly flowing, now wild' river Gera and to
G reg Gören 'canal' (Schleswig). Was he trying to suggest
that girl should be interpreted as originally meaning
'brisk, impetuous'? (See Holthausen's puzzled query
[1923:345/204].) If so, his predecessor was Wood
(1902:52/88a), who posited the root *gheu- 'move
rapidly, whirl, turn,' as in Gk θήρ 'beast, animal,' L ferus
'wild; wild animal,' LG Göre 'boy, girl,' OE [sic] gyrle 'girl'
(here Wood cites Lith veikus 'quick' and vaikas 'boy,
girl'), and so on, including E giddy. Wood's derivation of
giddy and girl is fanciful; see Klaeber's guarded criticism
(1905:202) and discussion of giddy in DWARF.
By 1918 Holthausen must have felt disenchanted
with his former etymologies of girl and thought that gyr-
in *gyrela was a diminutive of OE gor 'dung, dirt, filth'
(ModE gore 'clotted blood,' distinct from gore 'triangular
piece'; Holthausen [1918a:254]). He cited Westph kyatal
482
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'little heap of dirt' and 'boy' (akin to G Kot 'filth,

excrement') and E groom, which he derived from OF
grom (< L grummus = grumus 'heap of earth, hillock'). In
EW2,3, Holthausen derived girl from OE gor without
comment. He did not explain how OE gor-, when
umlauted, produced three Middle English variants: gerle
(the expected form), girle, and gurle. Nor did he come to
terms with Björk-man (1912), whom he had once
supported with such enthusiasm. In a way, girl from gor
is a perversion of Braune's idea: Braune (1879:94) ex-
plained LG Gör as being the same word as Du geur
'fragrance, odor, aroma' (allegedly, it all started with
phrases like sote göre 'sweet smell' used as hypocoristic
forms of address, but geur is probably a cognate of OE
gor 'dung'; see NEW). According to still another
interpretation, OE gor is a cognate of Go gaurs
(Uhlenbeck [1905:289/132] and KEW1 but removed from
KEW2). Uhlenbeck's etymology again brings us to OI
gaurr and the rest.
5. Early etymologists had no clue to the origin of girl.
They only assembled words for 'young female' that
began with g, k, h and contained postvocalic r, l or
explained it according to their views on women's nature.
See surveys in Johnson, Johnson-Todd, Richardson,
Worcester, and Mackay (1877). Minsheu derived girl
from L gar-rula 'garrulous' (f) (because young women are
chatterboxes) or from girella, which he glossed as
483
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'weathercock' (Gazophylacium: "from ä Gyrando,

thereby denoting their inconstancy"); see girella in OED.
The first of his etymologies enjoyed such popularity that
CD devoted a special statement to its refutation.
Casaubon (1650:292) traced girl to Gk κόρη 'girl'. Not
only Lemon and Cockayne (1861/282 and 1049) but even
Wyld (UED) supported the girl—κόρη idea (Wyld says:
"Possibly cognate with").
Skinner suggested OE ceorl 'man' as the etymon of
girl or rather the imaginary feminine *ceorla (though OI
kerla 'woman' exists), and Hickes (170305:107) derived
girle from OI karlinna 'woman.' Hickes's etymology
proved equally long-lived. It turns up in Serenius (1757,
karl, where he noted the similarity between girl and
ModI gervi 'form' and gervilegur 'pretty'), Thomson,
Webster (1864, among other possiblilities; 1874 and
1880), and in DDEL; reference to karlinna disappeared
from Webster only in 1890. Van Kempe Valk (1880:168)
cited OE ceorl, Du kerel, and E girl as self-evident
cognates. Bernard compared girl and Pol garzel and
garlica (? = gardziel 'throat' and gardlica 'turtle dove').
Junius mentioned Wel herlodes 'girl' (in fact, herlod
means 'boy'), from which he seems to have derived E girl
and harlot (harlot is from French, whereas Wel
herlod[es] is most probably from English [Skeat 4]; the
origin of the French word is the subject of involved
conjectures, to quote COD5 on boy). Worcester adds Gael
484
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cael and caileag to this list; his modern supporter is Par-

tridge (1958). (Was Worcester inspired by the pro-
nunciation [gesl]?) Gael caile ~ caileag, Ir caile, and Br
plac'h 'girl' are even more obscure than E girl (LE, caile).
Comparison between those Celtic words, Gk παλλακή,
and L p(a)ellex (both mean
'concubine'), favored at one time (MacBain, caile;
Henry, plac'h), seems to be erroneous (WH, paellex).
W (1828) derived girl from "Low L. gerula, a young
woman employed in tending children and carrying them
about, from gero, to carry; a word probably received
from the Romans while in England." This etymology
stayed in Webster until 1860 and found its way into ID
(1850), anonymous (1861:142), E. Edwards, Brewer, and
Boag. According to Shipley (1945), Brewer derived girl
from girdle, an object "worn by maids and loosed at the
marriage," a derivation that does not turn up in any
edition of Brewer's books consulted. Shipley found
Brewer's idea "interesting" and surmised that girl is
perhaps a "corruption" of darling. It will be seen that the
line between so-called prescientific and modern
guesswork is tenuous, the more so because some
modern authors, like their distant predecessors, drop
hints without going into details (for example, Hilmer
[1914:35] asserts that most words for 'child,' including
girl, are traceable to 'mass, piece, etc'). By contrast,
some early philologists had enough common sense not
485
Adz(e) Adz(e)

to indulge in fruitless guessing (one of them was

Tyrwhitt; see Tyrwhitt [1775:5, 85]).
Of old ideas, the one put forward by Skinner still has
value. The group OE ceorl (ModE churl), MLG kerle
(ModG Kerl), OI karl, and OHG karl (all of them mean
'man') reflects the same depreciatory attitude toward
the persons involved that is noticeable in the girl group.
A ceorl was a free man without rank; later ceorl acquired
the meaning 'peasant, rustic, low base fellow, etc.' G Kerl
has not degraded to the level of churl, but it is a familiar
term: 'guy, bloke.' OI kerling, kelli, kerla, and kella 'old
woman' are often synonymous with 'old hag.' The
derivational model of gir-l, kar-l, and ker-le is the same.
Seebold (KS) has justifiable doubts about the accepted
etymology of G Kerl from PIE *gera-'old,' whereas MLG
kerl(e) and OHG karl need not be related by ablaut.
More likely, they are variants of the same root, as are
gor(r) ~ gur(r). Amosova (1956:183) rejects, on phonetic
grounds, the idea that girl has anything to do with OE
ceorl. To be sure, gor(r) and ker- ~ kar- are related (if at
all) differently from L ager and Go akrs 'field,' but it
seems that Germanic had several near synonymous roots
beginning with a velar stop and ending in r. They often
appeared with the diminutive suffix -l(e), and denoted
young animals, children, and all kinds of creatures
considered immature, worthless, or past their prime. In

486
Adz(e) Adz(e)

some situations, gor(r)— gur(r)- and ker— kar-

functioned
as doublets (Liberman [1998]).
HEATHER (1730)
Heather continues Northumbr hadder, which is most
probably from OI *ha8r; -er would be the same suffix as
in clover, madder, and a few other plant names. *Ha8-
may have meant 'hair.' Its association with heath
appears to be late.
Heather emerged in the 14th century in the form hath
ir (later, hadyr, haddyr, haddir, hedder, hadder, hather,
and hether). Heather, first recorded in the 18th century, is
seemingly from heath + er, with vowel shortening in the
stem syllable (Skeat1 and the pre-OED works that discuss
heather). Usually heather appears at the end of the entry
for heath as an obvious derivative. Some researchers cite
G Heidekraut 'heather' (literally 'heath grass') as proof
that heath and heather are related in a natural way; G
Heide (plant name) also existed (Wolff [1976]). Several
etymologies of the word for 'heather' in the Indo-
European languages (notably, of OI lyng) trace the name
of this plant to the type of soil in which it grows. But
hathir was originally confined to Scotland with the
contiguous part of the English border, that is, to the
regions in which heath was unknown, and an association
between those words is late. One would expect heather

487
Adz(e) Adz(e)

to go back to *hedder, *hadder, from *hxdder or

*hxddre (OED).
According to Skeat4, who follows OED, heath and
heather are etymologically unrelated, for Northumbr
hadder points to some different origins. The other late
dictionaries repeat OED with insignificant variations.
UED adds that heather may have had the same
formative suffix as in several other plant names. See
discussion at CLOVER. In Ekwall's opinion (1908), heath
and heather are cognates, with heath being native and
heather going back to OI heidr. To prove his idea, he
reconstructed the change of Scand ei to a in Middle En-
glish, the shortening of a before -r, its narrowing to e in
Scots (as in Sc fether 'father' and the like), and the
reinterpretation of r as part of the root. Ek-wall's
examples of Scand ei > ME a are less than fully
convincing and no unambiguous evidence testifies to
Scand *heidr 'heather,' but he was right that Scand lyng
'heather' had synonyms (see Moberg [1971] and
Melefors [1984]).
Scand *hadr 'heather,' unrelated to heidr, probably
existed. The old name of the Norwegian province
Hadaland (now Hadeland) has been explained as
containing the root hod 'battle' (akin to OE headu- and G
Hader 'discontent') or *had- 'sea.' H. Kuhn (1941)
supported the second etymology, but he did not
mention Hodr, the legendary eponymous ancestor of the
488
Adz(e) Adz(e)

people of Hadaland, an important name in this context

(see Much [1924:109]).
Both explanations seem to be wrong. OE heado-
lldende (Beowulf, 1798 and 2955) probably means 'sea
traveler,' but it does not follow that Hadaland should be
understood as 'sea land.' It is also unlikely that a
province called 'war land' existed. Hadaland rather
meant 'heather land.' Knobloch (1980:198-99) related
the root of such place names to OE heador 'restraint,
confinement' (that is, 'wattle')—a rather contrived
hypothesis. In late Old English, *hadr and hxp must have
been pronounced [hasBr] and [ha2:p] respectively. Folk
etymology connected them and thereby saved *hx5r,
which spread south from its original home, while in
Scandinavia it was ousted by lyng.
Many words with a and ai in the Germanic languages
have the appearance of being related, but those vowels
belong to different ablaut series. See more at KEY and
OAT. H. Kuhn's etymologies (1954:144, 146, 151) are
shaky. However, even if his approach to Gmc *a were
acceptable, coupling *haipi- ~ *haidi- with *hadr within
the framework of his theory would presuppose that one
of them is a term of agriculture or cattle-raising; yet
heather is not a fodder crop.
*Ha5r may represent an r-less variant of the root
*hazdaz 'hair,' as in OI haddr 'hair' (= 'long hair in need
of combing,' hence 'woman's hair') and OE -heord 'hair'
489
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(in bundenheord 'with one's hair bound'); see also the

history of E hards and hurds in etymological dictionaries.
The West Germanic root *hezdon, from which -heord
was derived, did have an r-less variant: compare OE
hadswxpe 'bridesmaid,' literally 'one who brushes the
bride's hair' (Pogatscher [1901:196-99; 1902:233-34],
Roeder [1909:34-39]). Hede and heide, the Middle Low
German forms for hurds, also lack [r]: cf Du hede and G
Hede. If *hadr goes back to an r-less variant of *hazdaz,
that is, if forms with and without r continued to be
productive after rhotacism set in, *hadr meant 'hairy.'
In some other Indo-European languages, the words
for heather and hair also occasionally sound
alike (O. Ritter [1922:52-53]). Their similarity is
due to chance (IEW, 1139, 1155). An association of
heather with shagginess in English dialects goes back to
the confusion of the roots hath- and hxd-'hair.' EDD cites
hedder-faced 'rough-faced, unshaven' and hed(d)ery
'rough, shaggy.' The noun hathe 'thick covering' occurs in
the phrase be in a hathe 'be thickly covered with
pustules of the small-pox or other eruptive disease; be
matted closely together.' *Hadr may have been an
ancient s-stem, later interpreted as the plural, with the
root of hathir, haddyr, hadder, hedder, and so forth
meaning 'hair.' Plant names are often collective plurals.
See CLOVER, IVY, and Bjorvand (1994:21-22), who
suggested a similar origin for lyng 'heather' (the same in
490
Adz(e) Adz(e)

BjL, lyng). If heather once contained the element -re, in

northern dialects this ancient suffix could be understood
as a Scandinavian ending of the plural. The sense of the
word would emerge as 'tract grown over with heather.'
It is a mere curiosity that E heather and L hedera 'ivy' are
near homonyms (Liberman [1988c:43-46]).
HEIFER (900)
In addition to the reflexes of OE heahfore, ME hay-
fore, and many similar forms, modern dialects have
heckfore and so forth. The explanation of heahfore as
heahfore 'high-farer, highstepper' makes little sense. The
assumption that -fore is related to OE fear(r) 'bull, ox' or
Sc ferry cow 'cow that is not with milk' does not clarify
the meaning of the compound either. Most likely, OE
heahfore < *haggfore < *haghfore consisted of *hagg
'enclosure' and the element -fore 'dweller' = 'occupant of
an enclosure.' Heckfore has the same structure (hec 'rail;
fence; gate'). A regular development heahfore >
heckfore is possible, but the change hf > kf in it has few
secure analogues. In some dialects, heahfore yielded
[heifa(r)], in others [hefa(r)]. Standard English heifer re-
flects the spelling of the first group and the
pronunciation of the second.
The sections are devoted to 1) the hypotheses about
the meaning of OE heah- and -fore, with emphasis on
vowel length and the connection between -fore and
faran, 2) the history of -k- in heckfore and of heck-
491
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'enclosure,' 3) similar animal names in English and other

languages, and 4) heahfore *'occupant of an enclosure.'
Sec 5 is the conclusion.
1. Old English had heahfore, heahfru, heaf(a)re,
Northumbr hehfore, and a few other forms. Heifer has
always meant 'young cow.' It is also a low colloquialism
for 'woman' (see Judges XIV:18, Authorized Version: if ye
had not plowed with my heifer 'if you had not used my
wife's help'). An association between a heifer and a
(young) woman is not limited to English. OIr ainder
means 'young woman,' while Wel anner means
'heifer' (Schuchardt
[1905:5-6]; Pedersen [1949-50:4], where Basque
and(e)re ~ anre 'young woman' are discussed); see
also the end of sec 4, below. According to Pokorny
(1949-50:131-32), Irish and Welsh borrowed ainder
~ anner from Berber. Schrijver (2002) leans toward
the Basque source of all those words.
See a few minor details of the phonetic history of OE
heahfore in SB (sec 218, note 2: heafre < heahfre) and A.
Campbell (1959:sec 392, heafre, heahfore). In modern
dialects, (h)ayfer, heckfore, and many similar forms
occur (EDD). Ben Jonson, in 1609, used heicfar 'woman'
(OED). Heahfore apparently consists of two parts, so that
ModE heifer is a disguised compound (Goetz
[1971:10.26], Faiss [1978:131-34];
not listed in Bergsten [1911:9-24]). Despite the
492
Adz(e) Adz(e)

early loss of -h-, -f- remained voiceless in this word,

and no forms have been attested with -v- at any period,
unlike, for example, OE clafre 'clover' and OE frofer ~
frofor (> ME frover) 'consolation.'
Words for 'young cow' are varied in Germanic. Their
original meaning can be 'small creature,' 'barren,' that is,
not yet impregnated, 'of one year old,' 'female,' and the
like. Those who believe that heahfore had e a (Skinner,
Lemon, and many others) usually gloss it as 'highstepper,
highgoer,' for they derive -fore from faran 'go' (as in OE
fara 'traveler'), with o from a under secondary stress
(more likely before r; see below).
The names of calves, lambs, and kids may perhaps
contain the root of a verb meaning 'go, pass' when they
refer to those animals' age. Such are possibly Oss rxwxd
'heifer' and its cognates in several Iranian languages (W.
Miller [1907:332/69],
IESOI, II:289-90). But Abaev's later etymology
(1997:218/390): rxwxd < *fra-wata-, in which wata-
means 'year,' is more convincing. Similar formations
would be OI gymbr 'ewe one year old' (ModI gimbur),
with reflexes in all the Scandinavian languages (a
cognate of L hiems 'winter': AEW, gymbr; ÄBM, gimbr;
OED, gimmel; doubts about the origin of this word can
now be dismissed), E reg twinter 'heifer' (that is, 'cow
two winters old'), and others. Apart from the fact that
OE heahfore, even if construed with a long diphthong,
493
Adz(e) Adz(e)

will not yield the meaning 'a creature of an advanced

(high) age,' heifers are young, not old.
Garrison (1955:279) suggested that 'highstep-per'
referred to calves' long legs, but his interpretation heah
'high' + fore 'in the front' is irreconcilable with the fact
that Old English compounds never had the structure
adjective + adverb of place. One could interpret
*highstepper as 'cow whose udder is (still) high above
the ground,' but the likelihood of such an interpretation
is not strong.
The element -fore has also been explained as a
cognate of OE fear(r) 'bull, ox' (akin to G Farre(n) <
far(ro) 'bullock') and of G Färse ~ Du vaars 'young cow'
(OHG, MHG, OLG, MDu verse: EWDS1-10 and KS, Färse;
EWNT; Vercoullie, vaarkoe and vaars
'heifer'; not in EWDS11-21 or NEW). The semantic
tie between 'bull' and 'young cow' is less apparent
than it seems: *'cow that goes to the bull for the first
time'? Skeat (in the first edition of his dictionary and in
Skeat [1887 = 1892]:424, 494, 496) defended the
comparison of -fore with OE fearr, but in the fourth
edition he disclaimed his views. See also R. Morris
(1903:135), who treats OE heahfore like OE he ahde or
'roebuck,' literally 'high (tall) animal' (UED says the
same). E. Klein (1911) relates -fore to faran on p. 15 and
to fearr on p. 41. Sweet (1888:354/1731), Mayhew
(1891c:secs 708, 745,
494
Adz(e) Adz(e)

801), BT, and Luick (1964:sec 516, note 5) do not

discuss the etymology of heahfore but write he ah-.
*'Highstepper' as the name of a young cow would be
a kenning, which alone makes this etymology of heifer
improbable. Heahdeor 'stag, deer' is a usual bahuvrihi
(Last [1925:21]). Among the Old English compounds
beginning with he ah-, none has the semantic structure
of a kenning. In heahseld 'throne,' heahsetl 'place of
honor,' heahsynn 'deadly sin,' and so on, heah- either
means 'high' or approaches the status of a reinforcing
particle. Even a bookish bahuvrihi like heahrun
'pythoness' would be more transparent than heahfore
'young cow,' a word of the peasants' vocabulary. The in-
terpretation of Germanic nonpoetic compounds as
elaborate metaphors and kennings is not justified (Binnig
[1984]). For this reason, N.P. Willis's explanation (heifer
= 'stepping superbly,' 'a young creature who has borne
no burthens'; see Shulman [1948:41-42]) should be
rejected.
Drake's idea (1907:221-22, no 518n, and 252, no
606n) that -fore in heahfore is related to -fur in OE
calfur, plural of cxlf 'calf,' does not merit discussion.
Equally fanciful is Makovskii's attempt to interpret
heahfore in light of an alleged mythological unity
'heaven' ~ 'cow' (1992b:154). He compared heah- with E
reg higgs 'white cumuli' (EDD), and -fore with Russ poroz

495
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'bull, boar,' a word of debatable etymology but probably

related to OE
fear(r) (Vasmer III:330-31).
IEW 818 derives heah- in heahfore from OE he ah
'high' and classifies -fore with cognates of ME farrow 'not
in calf' (akin to Sc ferry cow 'cow that is not with calf and
therefore continues to give milk through the winter' and
Fl vare koe 'cow that gives no more milk': Jamieson
[1879-82]). According to ODEE, farrow (adj), unrelated to
farrow 'litter of pigs' (< OE fearh; PIE *porkos), is of
unknown origin, but Holthausen's hypothesis in AeEW is
attractive: he compares farrow (adj) with Westph fear
'barren,' WFr fear 'barren,' and OE fearr 'ox' ('barren'
and 'ox' share the feature 'nonproductive'; see the words
of this root in Holthausen [1913:334] and in AeEW: fearr
and for). Although irreproachable phonetically, the
etymology in IEW shares the main weakness of the
previous one. Special names are bestowed on one-year-
old animals precisely because they are not full-grown
(see CD1).
The proposed interpretation of -fore is tenable, but
heah- in heahfore cannot mean 'high.'
Forby (1830), whose main concern was East Anglian
heifker, wanted the word "to express a half-cow; a cow
half-grown, not yet come to full size and maturity," a
most reasonable hypothesis, considering the attempts to
interpret heah- as heah-. He cited the 1579 Norfolk form
496
Adz(e) Adz(e)

heckfordes or heckforthes 'heifers.' These, he thought,

lost d or th (as in the place name Thetfor' < Thetford) and
became heifker by metathesis, whereas heckfer allegedly
emerged as the "mispronunciation" of heifker. Forby's
reconstruction, however, is of little interest today, for it
does not take into account OE heahfore. Rye (1895)
deleted the entire note, but the forms ending in -forde ~
-forthe, to which OED adds hecfurthe, need an
explanation; folk etymology must have been at work in
them. East Anglian heifker, with its diphthong, looks like
a blend, a cross between
*[heif\(r)] and [hekf\(r)].
Kluge (EWDS1-3, Klee) connected -fore in heahfore
and -fre in OE clafre 'clover' but later never returned to
this idea; see CLOVER. Another daring guess about the
element -fore is Shipley's. He traced -fore to PIE *per
'pristine, primary' and cited farrow (he did not say
which) as a cognate (1984:306, per VIc); Shipley's
derivations are usually of this type.
The Latin glosses of OE heahfore were altila and
altilium 'fatted calf' (from alo 'nourish'). Junius (haifer)
thought that heahfore was a variant of heahfodro. His
guess has little to recommend it despite Baly's support of
it (1897:643, note 1). In Old
English, altile, the Latin lemma for heahfore, oc-
curred twice as antile. According to A. Brown (1972),
heahfore is some glossator's attempt to render altile ~
497
Adz(e) Adz(e)

antile: heah for alt(us) and fore for ant(e) (compare

Garrison's etymology 'high-in-the-front'). He suggested
that heahfore was never meant to be a real word.
Heahfru is, in his opinion, a nominative back formation
from the -f(a)re forms in oblique cases. If such were the
origin of heahfore, it would be impossible to understand
how this ghost word became known to the translators of
Bede, gained currency in dialects, and stayed in the
language of the peasants for twelve centuries. The
glossator, more likely, wrote antile instead of altile,
influenced by -fore.
W. S. Morris (1967:70-71) maintains that heah-
was used to distinguish the genders of fear(r) (m)
'beast of burden, ox, bull' and heafre (f) 'young cow.' He
believes the distinction to be due to an early
misinterpretation of L alitilia 'nourished, fattened,'
usually written altilia, as though it were a derivative of
altus 'high,' which would correspond to OE heah-. Such a
misuse of heah- would be unique, and Anglo-Saxon
farmers did not know Latin. The rather frequent
juxtaposition of OE fear and heahfore (> heafre) goes
back to the predilection of Old English authors for
paronomasia (see Frank
[1972]).
2. Wedgwood recognized a word for 'enclosure' in
heckfore. He cited Du hokkeling 'heifer' from hok 'pen' as
a parallel case. His etymology
498
Adz(e) Adz(e)

reached the public (Paley [1882:462]), and it became

customary to treat the heah- and hek- forms as parallel
(so Mueller and CD). According to Kluge (KL), OE *hxgre
is from *heah— *hxg- 'enclosure.' He detected the same
root in OE heahfore and in G reg hagen and hegel 'bull,
ox' and compared -fore with OE fearr. Jordan (1903:179),
who writes heahfore, and Weekley say the same. Theirs
is a fruitful approach, though Hagen and Hegel are
probably unrelated (DW; WP I:33-4; IEW, 522; KM:
Hecke1, Hecke2, and Hag), and neither seems to be
related to words for 'enclosure.' Smythe Palmer (1883,
heifer) also compared heck- in E reg heckfor with heck
'enclosure' and ascribed the similarity to folk etymology.
ID says that R. Morris derived the first part of heifer from
a word for 'pen, stall,' but the form cited (hea) and the
reference (oral communication? nothing similar occurs in
any of his books) are dubious. EB, which gives the same
strange form, prefers the meaning 'high-stepper.'
The relationship between heah- and hek- in the
history of heifer remains a matter of dispute. Kluge
(1901b:1003) proposed a rule whereby ME hf became kf
(as allegedly in heahfore > hekfere), analogous to the
change of Gmc -s to -ks. His idea found many
supporters; see O. Ritter (1904:303;
1906a:149), Wyld (1899-1902:22; 1899:248-49), Luick
(1964:718/4 and 770, note), Jordan (1968:sec 168,
note 2), and HL (862, 1041-42). Kalb (1937:51), with
499
Adz(e) Adz(e)

reference to Horn (1901:94), cites several examples of k

> h in Middle English, but the history of the word
hockamore (a doublet of hock 'sort of wine'), first
recorded in the 17th century, sheds no light on heckfor,
because it is an Anglicised pronunciation of G
Hochheimer. Skeat (1899-1902:446-47) disagreed with
the formulation "h becomes k before a spirant" and
pointed out that final h in heah- had either to disappear
in Middle English or change. According to him, in some
dialects, -[%\ yielded -k (as in elk < eolh), whereas in
others the usual change of -[c] to -f occurred, as in ruh >
rough. When *heahfore became *heaffore, the vowel, he
said, shortened and the word acquired its modern pro-
nunciation. Since OE heahfore is a more likely form than
heahfore, Skeat's intermediate stage can be dispensed
with.
The shortening of ei in heifer may be compared with
that in leisure (when it rhymes with pleasure), Leister,
and nonpareil (Kaluza [1906-07, II:298, sec 381/e]), but it
is not necessary to explain [e] in heifer by the influence
of heckfer (this is the suggestion in HL, 308, 727). The
change from [c] to k is extremely rare. If we disregard the
animal names elk, from eolh, and reg selk, from seolh
'seal' (on which see Hamp [1994], among others), only
reg ekt (< OE *heht) 'height' and possibly [hok] 'hough' (?
< OE hohsinu) remain. The evidence of place names is
ambiguous. It is not necessary to trace Haxtead (Surrey),
500
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Hickstead (Sussex), and Heckfeld to OE heah- or Freek's

(Sussex) to OE fyrhde 'woodland' (so Mawer [1937:127],
but see Haxtead and Heckfeld in Ekwall [1960]).
Heahfore was not a literary word, which explains its low
frequency in OE texts. OE *hecfore, not derived from
heahfore, may have existed, though it has not been
attested.
3. Other animal names are useless in establishing the
etymology of heifer. The origin of Russ koza 'nanny goat'
(stress on the second syllable) is obscure. Even if it is
related to Go hakuls* 'cloak' and OE hcecen ~ hecen
'goat' (Woeste [1857:431-32]; Feist3-4, AEW, hokull; WP
I:336; IEW, 517), nothing follows from this fact for heifer,
despite Raucq's statement to the contrary (1939:49). The
Russian word loses all relevancy if it is a cognate of Skt
ajdh 'billy goat,' regardless of whether kin koza is old or
prothetic. But koza may be of Turkic origin (see the
conflicting views on this word in Vasmer II:277-78; ESSI
XII:19-20, and Chernykh I:408). Etymological links
between heifer and OE hxfer 'goat' (related to OI hafr, L
caper, Ir gabhar, and so on)—Skinner, Leo (1842:512),
Smythe Palmer, Shipley (1945), and Gottlieb (1931:17)—
based on the idea that both mean 'swift,
bounding animal' (Pictet [1859-63, I:347, 368]: L
caper and Skt capala 'swift') should be dismissed on
phonetic grounds. The etymologies that relate heifer to

501
Adz(e) Adz(e)

some form of the root hang (for a heifer is covered a

tauro: W. Barnes [1862:142]), E havier
'gelded fallow deer' (G. W. [1850]), OE eofer 'boar'
(Paley [1882:462]), and OE cxlf 'calf' (Drake 1907:
221-22/ 518n) lack all foundation.
Hebr rp (par) 'bull,' PHS (parah) 'cow' and other
related Semitic words (CEDHL, 522) can be compared
with heifer, Gk mopij 'heifer,' and the rest only if the
second component of heahfore is a cognate of OE fear(r)
and if this animal name is a migratory Eurasian word (see
W [1828], Charnock
[1889], P. Haupt [1889-90:114-5, note], Muss-Arnolt
[1890:250], P. Haupt [1906:155, note 1], Cohen
[1975] with reference to his earlier discussion;
Möller [1911:112], at 1*ke-, where -fer in OE hehfor [sic],
mistranslated as Bock, is said to be related not only to L
caper, OI hafr, and so on but also to OE s-ceap 'sheep'; L.
Brunner does not mention heifer [1969]). The similarity
between the Hebrew and the Germanic word attracted
the attention of Luther, who regularly used farre where
the Vulgate text had vitulus. Apparently, he searched for
both a gloss and a look-alike (Ising [1960: 48]).
4. In heahfore, the most likely Old English form of
heifer, he ah- is probably related to *hxg 'enclosure,' as
Wedgwood suggested. The element -fore might be a
weakened variant of -fare = fear(r) 'bullock' or of the Old
English etymon of farrow 'not in calf,' because in West
502
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Germanic, a and o tended to alternate before and after r.

Some examples include OFr fora ~ fara 'before,' OE rador
~ rodor 'heaven,' MHG verwarren ~ verworren 'con-
fused,' and the Middle English doublets scorn ~ scarn
'scorn' (see more at RABBIT).
However, the fact that Old English lacked a cognate
of MDu verse and that farrow surfaced only in the 15th
century makes such an etymology vulnerable. The
second element of heahfore seems to be the same suffix
as in OE felofor and a few other words (see FIELDFARE).
Heahfore then meant 'occupant of an enclosure.' This is
admittedly a vague gloss. At present, bull calves are
castrated about six months after they are born, at which
point the calves are separated from their mothers but
are kept together. If in older days the castration of young
bulls occurred later, young cows may have been put into
special enclosures, to protect them from the male
animals. Or perhaps (a less likely hypothesis) heahfore
was first applied to all calves and only with time
acquired its more special meaning. A more definitive
answer about the origin of heifer would be possible if we
knew more about cattle breeding in the days of King Al-
fred.
Words designating 'place for sucking calves' abound:
cf cauf kit, cauf crib, kid crow, and kid crew
in the Cheshire dialect (Wilbraham [1821:22, 30]).

503
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Animal names from animals' 'houses' are common.

Such are stallion from stall, Du hokkeling from hok (see
above), and, according to Must (1957:63), OE hengest,
but no one seems to have accepted his etymology. OE
hlose 'pigsty' provides a possible parallel, assuming that
hlos meant 'pig' or 'boar.' Note the numerous attempts
to connect OI kviga 'heifer' with kvi 'enclosure for the
cattle' or, conversely, to dissociate one from the other
(Elmevik
[1971] and [1984:134-40], both with exhaustive ref-
erences to earlier works).
Of interest is Skt grst^h 'heifer.' Uhlenbeck calls this
word unexplained (KEWAS, 82) and does not discuss it.
Petersson (1916:240-44) relates it to the root *guerbh ~
*guerebh 'be bursting with life's force' (as in Skt gdrbhah
'womb, fruit of the womb,' Gk Ppecpoj 'fruit, child, etc,'
and Russ zherebenok 'foal'). Liebert (1949:195)
supported that etymology, and KEWA, I:344, finds it "not
improbable."
None of them mentioned Fay's conjecture (1913:31):
grsth from *g(h)rd(h)-sthis 'standing in a stall'
(supposedly akin to Av garada- 'hole'). Fay's whole
section "Names of Animals and their Stalls" (1913:31-32)
is instructive. Assuming that the etymology of heahfore
proposed here is persuasive, the 'enclosing' of heifers
has nothing to do with building fences around or
gathering together herds, as a supporter of Trier might
504
Adz(e) Adz(e)

conclude. See Go wiprus 'herd (of pigs)' in Feist3-4 and J.

de Vries's variations on the theme of Trier's fence at reini
'horse' and rddi 'boar' in AEW.
The change -fore > -fre in heahfore may be due to
syncope (though -fre occurs in other animal names: one
of them is OE culfre 'culver, wood pigeon'), but -fru poses
problems. Some changes caused by folk etymology are
possible under the influence of a word meaning
'woman': cf the West Norwegian cow name Hornfru and
the like (Stoltz [1935:52]; see
also Edlinger [1886:99], Falk [1925b:136-7], and
NEW, kween).
According to IEW, 537-38, hek- in ME hekfer
may have meant 'horn.' However, in the name of a
young cow, hec- and hek- (OE *hec as in OE fo dderhec
'ruck for fodder, crib for hay') much more probably
referred to 'fence, rail, gate.' If OE *hecfore existed, it
must have been understood as a doublet of *hxgfore
since both hxg- and hec-designated some sort of
enclosure. When -g (the fricative [g ]) was devoiced,
*hxhfore (< *hxgfore) became heahfore by Old English
breaking. The two forms (*hecfore and heahfore <
*hxhfore) continued as variants of the same word into
early Middle English.
Although when calves are weaned and given hay, the
change is sometimes reflected in their names (see G
Heurind, Heukalb in Gabriel [1986: 165]), hay 'dry grass'
505
Adz(e) Adz(e)

is unrelated to heifer (despite the suggestions to this

effect by Minsheu and Skinner). The Old English for hay
was hieg, heg and hig. A. Brown (1972:84, note 7)
suggests that the modern spelling of heifer may be partly
due to a folk etymological connection with hay. In that
case, the idea of the change [ei] > [e] is wrong, but the
pronunciation [hefs(r)] is not reminiscent of [hei]. Folk
etymology would have affected the sound shape of the
word rather than its spelling.
5. Heifer is so hard to explain that most old dic-
tionaries limit their etymological rubrics to the ref-
erence: OE heahfore. Some authors label it as a word of
unknown origin (Mätzner [1878-85:398], Skeat4, OED,
LEDEL). The etymology offered here resolves itself into
the following. OE *hsegfore consisted of *hseg-
'enclosure' and the suffix -fore, the overall meaning
being 'occupant of an enclosure.' By later phonetic
processes, *hxgfore became *hxhfore and the latter
became heahfore. It may have had a doublet, OE
*hecfore (in which hec- meant 'rail, fence, gate' and -fore
meant 'occupant,' as above). In some dialects, heahfore
yielded [heifs(r)], in others, [hefs(r)]. Standard English
heifer reflects the spelling of the first group and the
pronunciation of the second. A change from -hf- to -kf- in
the history of this word is unlikely (Liberman [1988a and
b]).
HEMLOCK (700)
506
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The closest cognate of hemlock is LG Hemer(n) 'helle-

bore.' The root hem-, as follows from the Slavic and
Baltic cognates of Hemer(n), means 'poison, sickness;
injury.' The Old English name of this plant is extant in the
variants hymblicas, hymlic, and hemlic. Comparative
data show that b in hymblicas is not an intrusive
consonant caused by the presence of m. Nor is it
necessary to regard hemlic as a Kentish form. Rather we
have three related roots: hym- and hem-, connected by
ablaut, and hymb-. Those roots are in turn reminiscent of
han-, hen-, hun-, designating 'death, poison; mutilation.'
The suffix -lic, also attested in OE cerlic 'charlock,' is
probably akin to Gmc -ling, occurring in G Schierling
'hemlock.' The original form of the Old English word may
have been *hem-l-ing or *hem-l-ig, with -ig as in lfig 'ivy.'
The suffix -lic was rare and unproductive, whence folk
etymological substitutions, one of which yielded ModE
hemlock.
The sections are devoted to 1) the existing
etymologies of hemlock, 2) the origin of hem-, and 3) the
history of -lock.
1. OE hymblicx first occurs in the Epinal Glosses
(700), where it is paired with L cicuta, for which Old
English glosses also offer wodewistle, literally 'a whistle
(that is, stalk) of madness.' Wod- had the same root as
the divine name Wodan. Could wodewistle originally
mean Wodan's 'whistle'? Religious connotations have
507
Adz(e) Adz(e)

been detected in HENBANE as well. The form hemlic

surfaced in the year 1000. This chronology gave rise to
the idea that e in hemlock is of Kentish origin (the
earliest example of y > e in Kent is dated 958; see Luick
[1964:sec 183], SB [1965:sec 31, note 1], and esp A.
Campbell
[1959:secs 289-90]). The etymology of hemlock re-
volves around the following questions: 1) What is the
relation of hym- to hem-? 2) What is the etymological
value of b in hymblicx? 3) Since the word hemlic consists
of two parts, what is hem— hymb-, and what is -lik? 4)
Insofar as luc in hemeluc dates to 1265, while hem(e)lok
turned up for the first time in 1400, how did -lic change
to -lock?
The etymologists of the pre-Skeat era (Minsheu,
Skinner, Junius, Lemon, Todd in Johnson-Todd,
Richardson, and Wedgwood) offer no hypotheses on the
derivation of hemlock. Minsheu gives Wüterich as the
German name of the plant. Craig's dictionary (1848-49)
mentions water hemlock, which it misidentifies with
cowbane (cowbane is Cicuta virosa, in contradistinction
to hemlock 'Cicuta maculata'). The roots of all species of
Cicuta are a deadly poison.
The earliest guess on the origin of hemlock belongs
to Webster (1828), who suggested, although without
certainty, that hemlock may have meant hem-lock
'border-plant, a plant growing in hedges.' His etymology
508
Adz(e) Adz(e)

disappeared from Webster's dictionary only in 1890.

Ettmüller (1851:453, 463) and Koch (1867:321)
conjecture the same. Ett-müller offered the series
*himan—*ham—*hemun— *humen 'heap up, raise up;
cover, hide; hinder, hamper,' which he believed to have
recognized in Go himins 'heaven.' He cited hem 'leather
sock; stripped-off clothes' (the language of this word is
not specified, but cf OE hemming 'boot' and OFr
hemminge 'leather sack; boot'). With some hesitation he
proposed to interpret hemlock as meaning 'border
plant.' But such a gloss name would fit plantain rather
than hemlock, which thrives not on the roadside but in
waste places, on banks, and under walls.
Mueller said, in the first edition of his dictionary,
that hem- is hardly the same element as haem ~ ha m
often occurring in plant names, and in the second edition
he only amplified Ettmüller's gloss. Almost at the same
time, Chambers's dictionary cited, with a question mark,
hxm and healm 'stubble, from the straw-like appearance
of the withered plant' as a possible cognate of hem-. Is
this what Mueller meant by haem and ha m? OE he(a)lm
'haulm' never appears without l. Stratmann (see
Stratmann3) compared hem- in hemlock with ME heme
(related to MHG hem) 'malign,' but, like his
predecessors, added a question mark. He cited the
phrase heme and hine. Although the Middle High
German adjective has the meaning 'rebellious, evil,' the
509
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Middle English phrase contains a different word. Bradley,

in his revision of Stratmann's dictionary, wrote he me
and hine and glossed he me (with a long vowel) 'from ?
ha m; man, head of family' (so 'the head of a family and
his domestics'). MED says 'household servants.'
Skeat1 acknowledged that the meaning of ME hem
was "not quite certain" but added that hem-in hemlock
"still means something bad." Later he proposed a
different etymology (Skeat [190710:340]). He pointed to
the similarity of hymb- in OE hymblicx to Lith kumpas
'crooked.' He would have offered what seems to be an
acceptable solution if he had not stopped at the meaning
of kum pas, which suggested to him "that hymblicx
meant precisely 'crooked-like'; from the remarkably
angular growth of its jointed branches." Crookedness
could not have been chosen as the most conspicuous
feature of a plant like hemlock. (In the last edition of
CED, that etymology has been omitted.)
The problem of -b- also remains. Holthausen (AeEW)
wondered whether hymlice was not related to OE
hymele 'hop' (a plant name). His shaky suggestion,
repeated in W3, WNWD3, and Barnhart, should be
abandoned. The only basis for Holthausen's etymology is
the phonetic similarity between the two words. Despite
several authoritative statements to the contrary, OE
hymele (related to OI humli) is isolated in Germanic.
Comparison with Nynorsk hamla and humla 'grope
510
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around' has little value. Climb and grope are not

synonyms, and just as hemlock is not another angular
plant, hymele is not another climber. Hymele seems to
have reached Europe from the East (see a detailed dis-
cussion in ESSI VIII:141-45), whereas hemlock is a native
plant, and its name is probably also native. Folk
etymology may have connected hymele and hymlic (it
would be strange if it did not: one plant kills, the other
deprives people of the power of reasoning), but that late
association has nothing to do with their origin.
2. The guesses on the origin of hemlock are the result
of a rare oversight, for the etymology of its closest kin LG
Hemern (OHG hemera, MHG hemer, hemere, LG Hemer
and Hemern 'hellebore' = G Nieswurz 'Helleborus L.' and
'Veratrum L.') was explained long ago. Its cognate in
Proto-Slavic is *chemeru ~ *chemera. Here are the mean-
ings of some of the reflexes of *chemeru in the modern
Slavic languages (ESSI IV:52-53): 'misfortune,' 'poison,'
'devil,' 'bitterness,' 'chagrin, disgust, fury,' 'pus in a
wound; gall.' They designate numerous diseases of
human beings and animals and a certain poisonous
plant, which often has a suffix: for example, chemeritsa
and chemerka; see ESSI
IV:52-53 and Vasmer IV:331-32 (chemer), where Bal-
tic cognates are cited. Apparently, we have the reflexes
of Balto-Slavic and Germanic *kem-er, with kem-
meaning 'poison; sickness; injury.'
511
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In Germanic, many words may be related to hem- in

G Hem-er and E hem-lock. Although the derivation of
some of them is debatable, a provisional list is worth
giving. OHG hamm 'infirm' (only in Otfrid III, 4:8), OHG
hamal 'wether, castrated ram' (ModG Hammel, from the
adjective hamal 'mutilated;' the same element occurs in
OI ha-malkyrni 'some sort of grain,' possibly without
bristles); MHG hem 'rebellious, evil,' mentioned above
(ModG hämisch). The confusion of MHG hemisch and
heimisch that troubles Seebold (KS: hämish) has an exact
parallel in the examples cited by Siebs (1892:151;
alongside Fru Hinn—about whom see HENBANE—Freund
Hein 'devil' is known; he is Old Henry's German
counterpart). The meaning of MHG hamen and hemmen
(ModG hemmen 'hinder, hamper'), E hem, and OI hemja
'hold back, restrain' accords well with the idea of
debilitating and castrating ('mutilate, cut off' and
'delimit, enclose, hinder'). E ham 'plot of pasture or
meadow land' and ham 'hollow or bend of the knee,'
later 'thigh of a hog used for food,' may belong here too.
Both compound verbs with ham- (hamstring and ham-
shackle) refer to injury. Less clear is the origin of E
hamper (v).
In the zero grade, we find E humble-(bee) and E reg
humble 'hornless' (said about cows). However natural it
may seem to explain humble-bee, bumblebee's twin, as a
humming insect, such an explanation is almost certainly
512
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wrong, for the Proto-Indo-European root of humble- is

*kem- ~ *kom. ESSI IV:145-46 and X:169-71 supports the
idea of the onomatopoeic origin of *kem— *kom-, but
strong faith is needed to hear [kem] or [kom] in the
sounds made by bees and mosquitoes. In the past,
humble-bees were often confused with drones, and it
was known that drones did not collect honey. A humble-
bee is thus 'a defective bee,' belonging with a hornless
cow and a castrated ram.
The protocow of Scandinavian mythology was called
Audhumla. The element humla corresponds to E humble
'hornless' and a few similar adjectives in Germanic
dialects (OED; its cognates in Baltic and Slavic are less
certain; see Sabaliauskas
[1964:59-61], and ESSI VII:18-19, XI:174-75). A.
Noreen (1918) glossed the name as 'rich hornless
cow,' which makes little sense, even though according to
Icelandic tradition, Bükolla, the hornless cow, was
endowed with magical properties (see especially
Uspenskij [2000:121-22]). In Icelandic,
-hum(b)l- 'hornless' has not been recorded.
Three words were spelled audr in Old Icelandic.
Besides audr 'riches' (and audr 'fate'), audr 'desolate;
desert' occurred. The Younger Edda tells that when the
frost surrounding the world thawed, it became a cow
called Audhumla. Her milk fed the primordial giant, and
she licked the first man out of the salty ice blocks. She
513
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was probably 'the destroyer of the desert.' Ebbinghaus

(1989b:4) discussed similar possibilities (aud- 'wasteland'
and 'wealth') in deciphering the cognomenta of two
Germanic matronae and glossed AVDRINEHAE ~
AVTHRINEHAE as 'matres of the waste land.' Kure
(2003:315) developed a theory that the universe of the
Scandinavian myth was created from "a scream" and
understood Audhumla as 'abundance of humming.' This
is a fanciful etymology.
The above survey shows that -b- appears in the ham
— hum- words too regularly to be dismissed as a
parasitic sound caused by the presence of m-, as in E
nimble and fumble. We have E hamble versus OE
hamelian, along with E humble-bee, and OHG humbal
versus Du hommel. Even Audhumla had the doublet
Audhumbla. Go hamfs* 'maimed,' Lith kumpas 'crooked,'
the Sanskrit glossary word kumpah 'with maimed hands,'
and Gk oraußcic; 'bow-legged' (IEW:918) make it clear
that the labial consonant does not depend on the posi-
tion between m and l. H. Schröder (1910:16-21) included
a few more words (for example, E hive) in his entry on
hamble, humbal, and others, but those already cited
point unambiguously to *han— *hen-~ *hun- and
*hamb- ~ *humf-, all of them referring to death, poison,
and mutilation.
It seems as though b were caused by the presence of
m, but in reality *n probably changed to m before b or f,
514
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and the result was *han- ~ *hanf-, and so on. We find

that root in hymblicx and hymlic. Hemlic may be a
Kentish form, but more probably hymlic and hemlic were
variants of the same word, whereas hymblicx is an
independent variant of that plant name.
3. The second part of hemlock is more obscure than
the first. Mahn (in W [1864]), compared hemlock with
charlock, another name of wild mustard. Old English had
cydilc, cedelc, and cyrlic (again with the alternation e ~
y). In Modern English, charlock coexists with kedlock
(OED also cites cadlock, first recorded in 1655) and reg
carlock, carlick, kerlock, kellock, kedlock, and kilk. Its
cognates are G Kettich, LG ködich, and Dan (reg) kiddik
(H. Schröder [1909:588]). In both hemlock and charlock, -
lock appeared relatively late. It is -lic and -lc that need an
explanation.
In Partridge's opinion (1958), "the suffix -lic suggests
that the Old English noun was originally an adjective:
perhaps hyml ce is a contraction of *hymelel c '(a herb)
like the hop vine of the bryony or the convolvulus,' OE
hymele being applied indifferently to all three vine-like
or climbing herbs. There may even be some obscure pun
on the dead-liness of the hemlock—and of the products
of the hop." Partridge did not elaborate on the nature of
the pun.
Mueller1 believed that -lic was OE le ac 'leek,' as in
garlick, for leac sometimes referred to any garden herb.
515
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Even UED says that -lock may be a weakened form of OE

leac 'vegetable,' as in leac-tun 'kitchen
garden,' though Skeat (1887 = 1892:424) realized
that -lice can hardly be -leek, and OED remarks (at
charlock): "There appears no basis for the guess that the
second syllable is le ac, 'leek'."
In the first edition of his dictionary, Skeat explained -
ley in barley as a reflex of le ac, but convinced by
Murray's etymology of barley in OED (-ley is from -llk, as
in the suffix -ly; the original meaning of the word was
'like barley'), he considered the possibility that -lic in
hemlic was of the same origin. However, the whole point
is that the English suffix -lic acquired a Scandinavian
pronunciation [lij] and lost -k, while -leek and garlic
show k where it has always been.
The German for 'hemlock' is Schierling (OHG
skerning and skeriling), now, following A. Kuhn, usually
explained as 'a plant growing on dung heaps,' from
*skarna- 'dung.' The correctness of that etymology is not
at issue here, but -ling may shed light on -lock. The
ancient Germanic suffix -ling is especially common in
German. J. Grimm (1890:370) cited a long list of the
names of mushrooms ending in -ling. This suffix is a
contraction of *-l-inga (< PIE -*lo-e -ko). Apparently, -ling
alternated with -ig in plant names, at least in English. For
instance, ivy descended from Ifig (Old High German had
ebah: see IVY). It must have been easy to borrow L radic-
516
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and turn it into OE rxdic 'radish,' for the word sounded

like rxd-ic.
Hemlic probably goes back to hem-l-ic, a variant of
*hem-l-ing or *hem-l-ig. For some reasons, -l-ic has been
recorded only in hem-l-ic and cyr-l-ic (with its doublet
cyr-l-c), but by the year 700 the suffix had become
unproductive and dead; hence the recorded forms
ending in -luk and -lok. An association with lock is due to
folk etymology, as happened in wedlock, killock 'stone
used as an anchor' (1630), and so forth. If Skeat's
etymology of fetlock, from fet-l-ock (with a double
suffix), is right, we have a case reminiscent of hem-l-ic.
Hemlic
(hymlic, hymblic) is 'a destructive, poisonous plant.'
The first syllable "means something bad," as Skeat put it,
and the second is a suffix whose meaning was forgotten
before the settlement of Britain by Germanic tribes,
assuming that hemlic and hym(b)lic were in use
alongside hemera from time immemorial (Liberman
[2001b:135-39]).
HENBANE (1265)
The first element of the plant name henbane seems
to go back to the root *hen- 'death,' preserved in the
names of places, people, and gods. Originally, henbane
was called hen-bell 'death bell.' Once the meaning *hen-
'murder, death' had been forgotten, an association of
hen- with the bird hen arose, henbell became opaque (no
517
Adz(e) Adz(e)

connection can be established between hens and bells),

and the second element was replaced with -bane. The
resulting compound is tautological from the historical
point of view ('death-murder' or 'death-death'). The
belief that henbane is particularly poisonous to domestic
fowls is due to an attempt to rationalize the otherwise
incomprehensible word.
The sections are devoted to 1) the existing
etymologies of henbane and 2) the ancient meaning of
hen- and the substitution of -bane for -bell.
1. Henbane, the common name of the plant
Hyoscyamus niger, has no recognizable cognates except
ME hendwale (one 1450 citation in OED; dwale meant
'sleeping potion') and ModG Hühnertod (about which
see below). F hanebane (a variant of hennebanne),
which De Morgan (1869) cites as a related form, is a 14 th-
century borrowing from English. The extant Old English
name of the plant is belene, a migratory word. OED says
that OE hennebelle designates the same plant.
The earliest citations of henne-belle, that is, hen-bell,
go back to the year 1000 and then disappear until they
turn up again in the herbals of 1500 and 1597, never to
come to life again. The gloss sim-phoniaca does not
explain -belle, for the resemblance between a calyx and
a bell is a trivial fact (compare bluebell, bellflower, and
the like). But the flowers of henbane (assuming that we
are speaking about the same plant) do not resemble
518
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bells, and the word henne-belle looks like a blend of OE

*hennebana and belene, in which folk etymology turned
belene into belle 'bell.' See some suggestions on this
point in Foerste (1964b:142). Smythe Palmer (1883)
thought of an earlier form *henge-belle, but his guess
has no foundation. The sentence from the LSceboc (in
translation: "This plant which... some people call henne-
belle"), dated 1000, suggests that the word had limited
currency.
OED explains henbell as hen + bell. A similar
etymology has been applied to henbane from
hen(n)eban(e): hen + bane. CD asserts that "the herb acts
as a deadly poison to man and most animals, and is
especially destructive to domestic fowls (whence the
name). Swine are said to eat it with impunity." Seeing
that the narcotic and poisonous properties of henbane
have been known for a long time, it is surprising that
hens were chosen as its particularly vulnerable victims,
the more so as henbane grows on waste ground and on
rubbish about villages and old houses (EB 11 specifies: cas-
tles), where hens hardly ever stray, while ducks and
geese are attracted by ponds rather than rubbish heaps,
old castles, and wasteland. Skeat glossed henbane as
'fowl-poison' in all the editions of his dictionary. Wyld's
'hen's pest' (UED) is similar. The names of poisonous
plants like E dogbane, cowbane, and even wolf's bane (a
calque from Greek via Latin) or Russ liutik 'buttercup' (<
519
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liut-'evil, terrible'), a possible calque of L (Ranunculus)

sceleratus, make more sense than henbane, as does
chicken weed, a counterpart of the notorious sparrow
grass < asparagus, admittedly a noninformative name.
Skinner thought that henbane is a calque of Gk
UoOKtitfjlOj 'pig bean' ("swine are said to eat it with
impunity") and traced -bane to bean. But he failed to
explain the first part. His editor Thomas Henshaw
retained hen-beans, because the flowers of this plant
"are not unlike to a bean in its blossom," to quote the
translation of Skinner's remarks in Gazophylacium. He
gave the German parallel Saubohne 'henbane' (now no
longer used in this meaning: KS), a calque of the Greek
word, possibly suggested by F jusquiame or Ital gius-
quiamo, both continuing the Greek-Latin name, and
offered the French and Latin glosses la mort aux oyes,
anserum venenum ('goose-bane,' as it were). Those
glosses amused Lemon, a lexicographer who always
sought the Greek origins of English words. He was
content with deriving hen-, or rather (h)en-, from Gk ioj
'poison'; the result appeared to be *hion-bean or *ion-
bean 'baneful bean.' Such is the short history of the
question.
2. In all likelihood, henbane does not mean 'fowl
poison, hen's pest' even if this plant is deadly to
domestic fowls. MA (267) say, without references, that
henbane was "employed by Danish chicken-thieves to
520
Adz(e) Adz(e)

stun their victims." Etymologists have overlooked an

important contribution to the history of Germanic
religion that is relevant to henbane. Siebs (1892)
reconstructed a Germanic god of death whose Old High
German name he gave as *Henno Wotan (= Mercury).
Independent of Siebs, Gallee (1901) came to the
conclusion that hen (hin)-
~ han- ~ hun- at one time meant 'death' (indepen-
dent, because he missed Siebs's article and learned
about it only after the appearance of his own work;
hence the sequel: Gallee [1902]). Siebs returned to this
subject many years later (1930).
The traces of hen- ~ han- ~ hun- show up in old
proper names, in place names, in magic formulas like
MHG id henne (it corresponds exactly to E oh, boy!, for
boy, too, meant 'bogeyman' in addition to 'little brother,
servant'; see BOY), swear words, mythological names
like LG Fru Hinne, LG henne-kled 'shroud' and LG
henbedde 'deathbed.' In some varieties of Dutch, the
plant Solanum Dulcamara is called henneblomen (-
blomen 'flower'), and in others, doodebezen 'death
berries.' Haonblom, hunen-bere, and hunschkraut also
occur. Both Siebs and Gallee derive hen- from the root
*ken-, as in Gk Koavco 'kill' (aorist 2: eravov).
In a short article that only Siebs (1930) and Flasdieck
(1937:279, and note 3) seem to have noticed, Sarrazin
(1911) detected the root hen- 'death' in numerous words
521
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that ostensibly have no relation to hens. Among other

things, he discussed Herne the hunter, whom
Shakespeare mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor
(IV:4). Siebs (1930:58-59) developed his idea in detail,
but Flas-dieck (1937:333-36) showed that Herne and
Henne are incompatible from the phonetic point of view.
He admitted (1937:278-80, 282) that the Germanic
god Henno is a shadowy figure but accepted the
existence of Henno Wodan.
Because of taboo, the names of chthonic deities are
often changed beyond recognition, which makes
isolating them in modern words difficult. For example,
hein- (in Heinrich) may be a doublet of hen-, but this is
not certain. G Hain is apparently a continuation of
Hagene (Guntert [1919:117]), while attempts to discover
the root hein- in G Heimchen 'cricket' and connect
crickets with the souls of either unborn or departing
souls fail to convince.
See Menzel (1861), Much (1932:48), KM (rewritten
in KS but still with reference to Much) and MOOCH,
sec 2.
Sarrazin's list of English place names beginning with
Hen- is of special interest. Many of them go back to OE
hean- 'high' (accusative) and hinde 'hind, doe,' but some
defy an explanation. Neither
Ekwall (1960) nor A. H. Smith (1956) was aware of

522
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the works by Sarrazin, Siebs, and Gallee. Sarrazin

suggested that hen- in henbane meant 'death.' This is a
reasonable hypothesis.
The oldest name of henbane evidently was henbell,
whatever the origin of the second element -belle 'bell'
may have been. Hens do not wear bells, and, as pointed
out, the flowers of henbane are not bell-shaped. The
meaning of hen- was forgotten, and -bane replaced bell.
From the historical point of view, henbane is a tautology
('death-death,' 'death-murder,' or 'poison-death')—not a
rare phenomenon in the development of disguised and
even transparent compounds; see SLOWWORM for a de-
tailed discussion of tautological compounds. G
Hühnertod is also the result of folk or pseu-dolearned
etymology (HDA). Siebs (1930:61) cited Himmelloch 'a
hole in heaven' and Hühnerloch 'hens' hole' for
Hinnerloch 'hell,' a more nonsensical word than
Hühnertod. Förster (1917:130, note 4) cited G
Hühnerlochkraut.
Henno was not the only name of Wodan ~ Wuotan
used in the West Germanic popular flower lore. Another
one may have been related to OI Njotr: see Bierbaumer's
explanation of the Old English plant name Forne tes folm
(1974). Some Dutch plant names beginning with hemd-
and Danish plant names beginning with hund- may also
contain the root *hen— *hun-. Perhaps hen- initially
referred to the medicinal properties of hennebelle, a
523
Adz(e) Adz(e)

painkiller (for example, it alleviated tooth pain). See

Alessio's comments on L vaticina 'henbane' and its
religious connotations (1969:92-94). But the origin of the
name hennebelle as a pharmaceutical term is, on the
whole, unlikely.
*Ken- had a double, namely, *kent- 'pierce.' The root
*kent- seems to be present in G Himbeere < hindberi ~
hintberi 'raspberry,' related to OE hind-berie ~
hindberige: Hermodsson (1990) (Liberman
[2001b:132-35]).

A Note on hebenon in Hamlet I, 5:62 The Ghost tells

Hamlet that Claudius poured "juice of cursed hebenon"
into his ears. Such a plant does not exist and guesses
about the origin of Shakespeare's word have been
numerous. Even in the 17th century no one seemed to
know for sure what substance was meant, for alongside
Hebenon of First Folio (1623), Hebona occurs in the
Quartos (see the forms in J. Wilson [1934:380]). Furness
(1877:101-02) lists the earlier conjectures: 1) hebenon is
the metathesized form of henebon 'henbane,' 2)
hebenon stands for ebony, regardless of whether the
English or some Romance word occurred in the
manuscript (Nares was among the supporters of this
view), 3) perhaps hemlock was intended, 4) heb-enon
may have been a misspelling of enoron, one of the
names, at that time, of Solanum maniacum, called also
524
Adz(e) Adz(e)

deadly nightshade. The equations hebe-non = henbane

or ebony can be supported by references to other
authors of the Elizabethan epoch.
Since 1877 hebenon has been discussed in several
publications. Nicholson (1880-82) advanced a series of
arguments against the henbane theory and proposed to
identify hebenon with yew (E yew < OE Iw ~ eow; G Eibe
< OHG iwa; OI yr). Among his followers were W. Harrison
(1880-82) and Sigismund (1885). The latter, surprisingly,
did not mention his predecessors, whose works he only
summarized, and thus misled German students of
Shakespeare. Even F. Schröder (1941:7) treated
Sigismund as an authority on the meaning of hebe-non.
Nicholson and Harrison insisted on the impossibility of
metathesis in Shakespeare. However, Furnivall's
examples, sent to Harrison in a letter and quoted by him
(p 320), show that syllables in henebon were occasionally
transposed in the 17th century. More to the point are
medical considerations. Shakespeare's contemporaries
often mentioned the deleterious effect of the yew
concoction, and the symptoms the Ghost described
match those we find in doctors' works. OED offers an
informative entry on hebenon, hebon, and hebona
without taking sides, whereas CD says: "Thought to be a
corruption of henbane." SG has "(?) yew."
Although Nicholson and Harrison made a strong
point for hebenon = yew, the case was not closed.
525
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Thiselton-Dyer (1916:506) found the equation hebenon =

henbane the most plausible of all. Bradley (1920) shared
his opinion. He, like most of his predecessors, refused to
ascribe the coincidence between juice of cursed hebenon
and Marlowe's juice of Hebon to chance (Jew of Malta
III:4, 98; in some editions, 101). Since the English word
ebon was often written with h-, Shakespeare (Bradley re-
marked) may have not distinguished between heb-enon
and henbane. Both Thiselton-Dyer and Bradley
emphasized that, in the 16th century, henbane was
believed to be deadly. Finally, according to Montgomery
(1920), Shakespeare did not confuse henbane with
(h)ebony, for "hebenon or hebona has its proper sense of
ebony." "Shakespeare, sharing a common view, regarded
lignum vitae as a species of ebony and used the general
term for the particular. Following a well-known tradition
he then attributed to the 'juice of hebona' (that is,
guaiac) the power of producing, in certain cases, a
loathsome and leprous-like disease" (p. 306).
Many years later, the scale was again tipped in favor
of henbane. R. Simpson (1947:582) pointed out that
guaicum is the resin of a tree, while the Ghost mentions
the juice. "The old alchemists would not be likely to use
the term 'juice' loosely for two such distinctive products.
Next it was a distilment and again the pharmacologists
would

526
Adz(e) Adz(e)

distil henbane but not guiacum [sic]. In addition

henbane in a fraction of a grain is a very potent poison.
But the medicinal dose of guiacum [sic] is 5-15 grains."
Simpson did not discuss the idea that hebenon could
mean 'yew.'
The case is hopeless because it rests on two ir-
reconcilable propositions: 1) Shakespeare must have had
a definite plant in mind, and he was an expert in plants
and poisons, 2) no plant was called hebenon. It is no
wonder that Jenkins (1982:457) found it "probably a
mistake to seek to equate heb-enon with any familiar
plant. No doubt Shakespeare drew on what he had
heard or read of well-known poisons, but he surely
relied (like Marlowe, to judge from his context) on a
suggestion of the fabulous to intensify the horror."
Other editors are equally noncommittal. Only
P. Edwards (1985:108) refers to Simpson. Most
popular books, like Savage (1923:150), equate heb-
enon with yew. However, from the standpoint of
medicine and pharmacology, henbane would be a better
gloss for hebenon. Such is also Dent's opinion (1971:63-
64). Of the works dealing specifically with Shakespeare's
flora, only Grindon (1883:47, note) deserves mention,
for, as he says, he had proposed the equation hebenon =
yew twenty years before Nicholson and Harrison.
Hebenon was probably henbane, but it remains a
mystery why Marlowe and Shakespeare did not say so in
527
Adz(e) Adz(e)

plain (Elizabethan) English.

HOBBLEDEHOY (1540)
Hobbledehoy occurred in numerous variants. The
first element has been compared to E hobble, E hoyden,
OF hubi (the past participle of hubir 'cause to thrive'), OF
hobe ~ E hobby, F hobel ~ hoberel ~ hob(e)ran 'country
squire,' F hober 'remove from place to place,' Sp hombre
'today,' and some nonexistent Dutch words. Those
etymologists seem to have been on the right track who
understood hob- as a pet name for Robert, which was
also one of the names of the Devil. The second element is
less clear, but the whole may have started as *Robert-le-
Roy and *Rob-le-Roy. When Hob- was substituted for
Rob-, Roy followed suit, which resulted in the
meaningless jingle *hobert-le-hoy and later
hobbledehoy under the influence of folk etymology, as
though the hobbledehoy had an awkward and clumsy
gait ("hobbled"). In its present form, hobbledehoy has an
'infix' -de-. Both -de- and -te- often occur in the names of
devils and sprites (Flibber-ti-gibbet and the like). These
infixes have the same function as -a- in ragamuffin, so
that hobbledehoy turns out to be an extended form. It
can be glossed approximately as 'devil-a-devil'.
The sections are devoted to 1) the attested forms of
hobbledehoy and the early attempts to explain the
word's origin,

528
Adz(e) Adz(e)

2) Hob as a pet name for Robert and the

development of *Robert-le-Roy to hobbledehoy, 3) a
short summary of the proposed etymology and the
further history of -dehoy, and 4) the role of -de- ~ -te- as
infixes used in extended forms.
1. The recorded variants of the noun hobbledehoy
(1540) are unusually many. It was spelled with two
hyphens or without any and as two or three separate
words. The first element appeared in the forms
hob(b)le-, hob(b)a-, as well as hobbe-, hobby-, hobo-,
hobbi-, hobbard-, and hab(b)er- (OED; a similar array of
forms appears in EDD). Hobble-, hobbe-, and hobber(d)-
reflect different pronunciations rather than the
instability of spelling; this is especially true of hobble and
hobber-. The middle syllable could be -de-, -di-, -dy-, -da-,
and -ty-.
According to OED, hobbledehoy is "[a] colloquial
word of unsettled form and uncertain origin. One
instance in hobble- occurs in 1540; otherwise hober-,
hobber-, are the prevailing forms before 1700; these,
with the forms hobe— hobby-, suggest that the word is
analogous in structure to Hoberdidance, hobbididance,
and hobidy-booby, q.v.: cf. also HOBERD. Some of the
variants are evidently due to the effort of popular
etymology to put some sense into an odd and absurd-
looking word. It is now perh[aps] most frequently
associated with hobble, and taken to have ludicrous
529
Adz(e) Adz(e)

reference to an awkward and clumsy gait." A brief

mention of the fact that Ray, Jamieson, Forby, and Skeat
tried to explain hobbledehoy follows that summary. The
derivation of hobbledehoy from F hob(e)rau 'hobby' (a
kind of hawk) is then called into question, but OED offers
no etymology of its own. Hobbididance is a fiend like
flibbertigibbet; OED has two citations for it (1603 and
1605). Hoberd (one citation, 1450) is a term of reproach.
Hobidy-booby (1720, also one citation) possibly means
'scarecrow.'
W (1864) cites E reg hobbledygee (without a ref-
erence, but the source is Halliwell) 'with a limping
movement' and suggests that we compare it with
hobbledehoy. The main question is whether the tie
between hobbledehoy and hobble is original. Chance
(1887:524) answered it in the affirmative. A lad from
fourteen upward, he says, "is uncertain, physically and
morally, whether he will turn out ill or well. And besides
this he frequently has an awkward and shambling gait,
to which the term may more especially have been
applied." But OED is probably right in stating that
hobbledehoy is only now most frequently associated
with hobble. Before 1700, the prevailing forms were
those with hoberand hobber. Hobbledygee and hobble-
de-poise may allude to unsteady movement, but it does
not follow that hobbledehoy belongs with them. The
picture becomes even more blurred if hubble-te-shives
530
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(Halliwell), a synonym of hubbleshow or hubbleshoo

'commotion, hubbub' (1515; OED), is taken into account.
It is not necessary to reduce all hobble-and hubble-
words to a single etymon (and no one has tried to
connect hubble-te-shives and hobbledehoy).
Most early conjectures on the origin of hobbledehoy
mentioned but not summarized in OED are unrevealing.
Ray (whom Skeat and Forby quote) derived hobbledehoy
from Sp hombre de hoy 'man of today'— a meaningless
gloss. Forby (1830:161-62) combined OF hubi, the past
participle of hubir 'cause to thrive by wholesome diet,'
and hui 'today' (as in F aujour d'hui) and obtained 'one
well thriven [sic] now,' that is, 'well-grown lad.' "The
change of vowels," he says, "is absolutely nothing. It
may have been made after the word became ours, for
the rhyme's sake ('hobi-de-hoy, / Neither man nor
boy')." Wilbraham suggested to Forby that Hobby is
Robin, and hoy is hoyt, or hoyden (see his comments on
Hobbity Hoy in Wilbraham [1821:28]). According to his
etymology, hobbledehoy is Robin the hoyden, or hoyt.
Forby treated Wilbra-ham's suggestion as probable:
"...by a metathesis in the last word, we come
immediately to hobbite-hoy." Jamieson thought that
hobbledehoy is a French word and cited F hobreau (as it
occurs in Cotgrave) 'country squire' ("hobbledehoy has
been undoubtedly borrowed from the French

531
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Hobereau;" note the use of undoubtedly, so common in

works on word origin).
Ker derived hobbledehoy from (what he called
Dutch) hoop beldt de hoy 'it is by being formed into the
heap (by heapings) that grass matures into hay,'
implying, as he explains, that "with the various
gradations of heapings and gradual increas-ings of size
(well known to haymakers), grass in the last and largest
of such forms, becomes hay, and is considered fit for its
intended use." The result is that hobbledehoy is 'he
whose increase of size portends a near approach to the
maturity of manhood, neither man nor boy' (Ker 1837,
I:84).
Skeat (1885-87:302-03 = 1901:731-32) traced
hobbledehoy to F hobel (= hoberel, hob(e)ran), origi-
nally 'country squire,' which he misunderstood as
'villain,' and de hoy 'today,' that is, he partly repeated
the etymologies of Ray and Forby. His translation of the
compound from French was 'vile fellow of today.'
Neither the gloss nor the contrived etymology has much
appeal (see Chance's critique [1887:523]). Hobel, in
Skeat's opinion, "is a diminutive of OFr. hobe, a hobby,
and is allied to the E. hobby, a sparrow-hawk, a hawk of
small size and inferior kind, whence it passed into a term
of contempt." In the last edition of his concise dic-
tionary, not a trace of that early etymology is left
(hobbledehoy is said to be of unknown origin). Skeat
532
Adz(e) Adz(e)

called hoy an unmeaning suffix and mentioned Sc hoy

'shout' (noun and verb). But in the full edition, he again
cited (for comparison) F hober 'remove from place to
place' (Cotgrave's gloss) that he mentioned in his early
article and added hopptihopp 'a giddy, flighty, eccentric
man' (from Alsace) and hupperling 'boy who jumps
about and cannot be still' (from Low German). However,
he ended his entry with reference to hobby 'pet name
for Robert,' as did Wilbraham, and herein lies the most
important clue to the origin of hobbledehoy.
2. Hob 'sprite, elf' is short for Rob. This name also
happens to be the first element of hobgoblin. Robin
Godfellow (English) and Knecht Ruprecht (German) are
medieval names of evil spirits (see ROBIN). It is
reasonable to assume that the spelling hoberdehoy
renders hoberd-de-hoy and that hobbledehoy is a folk
etymological reshaping of that form. In 1557 Thomas
Tusser published the book Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good
Husbandrie. In one of its chapters, a human life is
divided into twelve periods, each lasting seven years.
The chapter begins so (see it in Tusser 1878:138, 60/3):
"The first seuen years, bring vp a childe; / The next, to
learning, for waxing too wilde; / The next, keepe under
sir hob-bard-de-hoy."
Tusser's verse has often been discussed in con-
nection with hobbledehoy (Johnson-Todd, Halliwell,

533
Adz(e) Adz(e)

W.W.E.T. [1852], H.B.F. [1872], Skeat [1885-87:302-

03]). Skeat understood under as an adverb (keepe
under / sir hobbard-de-hoy, not keep [the child] / under
sir hobbard-de-hoy). No other reading makes sense. The
meaning then is: until the age of seven, bring up (take
care of) your child; at the age between seven and
fourteen, teach him, lest he get out of hand; at the age
between fourteen and twenty-one, suppress Sir Hobbard
de Hoy. Sir Hobbard de Hoy is the Devil, the call of sex.
Tusser had a clear notion of when lust should be
satisfied, when it is too late to start, and when it stops
being attractive. Evidently, before a young man turns
twenty-one, it should be kept in check. Hobbard is a
side-form of Robert. (Perhaps a trace of the ancient
devilry can be discerned in E reg hobblety-hoy 'large,
unmanageable top': Brocket.)
The second half of the puzzle is -dehoy. Hoy, as
Wilbraham pointed out, is reminiscent of hoyden,
originally 'rude person of either sex.' Both Richardson
and Ogilvie (ID, 1850) compared them. Skinner believed
that hoyden was an Anglicized variant of MDu heiden
'heathen, gipsy.' OED accepted his etymology for want of
a better one. But in the entry on hoit 'indulge in riotous
and noisy mirth; move clumsily' (the word that is the
basis of hoity-toity 'riotous behavior, romping'), it
follows Brandreth (1885:vii), and hoyden turns up again.
Hoyden, understood as hoitin, with intervocalic d from t,
534
Adz(e) Adz(e)

is more likely than hoyden identified with MDu heiden.

The Celtic derivation of hoyden (see Johnson-Todd, with
additions in Mackay [1877]) has been discredited, for the
Welsh word is apparently a borrowing from English.
Hoyden hardly has any connections with hobbledehoy.
Chance (1887:524) compared hobbledygee ~ hob-
bledehoy with carters' and waggoners' cry gee-haw. (Is
Skeat's hoy, a shout used in Scotland, an attempt to
improve on Chance's hypothesis?) According to him, the
first word meant 'turning right' and the other, 'turning
left.' He visualized balances as in hobberdepoise, with
the needle wobbling about the middle point. Then, he
says, these terms began to be applied to people, but he
was at a loss to explain why a hobbledehoy should be
someone inclining
to the left.
The alliteration binding the elements of hobbledehoy
is obvious. RHD states that hobbledehoy consists of
hoberd (which seems to be correct) + y + hoy for boy,
with b > h for alliteration. The part of the etymology
about -y + boy (as in Forby) lacks foundation. More
persuasive is J. Hughes's conjecture (1954:606). He posits
the initial form *Robert le Roy, that is, King Robert. After
Robert became Hobar(d), Roy followed suit, and its r also
changed to h. The existence of King Robert is probable,
and there must have been an element of humor in giving
Robert Bruce an affectionate name King Hobbe. Hobard-
535
Adz(e) Adz(e)

de-Hoy is a sibling of three fiends mentioned in King

Lear, namely Hobber-didance, Obidicut (also known as
Haberdicut), and Flibbertigibbet. One of them danced,
another may have been fond of cutting capers (Chance
1887:524, note), but hobber in their names, contrary to
Chance's suggestion, did not refer to hopping.
3. The development of hobbledehoy can be re-
constructed so: 1) One of the many names of an evil
spirit, or the Devil, was *Robert le Roy. 2) In popular
speech, Robert was replaced with Hob, Hobard, *Hobert,
and so on. 3) Roy adjusted to the new pronunciation and
became hoy; the result was a piece of alliterative
gibberish. 4) *Hobert le Hoy degraded further into
Hobert-de-hoy, for fiends' names typically had -de- in the
middle. Although a desemanticized word in Tusser's
days, it was still remembered as the Devil's name. 5) Evil
sprites and all kinds of hobgoblins are occasionally repre-
sented as diminutive creatures, and conversely, children
tend to be associated with devils of small stature. A
classic example is the history of imp: from 'offshoot' in
Old English to 'offspring, child' in Middle English, and to
'child of the Devil, little demon' in Early Modern English.
6) When hobert-de-hoy became the designation of an
unwieldy adolescent, hobert turned into hobble, and the
word acquired its present day form.
At a certain time, -dehoy may have begun to lead a
semi-independent existence. Jamieson (1879-82) cited
536
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ride cockerdehoy 'sit on one, or on both the shoulders of

another, in imitation of riding on horseback' and traced
the component -dehoy to F de haut 'from on high.'
Chance (1887:524-25) explained the Scots phrase as
meaning originally 'sit on the left shoulder,' which is
hardly credible. It probably means 'ride in the position of
a cocker (that is, fighter, winner) and shout hoy.' Chance
states that "...the dehoy [in cockerdehoy] ought to have
the same meaning as hobbledehoy." His conclusion is not
self-evident. The question remains open. Like *Hobard le
Roy that changed to Hobard de hoy, to provide the
phrase with alliteration, cock-erdehoy produced a
doublet cockerdecosie.
4. The persuasiveness of what has been said above
(*Hobert le Hoy > Hobert-de-hoy) partly depends on
whether a sufficient number of forms with
unetymological -de- can be shown to have existed. The
number is not great, but some humorous coinages are
noteworthy, because they bring out the productivity of -
de-. One of them is simper-de-cocket (OED gives citations
from 1524 to 1707), a term of relativity mild abuse for a
woman; the original meaning must have been 'simpering
coquette.' Unlike figgle-le-gee 'finical, foppish' (Ja-
mieson), in which -le- is a kind of reduplication -[l-li-]- of
the same type as in la-di-da 'affectedly swell' or fiddle-
de-dee 'nonsense,' the augment -de- in simper-de-cocket

537
Adz(e) Adz(e)

did not arise for phonetic reasons. The same holds for
gobbledegook ~ gobbledygook.
In the study of such compounds, French models from
Cœur de Lion to dent-de-lion (> dandelion) spring to
mind, but -de- probably has more than one source, and
in this respect it shares some common ground with -a-
occurring in ragamuffin, that is, rag-a-muffin (see
RAGAMUFFIN for a detailed discussion of this element).
In musterdevillers, the name of woolen cloth well known
between the 14th and the 16th century (the latest citation
in OED is dated 1564), -de- is from French. But dandiprat
'small 16th-century coin' and 'worthless fellow' (no
recorded examples before 1520) is obscure. Weekley
(1921) wonders: "? Of the same family as Jack Sprat
—'This Jack Prat will go boast / And say he hath cowed
me'—Misogonus, ii, I, c. 1550." Dandy, itself of dubious
origin, surfaced only in the 18th century. Prat could be a
nickname (cf prat 'trick' and prat 'buttock'), or it could
refer to prate and prattle. Neither component of
dandiprat is of French origin, but the whole looks like
dan-di-prat. Parasitic -di- occurs in several words
denoting hubbub, ruckus, that is, noisy commotion and
disturbance in the names of disreputable people and
demons, in one of which it varies with -te-. The form -te-
also speaks against the French origin of this augment.
Here are some of the -de- ~ -te- words: hagger-
decash 'in a disorderly state, topsy-turvy' (Jami-eson),
538
Adz(e) Adz(e)

hubble-te-shives 'confusion,' flipper-de-flapper 'noise

and confusion'; haydegines or heiedegynes (see
Whiter 1822-25, I:699-700 and its other forms in
OED, hay sb4, 2, explained there tentatively as hay de
Guy; hay 'dance'); slabberdegullion 'lout' (a 17th-century
word), tatterdemalian 'ragged person,' griz-zle-de-
mundy 'stupid person who is always grinning,' a
synonym of grinagog; Flibber-ti-gibbet has been
recorded in numerous variants, including Flibberdigibbet
The syllables -de- and -te- are common in Dutch, and
some English words with those augments are probably of
Low German / Dutch rather than Romance origin. In
German we find rumpel-de-pumpel (Sprenger [1887])
and holder-di(e)-polter 'upside down.' Its Dutch cognate
is holder de bolder 'helter-skelter,' whereas Low German
has hulter-(de-)fulter and hullerdebuller, along with
hulterpulter, the last one without an augment (NEW,
holderde-bolder); see more variants in Hauschild (1899-
1900:8/3) and more Low German words of this type in
Koppmann (1899-1900:42.k). The number and variety of
such forms refute Partridge's statement (1949b and
1958) that -de- in hobbledehoy is "euphonic," "an
intrusive, meaningless element introduced for ease of
pronunciation."
H. Schröder (1906) regarded G Schlaraffen- in
Schlaraffenland (the German counterpart of the English
Land of Cockaign) as an extended form schl(ar)aff(e)
539
Adz(e) Adz(e)

from schlaff 'loose, lax.' Schröder's term is Streckform.

See more about such forms at RAGAMUFFIN and
SKEDADDLE. Kluge (1906:401) found a mistake in
Schröder's quotation and hauled him over the coals for
it. However regrettable his mistake might be, it did not
invalidate Schröder's conclusion. The curious thing is
that Schlaraffen developed from slu-de-raffe 'prosperous
idler.' Consequently, one way or the other, Schlaraffen is
an extended form (see esp KS).
French and Low German must have contributed in
equal measure to the spread of -de- in English. Once this
type of word formation came into being, hybrids like
hobble-de-poise 'easily balanced' (half-Germanic, half-
French), modeled on avoirdupois, and coinages like
gobbledygook met with no resistance.
Chance (1887:524, note) remarks that E -de- "is
not used as the French de is. It seems rather to mark
some loose, often ill-definable relation between the two
words which it connects, and may apparently be
translated by with regard to, as or like, in, about, on, or
towards." His formulation will not hold for -a-. However,
-a- and -de- have sometimes been used interchangingly:
cf cater-a-fran and cater-de-flamp (EDD; both mean
'askew'); OED cites raggedemuffin, 1612. (Liberman
[2004b:100-04].)
HOREHOUND (1000)

540
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Hore- in horehound (also spelled hoar-) means

'hoary,' that is, 'white.' The Old English forms hune and
hare hune show that -d in -hound is late and invalidate
attempts to find a connection between this plant name
and dogs (hounds). Final -d may be excrescent (as in
sound). It may also be due to the confusion between
horehound and alyssum (a plant used to cure
hydrophobia) and to the influence of gund 'poison.' One
of the several meanings of the Germanic root *hun-
seems to have been 'dark, black.' Possibly, OE hune was
at first the name of Ballota nigra. If so, hare was chosen
to modify hune only when hune came to designate
Marrubium vulgare.
The sections are devoted to 1) various attempts to
relate horehound to hound, 2) the ancient meaning of
the root hun- and its possible congeners, 3) the proposed
etymology of horehound, and 4) horehound among
other plant names containing reference to poison.
1. At present, etymologists agree that the first part in
OE hare hune 'Marrubium vulgare' means 'hoary'
because the flowers of horehound are white or because
its stem and leaves are covered with white, cottony
pubescence (OED), from ha r 'grayish-white.' Skeat1
concluded that Anglo-Saxons also knew black
horehound, Ballota nigra, for otherwise the phrase
hwite hare hune would not have been coined. As usual in

541
Adz(e) Adz(e)

such cases, the same name has been applied to various

plants (Pheifer [1974:103, note to line 657]).
The impenetrable part of ha re hu ne is -hu ne,
whose reflex is ModE -hound. The form with -d after n-
(hoarhunde) was recorded late (1486) and is of no value
for etymological purposes. However,
an association between horehound and dogs is old,
because horehound was confused with alys-sum, or gold
dust (see the 1551 quotation in OED,
alyssum), a plant whose name suggested that it
could appease anger and even cure hydrophobia. Since
Gk αλυσσον looks like the neuter of αλυσσος 'curing
canine madness,' from the privative a- and λύσσα 'fury;
passionate outburst; rabies' (according to a more
convincing version, it was used to check hiccup: λύζω
'hiccup, etc'), the same healing properties were ascribed
to horehound. "The species alyssum, a native of Spain
and Italy, is called Galen's Madwort, because it was, at
one time, a specific in cases of Hydrophobia" (Booth
[1836:108]). Belief in horehound as a remedy for the bite
of a mad dog was still remembered in the middle of the
19th century; both Richardson and Chambers mention it.
This may explain why hare hune acquired d after e had
been apocopated (but see the end of the entry). On the
other hand, E sound 'auditory signal' and bound
'prepared to go' have excrescent d for no particular
reason (Week-ley [1921]: horehound). Barnhart's
542
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cautious reference to the Old English plant name hundes

tunge as a possible source of d in horehound is an
unsubstantiated guess.
Greppin (1997:72-73) points out that the medieval
Arabic word for 'horehound' was hasisat-al-kalab 'dog's
plant.' He goes on to say that OE hund may have had two
forms, namely hund and *hun because houne sometimes
occurs in Middle English without d. However, ME
houn(e) cannot be projected to early English. The
formant d in hund is Common Germanic (Go hunds* and
its cognates regularly have it), but postnasal d was often
lost in both English and Frisian. Consider the recorded
forms in Modern Frisian dialects (OFr hund, Standard
Frisian houn): hund, hond and huhn, hun, hunn', hun,
hyn, hoen, hyn', huwn(e), houn, hon, and so on (Siebs
[1889:178]). Deriving them from two sources (hund and
hun) is out of the question, whereas the change nd > n is
a common occurrence, though it is more characteristic of
the Scandinavian languages than of West Germanic. Gmc
*Cundaz had a short vowel, and u in English is due to the
lengthening before nd. If *hun had existed, it would
either have retained its form in Middle English and
become modern reg *hun [hun] ~ [hAn] or had
lengthened u in *hune. ME u, when it lengthened before
a single consonant (in so-called open syllables; cf IVY, sec
1) and preserved its length in later periods, yielded o, so

543
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that the form Greppin cites would have been spelled

*ho(o)ne, not houne.
Maimonides could not offer a good explanation of
the Arabic term (Greppin [1997:73]). The difficulty he
faced is typical. Consider E dogwood
(dogberry, dogtree), dogrose, dog poison (= fool's
parsley), and many others. In some cases, 'prefixes' like
dog- and horse- are added to designate inferior varieties
of plants (Hoops [1920:40], Loewe [1938:5253]). In
English plant names, the name of an animal is typically
the first element (foxglove, harebell, cowslip, and so
forth), which makes the derivation of -hound from the
noun hound improbable.
2. Dictionaries offer almost no suggestions on the
origin of horehound. Thomson spells hoarhund and says:
"Saxon hun signified wasting of strength, consumption
for which this plant was esteemed a remedy." This is an
interesting etymology, but Thomson did not indicate his
source (in Somner [1659]), Junius, and Lye hun does not
appear). Skeat1 compared -hun and L cun-ila, Gk Kovf 1r|
'a species of origanum,' and Skt knu j- 'stink' (OE cunelle
~ cunille 'wild thyme,' OS quenela, OHG quenela, and
MHG ~ ModG Quendel are from Latin). If the Greek word
meant 'strong-scented,' little is left of the connection
between wild thyme and horehound, for a strong smell
is not characteristic of Marrubium vulgare. Besides this,
the first vowel is short in Latin and Greek, and, to save
544
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Skeat's etymology, a prolonged grade in Germanic has to

be set up (see below). W (1890) copied Skeat's
etymology, but it did not reemerge in more recent
editions, and Skeat expunged the reference to cunlla
from the fourth edition of his dictionary ("origin
unknown"). OE hare hune was a phrase rather than a
compound, in which hu ne may have been the primary
word, with hare added as a modifier. Conversely, hare
hune originally may have been an indivisible group, with
hu ne abstracted from it. Alongside hare hune, harhune
has been recorded. Holthausen (AeEW) gives hu ne as a
separate entry and says only: "To hu n 'bear cub'?"
Gallee (1901:57) quoted from the Bern Low German
glosses: "hun en crut elleborum." In Old High German
glosses, this plant (krut) is called hunisch wurzu. The
English correspondence of elle-borum is hellebore < ME
ellebre < OF elebre < ML ele-borus (L elleborus goes back
to Gk ellePopoj, rarely ellePopoj), "[a] name given by the
ancients to certain plants having poisonous and
medicinal properties, and especially reputed as specifics
for mental disease; identified with species of Helleborus
and Veratrum..." (OED). Gallee observed that since
vowel length is not marked in the Bern glosses, hun
might stand for hun, as in OE hare hune. He also cited OE
hun 'impurity' and hunel 'foul, wanton.' Hunel is a ghost
word. Hune, with its synonym adle, glossed L tabo. All
the words are in the dative. Tabum means 'pus,' but OE
545
Adz(e) Adz(e)

adle means 'disease, infirmity, sickness.' Consequently,

hune may be 'poison' but may be 'disease' (or both). If
hune is hune (the likeliest variant), it is one of the words
discussed at HENBANE.
Since the pronunciation of a word for 'poison' might
have been altered as the result of a taboo, hune < hUn is
not inconceivable. If so, hare hune means 'white poison.'
Poisonous plants and herbs known for their medicinal
properties often share names, because every medicine is
poison used with discretion. G Wüterich 'henbane' was
supposed to cure madness; thus it did not cause but
avert 'fury' (Wut). OE ätorlaöe was a plant used as an
antidote to poison (ator 'poison,' lad 'injury'), and
lybcorn was some medicinal seed (lybb 'poison,' corn
'seed'). Even if hun- and hun- are in the end related, they
seem to have been different words in early Old English,
and ha re hu ne need not have meant 'white poison.'
Gallee approved of Skeat's comparison -hune with cunlla
and suggested that the root in question may have had
two forms, with u and with u.
Siebs (1892:155 and 1930:55) explained LG
hunnebedde, hünebett, and heunenbett as 'death bed'
and E reg hunbarrow 'tumulus,' a word recorded in EDD
and briefly discussed by Mayhew (1900), as 'burial
mound.' By so doing, he evaded the problem of vowel
length in hun ~ hun. The hun- element of Old Germanic
proper names like Folchun is usually compared with
546
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Celtic kunos 'high.' Hoops (1902:176-79) proposed that

the initial meaning of hu n- was not 'great' but 'dark,
black, brown,' as is probably the case in OI húnaflói,
Húna-vatn 'dark water,' and the like. It is this adjective
that he recognized in OE hune and hare hune. In his
opinion, hune referred to Ballota nigra, whereas hare
hune was later applied to Marrubium. In Tyrolese, Helle-
borus niger is called hainwurz, and in Silesian
Schwarzwurz is the name of Helleborus viridis. Likewise,
he explained OI húnn 'bear cub' as 'brown one.'
Helm (1903:83-85; 1905) supported Hoops's
idea and pointed out that hu n may be related to Go
hauns 'humble' (Go haunjan 'abase' and hauneins*
'lowliness' have also been recorded), whose cognates are
OE hean 'lowly, despised,' OHG honi 'despised,' and OHG
hona (ModG Hohn) 'scorn.' He reconstructed PIE *kewo
'big,' with the possibility of its denoting things very high
('great') or very low ('deep'), like L altus 'high; deep' and
G steigen 'go up' or 'go down.' From 'low, deep' he
deduced 'dark, black.' This sounds like an acceptable hy-
pothesis. However, Helm did not touch on the possible
ties between hun- 'death' and hu n 'low, deep, dark,' and
before him Hoops (1902:176/3) observed that he would
not discuss hünebett, hünengrab, and hunbarrow, which
Siebs separated from MHG hiune (ModG Hüne) 'giant.'
According to Siebs, those words had nothing to do with

547
Adz(e) Adz(e)

giants or Hunns and had always had a short vowel in the

root.
Perhaps alongside the meaning 'death,' the complex
hUn developed the meaning 'earth, ground' by ablaut u :
U (De Vaan [2003:286]) or with expressive lengthening.
Then 'black, brown, dark' would be derivative of 'earth-
colored,' and hiune 'giant,' presumably an ancient word
even though first recorded in Middle High German, could
be understood as having originally referred to any
frightening chthonic being, a sibling of those who have
the appellations jotunn, risi, purs, and troll ~ troll in
Scandinavian mythology and folklore. The meaning
'abase' (from 'a-base') in Go haunjan, OE hynan, OS
honian, and OHG honen fits *hun 'earth' perfectly;
compare L humilis 'low, humble' from humus 'ground.'
The alternation u ~ au is not a hindrance to such a
reconstruction. Similar alternations occur in the second
class of strong verbs (OE scufan 'shove' ~ OHG scioban,
with io < *au) and in the normal grade (OE hream 'fame,
glory,' with ea < *au, ~ OS hrom, with ea < *au). But it is
equally possible that hun and hun are not related.
Gerland (1861) glossed *hu naz as 'swollen,' and
Steinhauser (1976:510-15) followed him or came to the
same conclusion. Those two reconstructed meanings do
not necessarily contradict each other. 'Big' is easier to
derive from 'swollen' than from 'dark' ('earth-colored'
can then be bypassed), but we should not disregard the
548
Adz(e) Adz(e)

later recorded senses of the reflexes of *hu naz.

'Swollen' (applied to rivers), 'full of poison' (applied to
the udder, as in one of Steinhau-ser's examples) could
develop the connotation 'dark' and 'poisonous.' Consider
also the discussion of Go hauns and its cognates, above.
Regardless of the most ancient meaning of *hunaz, in
horehound the reference seems to be to the flower's
color. 'Poisonous' is less likely.
3. In sum, the following tentative etymology of
horehound can be offered. Two roots existed in
Germanic, both with non-Germanic cognates. One was
*hen— *han— *hun- 'death; poison.' It often occurred in
the names of poisonous plants (see HENBANE). The
other was *hun-. Its etymology is less clear. Words with
*hun- meant 'black; low; big,' assuming that all of them
belong together. Perhaps we have a case of
enantiosemy, as Helm thought. But perhaps *hun- is
hun- by ablaut or with expressive lengthening. If it is an
emphatic form, its Indo-European cognates should be
discounted. *Hun may have meant 'earth,' whence
'black; low' and, in special circumstances, 'a creature of
the earth, giant.' One more unknown is the origin of the
ethnic name Hunn, a word that may have influenced the
meaning of MHG hiune.
Whatever the origin of hün 'black' (from *hun- or
from *hUn- lengthened), the Old English plant name
hune gets an explanation if we agree that in the
549
Adz(e) Adz(e)

beginning hñne meant Ballota nigra. When this word

came to designate Marrubium, hare was chosen to
modify it. Hwtte hare hune is puzzling. Apparently, har
'hoary, old' supplanted har 'grey,' and the color term
receded from active use. With time hare hune became a
regular compound harhune (which may not have
happened, as OE hare-wyrt shows). After apocope, -d
was appended to hu n, possibly because of the confusion
of horehound and alyssum, the traditional remedy for
canine madness.
4. When trying to unravel the remote origins of some
poisonous plant names, we constantly run into near
homonymous sound complexes with the meaning
'poison, injury' and should reckon with the possibility
that the extant form is the result of folk etymology or a
cross between a native and some migratory word. In
addition to hen— han— hun-, as in henbane, hem(b) ~
hym(b), as in hemlock, and hend-, as in G Himbeere, have
been recorded. *Hun- 'poison, death' and *hend- 'pierce'
competed with gund, as in Go gund 'gangrene,' OE gund
'pus,' and OHG gunt ~ gund 'pus.' Their modern reflexes
are N reg gund 'scurf' and E reg gund 'a disease of sheep
that affects the skin' (EDD, only Dorset; Sigma
[1890:125], and see A. Campbell's discussion [1969:306]
of OE *healsgund 'neck tumor').
The plant nightshade (bittersweet, belladona), that
is, Solanum nigrum or Solanum Dulcamara, is called
550
Adz(e) Adz(e)

hondemiegersholt in the Dutch dialect of Drente and

hounebeishout or stinkhout in Frisian, which reminds us
of the "strong-scented" Kovtlr (Naarding [1954:94-95]).
Hand 'hand' and hond or houn 'dog' are close by to
suggest folk etymological solutions, but they should be
disregarded. Du hondsdraf 'ground ivy' replaced
onderhave and on-derhaaf, and the earlier form was
gondrdve (related to OHG gundareba > MHG grunderebe
> ModG Gundelrebe). *Hun- 'death' and gund 'poison'
are the likeliest roots of those words.
Onderhave sounds amazingly like G Andorn
'horehound.' Of several etymologies of Andorn EWA
prefers the one that is based on the comparison of the
German word and Gk ccvQoj 'bloom, sheen,' but it
appears that we are dealing with a plant name known in
approximately the same form in Indo-European and
Semitic (Möller
[1911:10-11, andh-], WP I:67-68, andhos; IEW 40-41,
andh-; none of them mentions Andorn). See also
Loewe (1935:255-56), Pokorny (1949-50:131-32),
Schwentner (1951:244), and Mayrhofer (1952b:48).
Vasmer IV:404 notes that Russ shandra 'horehound'
is almost the same word as Skt candrds 'shining' and
refers to Weisleuchte, literally 'white lamp,' the popular
German name of horehound. He is unable to reconstruct
the circumstances in which shandra and its Polish
cognate could have been borrowed from a language of
551
Adz(e) Adz(e)

India. Yet the fact remains that shandra, if we take away

sh-, bears an uncanny resemblance to Du onder(have)
and G Andorn. In case several such words were known to
the speakers of Middle English, the change from
horehoun to hore-hound may find an additional
explanation (Liber-
man [2001b:139-43]).

IVY (800).
OE ifig has established cognates only in German and
Dutch. The origin of i is debatable, but despite the
prevailing opinion to the contrary, ifig probably does not
go back to if-heg (-heg 'hay') with compensatory
lengthening after the loss of -h-. It is more likely that OE
if-ig and OHG eb-ah (both mean 'ivy') have different
grades of ablaut in the root and in the suffix.
In the languages of the world, the name of ivy is
occasionally borrowed, and ifig ~ ebah have been
compared with many plant names in Germanic, Latin,
and Greek. Although such comparisons have not yielded
convincing results, the idea of a non-native, perhaps non-
Indo-European origin of *ib- has not been abandoned.
Only one of the proposed etymologies of ivy as an Indo-
European word has survived until the present. According
to it, ifig is related to L ibex and means 'climber.' But ibex
appears to be an Alpine substrate word, and the Indo-
552
Adz(e) Adz(e)

European root *ibh- 'climb' has not been recorded. All

the skepticism notwithstanding, ivy can be a noun of
Germanic origin, related to OE afor and OHG eibar
'pungent; bitter; fierce.' Likewise, Ifing, the name of a
mythic river, occurring once in the Elder Edda, might
mean 'violent (stream).' Yet a single obscure
Scandinavian word is not sufficient for setting up a
common Germanic root *ib- 'bitter.' The resemblance
between Ifing and other similar river names outside
Scandinavia is probably accidental.
The sections are devoted to 1) the phonetic structure
of OE ifig, 2) the rejected etymologies of ivy and words
for 'ivy' in various languages, 3) the one still current
etymology of ivy and the etymology that holds out the
greatest promise, and 4) the Scandinavian connection
and the possibility of setting up a Germanic root *ib.
1. The Old English forms of ivy are spelled ifeg and
ifig; the form ifegn will be discussed at the end of sec 3.
It is now universally accepted that ifig goes back to if-
followed by a word for 'hay.'
Standard reference books give *if-hieg (Luick
[1964:sec 250]; the same in BWA I:91), *ib-heg (SB, secs
121 and 218, note 1), *if-hig (Mayhew[1891c: sec 811]),
and *if-hieg (A. Campbell [1959:secs 240.2 and 468]).
Kluge (1889:586) reconstructed *ifhig.
Sievers (ASG3, sec 217) and Holthausen (1894;

553
Adz(e) Adz(e)

1903b:39) followed him and recognized the exis-

tence of pre-OE *ifhig. According to them, -h- was lost in
*if-hi(e)g, as a result of which radical i underwent
compensatory lengthening. OHG eba-hewi 'ivy' provided
the main support for OE *if-hieg. The equation *if-hieg =
eba-hewi has long since become commonplace. See
Charpentier (1918:39) and Trier (1963:2) among the best-
known names.
The first vowel of OE ifig was long. Before a single
consonant (or in so-called open syllables; cf
HOREHOUND, end of sec 1), i yielded e not i. Ten Brink
(1884:25) believed that ivy constituted a rare exception
to the rule and that ifig became ivy, but his idea has
been rejected (see especially Morsbach
[1888:182]). By the 13th century at the latest, ifig
must have had , for otherwise the present-day form
would have been *ivvy (with the vowel of give) or *evy
(with the vowel of eve). Morsbach, in reconstructing i in
ifig, referred to Du eiloof 'ivy' (that is, ei-loof; loof means
'leave'). According to a more recent view, ei- in eiloof has
no value for tracing the origin of ivy because eiloof is
allegedly a 'bastardized' form, the product of interplay
between MDu iw-lof, iff-lof, i-loof, and eig-ldf (Ceelen
[1958:21-29]). That view is not necessarily correct (see
the end of sec 3, below).
Despite the fact that ifig could not develop from ifig,
that OHG ebah points to a short initial vowel, and that
554
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the second component of OHG ebihewi meant 'hay,' OE

*if-hieg probably did not exist. Bjorkman (1901:226)
listed numerous forms of the Old High German name for
'ivy' and ascribed eba-hewi to folk etymology, which
allegedly substituted hewi 'hay' for the ancient suffix -ah.
By contrast, OE *if-hieg is believed to be the original,
primary etymon of f-ig. Those reconstructions are at
cross-purposes. Ifig matches eb-ah, though each word
contains a root and a suffix in different grades of ablaut.
Not inconceivably, OE -ig is from *-ag. OE bodig 'body,'
manig 'many,' and hunig 'honey' correspond to OHG
botah, Go manags*, and OHG honag, and neither body
nor honey had umlaut (in many it occurred late). If -ag is
the original form of the suffix, *if-hieg is no longer
needed even as a possibility, unless ebah derives from
ebihewi—an improbable development. Another
alternative is to set up OE *if-hieg versus OHG ebah,
which is also a bad solution because an independent
word *if- has not been recorded and no known
component could attract hieg as the second element of
*if-hieg.
We are bound to admit that Old English had fig,
while German had ebah, but that in German, ebah
competed with eba-hewi, perhaps not so much under
the influence of folk etymology as for practical reasons:
ivy leaves were, and in some places still are, regularly
used as fodder in winter (see more on -hewi in sec 2).
555
Adz(e) Adz(e)

HDA called into question the connection between ivy

and hay, but Trier
(1963:2) clarified it and T. Klein (1977:364-66) ex-
plained it in overwhelming detail. See also ESSI III:59-61
on the same subject, but the conclusion drawn there is
less convincing.
Works on Germanic word formation are silent on the
meaning of OHG -ah. Only Seebold (KS, Efeu) mentions
its collective force. Kluge (1926:sec 67) points out that in
Old High German, the suffix *-ahja was productive in the
names of areas with a concentration of certain plants:
for instance, boum meant 'tree' and boumahi meant
'place grown over with trees, woods.' A similar word is
OHG risahi (> ModG Reisig 'brushwood') from ris 'twig.'
KrM
(sec 146), Kubriakova (1963:106), and EWA (ebah)
repeat the same information. At one time, ebah
probably referred to areas covered with ivy. The neuter
gender of ebah and ifig bears out the conjecture that
they were collective nouns. OHG ebah
may have had the meaning that ivery has in the
modern Sussex dialect (Gepp included it in his books and
discussed in Gepp [1922:107]). Change of gender in the
history of German nouns is common. G Efeu is now
masculine, even though Heu 'hay' is neuter. Sauer
(1992:403) calls fig a native simplex. Ifig and ebah,
although not compounds, were bimorphemic.
556
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The origin of the intervocalic consonant in fig also

poses problems. Old English f regularly corresponds to
Old High German b (as in OE giefan versus OHG geban
'give'), but since intervocalic fricatives underwent voicing
in Old English, the reflexes of PIE *bh (to use the
traditional value of this phoneme) and *p merged: lufu
'love' (with f < *bh), belifan 'remain' (with f < *p in a
stressed syllable), and seofon 'seven' (with f < *p
preceding stress by Verner's Law) had [v] (Bahder [1903]
offers the most detailed discussion of such words). Thus
we can be certain that OE ifig was pronounced ['i:vij],
but the exact origin of the fricative remains unclear. The
zero grade of the root vowel in OHG
*ibah suggests final stress, while in OE fig makes
initial stress the most natural option. We may therefore
reconstruct pre-OE *ifig and pre-OHG *ibdh, though
*ibhig and *ibhdh would have yielded the same
pronunciations. However, setting up *bh in such forms
presupposes their great antiquity, and this is exactly
what has to be demonstrated.
2. The proposed etymologies of ivy and its cognates
are numerous. The word is West Germanic (N ef0y is a
borrowing from German). Minsheu (ivie) derived ivy
from Gk eniCaivoo 'invade' but found no supporters.
Many plant names resemble ifig ~ ebah and have been
compared with them. Among them G Eibe (< OHG iwa) ~
E yew (< OE iw ~ eow) are particularly prominent (so
557
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Skinner, Gazophylacium, and Meidinger [1836:32]).

Skinner's reconstruction seems to be such: arrows were
made of yew, and Gk ioj 'arrow' is reminiscent of yew
and ivy. According to him, the first to compare ivy and
yew was Casaubon.
Junius (ivie) cited Gk if I 'strongly, boldly,' because
ivy kills the tree by twisting it hard. He probably did not
realize that icpi goes back to *w6cpi, the archaic dative
of i'j 'sinew, strength.' Lemon found Junius's etymology
acceptable: ivy, he said, is called "from its cleaving close
to, adhering to, or affectionately embracing every thing
it lays hold on." Since ivy was dedicated to Bacchus, a
tradition emerged that connected OHG ebah either with
Bacchus's name directly or with 'Euccv, an exclamation in
honor of Bacchus (Casaubon, Skinner, Junius,
Gazophylacium).
Charnock (1889) derived yew from Go aiw, which he
glossed 'of age,' and suggested that ivy is akin to G ewig
'eternal,' for it is an evergreen plant. The same
etymology could have been obtained without reference
to yew, by comparing OE ifig with some cognate of G
ewig (so Kaltschmidt, Epheu). Confusion between the
derivatives of Efeu and Eibe and between both of them
and ewig occurred not only in the minds of linguists but
also in popular usage, as T. Klein showed (1977:363-67)
and as follows from the existence of ewig, one of the
regional names of ivy in German.
558
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Next comes Gk ccjjiov 'pear,' the putative source of L

apium 'parsley,' which yielded F ache 'parsley, celery'
and which German borrowed as Eppich 'celery' and
sometimes 'ivy' (e is the umlaut of *a). Reference to Eibe
and Eppig in the discussion of ivy and its cognates was
usual, and Vercoullie devoted a whole entry to
separating ifte from ijf 'yew' and eppe 'parsley.'
Schwenck connected Efeu, Eppich, and Eibe with L abies
'fir', reasoning that their original meaning was 'green.'
Both cpiov and apium turn up as possible cognates of ivy
in Weigand (Epheu), Mueller1, and Skeat1.
Petersson (1908-09:161) compared Efeu and iy6j,
known only from Hesychios, and glossed iy6j as 'ivy,' but,
according to Frisk, the Greek word means cork oak. Then
there is ME ive, or herbe ive, remembered mainly
because it occurs in Canterbury Tales (not recorded in
English texts after 1611: OED). Skeat first thought that
ive meant 'ivy' (see the report in The Athenxum
1889/I:762-63), but, as he said later: "The etymology of
the F. ive is unknown. There is no reason for connecting
it with E. ivy, nor with E. yew, both of which Littre
mentions, but does not seem to favour" (Skeat
[1901:145]). His attempt to derive ive from OF ive (L
equa) 'mare' (Skeat [see the report in The Athenxum
1900/I:630; Skeat [1901:145-46]) has no bearing on the
etymology of ivy.

559
Adz(e) Adz(e)

None of the conjectures summarized above brings to

light the origin of ivy, and some do not merit discussion,
but the similarity between OHG ebah, Gk ccjjiov and iy'j,
and L apium (the Indo-European word for 'apple' can
also be added to this list) is obvious. Some old (pre-Indo-
European?) migratory plant name beginning with ap- or
ip- may have become known to speakers of Germanic
and been associated with Hedera Helix. It need not have
been the name of ivy, as the gulf between 'pear' in Greek
and 'parsley' in Latin or between Arabic ribas 'sorrel' and
E ribes 'currants' (OED) shows. Latv efeja and eepjes
(Schachmatov [1912:196]) and N efoy make it clear that
ivy may have a foreign name even in the countries where
it grows in abundance. It also seems that ebah was not
the main popular word for 'ivy' in medieval Germany. In
late MHG, ephou, that is, ep-hou, ph was taken for Greek
ph and the pronunciation with [f] instead of [ph] set in. A
spelling pronunciation would not have prevailed among
illiterate peasants. It is hard to imagine E uphill
becoming *ufill or, conversely, telephone becoming
*telep-hone in a completely literate society.
Besides possibly being a substrate word, ivy may
have changed because of a taboo. Although ivy, as far as
we can judge, has never been prominent in medicine and
was not used in Germanic religious rites (its use in
ancient cults is known well; in addition to standard
reference works, see
560
Adz(e) Adz(e)

F. Tobler [1912:137-51], and R. Palmer [1972]), it

plays and played in the past a noticeable role in
superstitions, especially in Germany (HDA).
The names of ivy are varied (Ceelen [1958] lists over
thirty for Dutch alone), and their origin is sometimes
obscure. The etymologically transparent ones are
formations like Du klimop, literally 'climber up,'
compounds like Sw murgrbna, literally 'wallgreen,' or
reflexes of a well-attested word: for example, the names
of 'ivy' in the modern standard Romance languages go
back to L hedera. Among the Classical Greek names of ivy
(Olck [1905:2827-28]), none, including κισσός, which has
often been discussed (see especially Guntert [1932:22-
23]), has an established etymology. The same is true of L
hedera. At one time, it was believed to be akin to L
prehendere 'seize' (so in most older dictionaries, and see
WP 1:531-33 and 589; IEW, 438), but in WH that
connection is dismissed. Stokes (1894:29) traced Welsh
eiddew and its Celtic cognates to *<p>edenno,
*<p>edjevo and compared them with Gk πέδη 'fetter,' L
pedica 'shackle, snare,' and so on. Even Brythonic ilid
was squeezed into this protoform (Henry). In a footnote,
Henry quotes Ernout's suggestion that ilid is a blend of
*pedenno and some other plant name, for example, illy
'sorb apple.' But Hamp (1974:90) reconstructed *ed-is—
*ed-ies followed by the suffix of the superlative and
glossed it as 'very eating, voracious.' Those conjectures
561
Adz(e) Adz(e)

do not inspire confidence. Russ pliushch alternates with

bliushch. Their connection with plevat' 'to spit' and
blevat' 'to vomit' is obvious, but whether those two
verbs provide a reliable clue to the etymology of
pliuschch ~ bliuschch is less clear (Vasmer I:179, ESSI
II:138-39). Proto-Slavic *bruscu°anu remains a matter of
dispute (ESSI III:59-61).
In Germanic, Du hondsdraf is no less opaque than ivy
(see the end of the entry HOREHOUND). Late in the 16th
century, it replaced the similar-sounding onderhave ~
onderhaaf (NEW). The second component (-have —haaf
is reminiscent of the English plant name hove, which also
occurs in E alehoof 'ground ivy,' another replacement,
this time of hayhove. OED relates hay- in hayhove to
haw and understands that compound as hawhove, but
the history of OHG ebihewi shows that such a conclusion
is not necessary.
The origin of OE hofe 'ground ivy' is unknown
(AeEW). No one seems to have compared hofe with Du -
have —haaf since Jellinghaus (1898a:464) included it in
his list. OED suggests that alehoof got its first element
"in allusion to its alleged use in brewing instead of
hops." However, alehoof looks so much like Du eiloof,
pronounced and spelled in English, that the connection
with ale and hove (< hofe) may be due to folk etymology.
Only Scott (CD, alehoof) noted the similarity but looked
on the Dutch word as a borrowing from English. His
562
Adz(e) Adz(e)

guess can hardly be substantiated. De Hoog (1909), Toll

(1926), Llewellyn (1936), and Bense do not discuss
alehoof. A vague tie could perhaps be sensed between
hove, hop(s), and the reflexes of OE heope 'fruit of the
(wild) rose' (> ME heppe ~ heepe > ModE hip) (see
EWNT2, hop). Is it possible that Old High German had a
cognate of OE hofe, a form like *huoba or *huowa, and
that *ebahuowa rather than ebah became ebihewi? Veil,
another Dutch word for 'ivy,' is equally difficult: native?
from Latin? (See Te Winkel [1893:54], Franck [1893:29-
30], Grootaers [1954:93], and Ceelen [1958:22-23],
besides EWNT
and NEW.)
Those examples go a long way toward showing that
the obscurity of ifig ~ ebah should be taken in stride and
weaken references to taboo and the substrate. So many
words for 'ivy' could probably not have been reshaped in
the course of history or be borrowed from extinct non-
Indo-European languages. In recent scholarship, Seebold
(KS, Efeu) is ready to admit that Germanic borrowed the
element eb- in ebah but offers no discussion.
Several relatively modern etymologies of ivy have
been proposed in passing and attracted little or no
attention. According to Wedgwood2-4, ivy is related to
Wel eiddew and Gael eidheann. In the first edition of his
dictionary, Gael eid 'cloth' turns up (ivy allegedly clothes
the objects on which it grows). Only E. Edwards repeated
563
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Wedgwood's derivation, but a similar idea occurred

much later to K. Malone (1952:531), who compared if- in
OI ifingr 'headscarf' (a hapax legomenon in Snorri's
Edda) and Go iftuma* 'next, following' ("a head-cloth is
something put upon the head"). He detected the same
element (if-) in OE ifig, allegedly from *if-heg: "[H]ere
again the plant is to be thought of as an object found
upon something." Thomson offered a similar conjecture
in 1826: ivy from G uppa ~ ybba (did he mean Sw uppd
'on'?) 'climb up,' as in Du klimop. Despite the mysterious
words he cites, he clearly meant that ivy was akin to up.
The cognates of Go iftuma* had caught the fancy of
other researchers interested in the origin of ebah ~ Ifig.
Thus Petersson (1908-09) traced OHG ebah, Gk iydj, and
Go ibuks* 'back' (adj) to the root *ibh- 'bend.' Feist23
referred to Petersson without comment. First to connect
ebah and ibuks* (with a question mark) was Kluge.
Ibuks* does not appear as a cognate of Efeu in any
edition of EWDS. That etymology was tried in KL (ivy),
where no one seems to have noticed it. Juret (1942:
253), whose etymological dictionary is full of fanciful
hypotheses, listed Gk οφις 'snake,' 'ΐψ -, and ivy as
belonging together (the root \2p 'crawl; reptile'). FT
compared efey and Gk 'ίφυον 'vegetable^)'—an
excellent match, but neither the exact meaning nor the
origin of the Greek word is known. Makovskii
(1999a:182), true to his method of decomposing English
564
Adz(e) Adz(e)

words into two Indo-European roots, represented ivy as

PIE *ei 'to move' + *pag- ~ *pak- 'seize, get hold of'
(because ivy clings to the pole on which it grows). These
etymologies are not better than those we find in the
works by Casaubon, Skinner, and others.
3. There has been only one breakthough in the study
of ebah ~ fig. Hoops (1903:483-85) assumed that OE
ifegn was a more ancient form than ifig and compared it
with OE holegn 'holly,' both of which he assigned to the
Indo-European k-stem ( fe-g-n, hole-g-n). He admitted
that fegn and the cognates of holly belonged to different
declensions but referred to Skt galaka (that is, salaka)
'splinter,' which was, according to Stokes (1894:91),
related to OIr cuilenn 'holly.' Neither Uhlenbeck (KEWAS,
305) nor Mayrhofer (KEWA 111:314-15) mentions OE
holegn among the cognates of salaka. For Ifegn Hoops
could not cite even such doubtful related
forms, but he followed Osthoff (1901:181-98, esp
181-87) and treated -n in both English plant names as
an adjectival suffix (Osthoff cited G Ahorn 'maple' and L
acernus 'made of maple' and looked on Ahorn as a
substantivized adjective).
Whether or not those ideas are valid, Hoops must be
given credit for taking notice of fegn. O. Ritter (1936:87)
had the same opinion as Hoops. However, Germanic
shows no traces of the k-stem. Whatever the remote
history of OE holegn, -egn must have been understood
565
Adz(e) Adz(e)

as a suffix in Old English and after holegn became holen.

OE sealh 'willow, sallow' is akin to OHG salaha. Is -h- not
a reduced variant of -ah(a)? And is -eg- in holegn not the
same suffix by Verner's Law? Both ivy and holly are
evergreens, so that rather than projecting tfegn to the k-
stem, it may be more logical to suppose that -egn
achieved the status of a suffix of plant names and that f-
egn was formed as a doublet of if-ig. See HEATHER for the
emergence of such secondary suffixes.
Having discussed the morphemic structure of Ifegn,
Hoops suggested that a cognate of this word was L ibex.
The ibex is a mountain goat. It is called Steinbock in
German, and the German word sometimes occurs in the
English zoological nomenclature. In Hoops's opinion, h in
ebah < *ebah-z or *ebah-az (< *ib-ah-z), or *ibah-az
alternates with g in OE Ifegn (< *Ubag-na) by Verner's
Law, whereas
*Ibahz goes back to PIE *ibhäks, the etymon of L ibex
(< *ibeks). Both are 'climbers.'
Hoops's etymology made no impression on Skeat or
Kluge, but Götze gave it as definite in EWDS11 and TDW
(Efeu in both). With or without reservations it appears in
WHirt (Efeu), Hirt (1921:197), Mackensen, Hiersche (Efeu
in both), EWA (ebuh), AHD, KM, KS (Efeu), SOD3a,
WNWD1 (less definitely in the second edition), and many
other dictionaries and compendia. The most circumspect
authors say as does ODEE (ivy): "... of unkn[own] origin
566
Adz(e) Adz(e)

unless referable to the base of L. IBEX, with the sense

'climber' (cf. Fris., Du. klimop ivy, lit[erally] 'climb-up')."
Some dictionaries have given up ivy ~ Efeu altogether.
They only cite the cognates and state: "Origin unknown."
See Skeat4, EWDS1-10 (the post-1903 editions are 7-10),
Week-ley, UED, and RHD.
It may be that a questionable etymology is better
than no etymology at all, but Hoops's comparison of
ebah and Ifig with ibex, however ingenious and
persuasive at first sight, is almost certainly wrong.
Among the Indo-European roots as Brug-mann and
Walde have codified them, we find no *ibh- 'climb.'
Uhlenbeck (1909:170/13) pointed to this difficulty,
discussed the Sanskrit, Greek, and Slavic words for
'copulate' derived from *iebh- (see them at FUCK, sec 5),
and added Skt ibha 'elephant' and G Eber 'boar,' both of
which he was ready to understand as 'mounters.'
'Mount' and 'climb' are not synonyms, however.
Uhlenbeck did not reject Hoops's etymology, but his
assent was lukewarm. He suggested (with a question
mark) Gk GCUTOJ 'steep' (adj) as a cognate of ebah. Van
Wijk (EWNT2, klimop) cited durac, with two question
marks.
Petersson (1908-09:161) accepted the equation ebah
= ibex but approached it from a different angle.
According to him, the root of both is *bheugh-'bend.'
The ibex, he argued, got its name on account of long
567
Adz(e) Adz(e)

backward-curving horns. In his reconstruction, the goat

and the plant are 'twisters' rather than 'climbers.' He did
not explain the origin of initial i-. All that is probably of
no avail, for L ibex is now universally believed to be an
Alpine substrate word like the etymon of chamois (EM).
Polome (1983:51-52) repeated Uhlenbeck's objections to
Hoops and emphasized the non-Indo-European origin of
ibex. In his opinion, Hoops's etymology of ivy is
insupportable. Among the Latin etymological
dictionaries, only WH mention Efeu, and the comment
on Petersson's hypothesis is: "Wrong in all its parts."
FT(G) reproduces the text from the Norwegian edition
intact. In the bibliographical supplement (p 1453),
Hoops's and Pe-tersson's hypotheses are added without
discussion. Even if we admitted for the sake of argument
that ibex is an Indo-European animal name, it would be
unsound to refer to it in the etymology of ivy. A word of
obscure origin cannot shed light on another equally
obscure word.
One more etymology of ivy exists. Loewenthal
(1917:109/65) took Gmc *ibvan ~ *ibvum (as they
appear in Torp [1909:28]), obtained PIE *fhuom, related
it to *a ibh 'burn, be bitter,' and compared it with OHG
eibar 'bitter, pungent; disgusting' and ebah 'ivy,' which
he glossed as 'poisonous berry' because the berries of ivy
have an unpleasant taste. Despite the artificial method
of reconstruction typical of all Loewenthal's etymologies,
568
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the match eibar : ebah is flawless. In Old English, the

corresponding pair is fig : afor. Another debatable i ~ a
pair is OE ides 'woman' and a d 'fire,' understood as
'hearth' on the analogy of L aedes 'house, hearth'
(AeEW). OE idig 'industrious' and OI id ~ id 'labor'
probably have the same root. A good semantic analogue
of fig 'poisonous plant' would be OHG gund-reba 'ivy,'
literally 'poison grass.'
However, we need not insist that afor ~ eibar meant
'poisonous.' In both Old English and Old High German,
this adjective occurs many times with exactly the same
referents. In Old English: fierce (in poetry); harsh, severe
(in medical recipes, of a remedy or its operation); bitter,
acid, pungent (of taste); glossing L rancidus, apparently,
in the sense 'bitter' (said about cries of remorse); in Latin
texts: acerbus, rancidus (with amarus, foetidus) (DOE).
According to Clark Hall: bitter, acid, sour, sharp; dire,
fierce, severe, harsh, impetuous. In BT, vol 1: vehement,
dire, hateful, rough, austere; atrox, odiosus, asterus,
acerbus. None of the Latin glosses except acerbus
appears in DOE, but Toller (vol 2) left them intact,
though he struck off Bos-worth's etymology (Go aibrs
'strong'). In Old High German: scharf, bitter; widerwärtig,
abscheulich; heftig, leidenschaftlich; quälend, peinigend
('sharp, bitter; disgusting, loathsome; vehement or
violent, passionate; torturous, distressful'); in glosses:
acerbus, horridus, immanis, amarus (AHW).
569
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Schade derived Ital afro 'sour, acid,' OF afre 'fright,'

and F affres 'anguish' ~ affreux 'frightful, atrocious' from
the root of OHG eibar, but his etymology is untenable. At
best, the Romance words are traceable to Go abrs
'great,' for Go aibr 'offering' (not 'strong,' as in
Bosworth!) is probably a scribal error for *tibr. Afor did
not continue even into Middle English, but reflexes of
eibar are extant in Modern German dialects and in
archaic texts.
The answer to the etymological puzzle is then: Tfig ~
ebah = 'bitter (unpleasant to the taste).' Another 'bitter'
plant is OE ampre, OHG ampfara ~ ampfaro (see amper
'bitter, sour' in FT, NEW, WP I:179, and IEW, 777). English
had two words in the normal grade of ablaut (Tfig and
afor), whereas in German the plant name was derived
from the zero grade (ebah). Du eiloof is harder to assess.
If it is a blend, the original vowel was i. But if eiloof is a
substitution for some old word with genuine ei, to which
loof 'leaf' was added, then ei may be a cognate of ei in
OHG eibar.
4. Ivy has established cognates only in West
Germanic, but perhaps one Old Icelandic word has the
same root. It is almost a homonym of ifingr that K.
Malone suggested. A myth in the Elder Edda
(Vafprüdnismdl, 15) contains the name of a never-
freezing river that separates the worlds inhabited by the
gods and the giants. The name, Ifing, is a hapax
570
Adz(e) Adz(e)

legomenon, and we do not know the length of the first i

in it. Gering (1927:166) connected it with OI yr 'yew.' H.
Pipping (1928:2526), M. Olsen (1964:15/6), F. Schröder
(1941:8), and Holthausen (VEW) agreed with Gering, but
J. de Vries's skepticism (AEW) is justified. What is a yew
river, even though Ifa occurs in skaldic poetry, and why
should a stream of cosmic importance be associated with
yew trees? Although the yew tree played an important
role in cult and legend (Läf-
fler [1911:646-67], Bertoldi [1928], F. Schröder
[1941:1-8]), this fact is irrelevant for understanding
the origin of Ifing.
J. de Vries's suggestion is better. He cites OE afor and
OHG eibar and concludes that Ifing was a stormy, violent
river. OE afor 'fierce' (in poetry) and OHG eibar 'violent,
vehement' fit his gloss ungestüm 'stormy, impetuous,'
though he derives 'ungestüm' from G Eifer and Du ijver
'zeal, ardor, eagerness,' whose origin is obscure (see
both words in German and Dutch etymological diction-
aries and especially in EWA, eibar1). Regardless of their
origin and of the vowel length in Ifing, the river between
the two worlds seems, in all likelihood, to have been
called fierce, violent, stormy. Machan (1988:77) finds
'yew river' and 'violent river' equally probable glosses of
Ifing. The interpretation 'yew river,' that is, 'flowing past
yew trees,' is too unimpressive in the context of the ed-
dic lay to deserve credence despite F. Schröder's
571
Adz(e) Adz(e)

attempts to prove the opposite. J. de Vries, perhaps

following FML, cites ModI yfng 'ripples; incitement;
strife' ('the state of agitation'). However, yfng belongs
with the words clustering around Go ubils 'evil' and its
cognates and hardly has anything to do with Ifing.
Scandinavian cognates of ivy have been proposed
more than once. Falk (1925a:242) suggested that the Old
Icelandic names of the (tame?) falcon, ifill, ifli, and
ifjungr, are related to both ifingr (this is the word in K.
Malone) and Ifing (in which he leaves the first vowel
short). In his opinion, all those words, as well as OI
ifrodull 'sun' (poetic), contain the root *ibh- 'wind' (v).
The tame falcon, he thought, got its name from some
band in the form of a ring, while the sun would be
'turning body.' Each of the Icelandic words Falk cited oc-
curs only once, and, unlike Ifing, in the so-called pulur
(lists of names), not in a consecutive text. His etymology
recurred in IsEW, 80. Falk, who added OHG ebah,
ebihewi, and OE ifig, Ifegn as related to ifill, Ifing, and
the rest, referred to Petersson (190809:161) but did not
mention Hoops. Finally, J. de Vries (AEW) compared afor
~ eibar and Ifing. Although he did not discuss ebah ~ fig
in his entry, the fragments of the picture are familiar
from Loewenthal's combination eibar ~ ebah. Conse-
quently, the isolation of ifig ~ ebah within West
Germanic has not always been taken for granted.

572
Adz(e) Adz(e)

If the etymology of ivy proposed above is correct,

not all the words that Falk gathered belong together.
The pair fig ~ ebah / afor ~ eibar excludes ifingr
'headscarf' and the Icelandic names of the falcon ('bitter'
is too remote from any bird name). A connection
between ifill ~ ifli ~ ifjungr and winding is so hard to
establish that this loss does not seem to be too great
either. OI rodull, a word of obscure origin, means 'sun'
even without if- (as follows from OE rodor ~ rador 'ether,
sky'), and if-does not occur as the first element in any
other compound. See ABM for an appraisal of the origin
of ifrodull, Ifing, ifill, and so on (only a survey; no new
suggestions and no mention of ivy). When discussing a
fanciful Pelasgian etymology of Gk κισσός, Hester (1964-
65:357) asked: "Is the ivy a 'twisting plant'?" It is such
only for the non-botanist, but climbing, winding, and
twisting are close insofar as the properties of plants are
concerned. However, other associations have been
equally important in naming ivy.
No explanation of Ifing, ifingr, and ifill or of fig and
afor can overcome the obstacle that their postulated
roots do not occur elsewhere in Germanic, let alone the
rest of Indo-European, and that the words under
discussion are, except for ifig ~ ebah, rare, even exotic. A
single Icelandic word (a hapax legomenon) resembling
ifig is not sufficient for setting up a common Germanic

573
Adz(e) Adz(e)

rather than a West Germanic protoform, but its

existence should not be disregarded.
WP I:6 and IEW 11 propose a Proto-Indo-European
root of afor and eibar and suggest a link to PIE *ai-
'burn.' Yet the reality of PIE *ai- is doubtful, for it has
been attested only with enlargements. It is no more than
the common part of numerous words with a loose
semantic base (from 'ashes' to 'rage'). The West
Germanic root * if-, that is, *ib- 'bitter, sour; frightful,'
recorded in all grades of ablaut (i / ei / i) is more
probable.
The Slavic river names Ibar (Serbo-Croatian), Ibr
(Russian, Ukrainian), and a few others are even more
obscure than Ifing, but it is instructive to observe the
ever-recurring hypotheses on their origin: a substrate
word? a derivative of PIE *iebh- 'copulate'? a cognate of
Basque ibai 'river' (cf Iberia and the name of the river
Ebro in Spain)? See Vasmer III: 113, Ibr and ESSI VIII:205-
06 for an incomplete and inconclusive discussion of the
Slavic hydro-nyms.
Some Old Scandinavian mythological names go back
to antiquity, others are late inventions of priests
(compare the remarks on Audhumla at HEMLOCK). Ifing
is an old name (otherwise, it would probably have been
more transparent), and that circumstance increases its
value for reconstructing the origin of ivy and of the
Germanic root *ib-
574
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(Liberman 2002b). JEEP (1940)

The first jeeps left the assembly line in 1940. Since
they were marked G.P., it is usually believed that the
coinage jeep, widely known by September 1941, goes
back to this abbreviation (which has been expanded in
various ways) and that it was later associated with
Eugene the Jeep. But most people who remembered the
early days of the jeep connected its name only with the
fabulous animal from E.C. Segar's cartoon, and
apparently for a good reason. Jeep 'inexperienced man,
rookie' hardly affected the derivation, meaning, and
spread of the new word.
Several companies vied for the honor of having
produced the first jeep, and conflicting versions
exist of how this vehicle got its name. McCloskey
(1943) recollects: "As far back as the early twenties
the forerunner of the present jeep was being devel-
oped concurrently at the Infantry Tank School at
Fort George G. Meade (Maryland) and at the Cav-
alry School, Fort Riley (Kansas). ...From the days
of the early experiments at the Infantry and Cav-
alry schools it was variously referred to as a 'pud-
dle jumper,' 'blitz buggy,' 'jeep,' and 'peep'—
regardless of whether it was a 1/4 -ton or a 1/2 -ton
truck.... In April 1940...I founded Army Motors, a
magazine for the motor transport service I... had
found that the mechanics and test drivers ... had settled
575
Adz(e) Adz(e)

on 'jeep' for the 72-ton truck because the first

production models they had seen came marked 'GP'
(General Production). I laid down an editorial ukase that
the 1/4 -ton truck was thereafter to be the 'jeep' and the
72-ton the 'peep'—and since our circulation ran into the
hundreds of thousands
the names stuck From all that I can discover, the
marking 'GP' just happened to be put on the pro-
duction jeeps merely to avoid confusing them with the
various pilot models. It had probably been applied
before, and if 'jeep' had not been one of the many
names then current for the 1/4 -ton and the 1/2 -ton
vehicles, there would have been no association of terms
to produce the final 'jeep' designation for
the 1/4-ton truck."
McCloskey's article appeared in response to H.L.
Mencken's query (ANQ 3, 1943:119) in which he asked
whether someone could supply the true etymology and
history of jeep. "A great many folk etymologies are in
circulation," he observed, "but they are extremely
unconvincing." As will be seen, "a great many folk
etymologies" have not turned up in printed sources. The
editors of ANQ pointed out that, according to a letter in
Life (November 3, 1944:5), jeep was the name, in a
"Popeye" comic strip, of a "quasi-rodent" with
"extraordinary powers." That information is given not in
the letter but by the editors, who say that, "[u]sed by
576
Adz(e) Adz(e)

soldiers, it is their name of endearment and seal of

approval on any particularly satisfactory piece of
equipment. It has been applied to reconnaissance-
command cars, light tanks, the 1/4 -ton reconnaissance
car and to anti-aircraft directors. Peep is a new word,
carrying the same emotional charge, so far applied only
to the 1/4-ton reconnaissance car."
With a single exception, all the other commu-
nications concern themselves with details. For example,
according to Q.W. (1944), "Erle Palmer Halliburton,
miner, manufacturer and oil financier, of Oklahoma and
California, turned out, in 1937, a commercial vehicle—
half truck and half tractor— which he himself named the
'Jeep' ... Mr. Halliburton proposed to convey an
impression of the same remarkable omniscience with
which Eugene the Jeep in 'The Thimble Theater' was
endowed" (emphasis added).
Wells (1946:33-39), who reviewed some of the
etymological material that had appeared in ANQ, quotes
a letter from the G.&C. Merriam Company: "We have
been interested in jeep as the name of the midget army
vehicle and trace its origin to a pronunciation of the
Army G.P. (General Purpose), a designation appearing on
the first modeling, influenced by the word jeep
appearing in the Segar comic strip. Before that in the
earlier thirties the slang term jeep had been applied to
an acrobatic dance, to a no-good worker, a wash-out,
577
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and the adjective jeepy meant, in the lingo of itenerants,

foolish. Some believe that jeep had application among
soldiers to anything insignificant, awkward, ill-shaped, or
ridiculous prior to the use in the comic strip. This we
have not investigated." B.W. (1946) reproduces the
answer from the G.&C. Merriam Company and points
out that if this suggestion was made on good grounds,
the date of the word, apart from its use as a proper
name, could be pushed back considerably.
Most likely, the fact that Halliburton called his
tractor Jeep had no bearing on the naming of the famous
car, though he was moved by the same impulse as those
who dealt with the war vehicle. The earliest secure date
of the wartime coinage is 1940: "...the original jeep was
designed and manufactured by the Minneapolis-Moline
Power Implement Company and was given its name
from the 'Popeye' comic strip—during the Fourth Army
Maneuvers at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, during the later
part of August and first part of September,
1940 A so-called 'big brother' of M-M's jeep—
"Jeepers Creepers'—was described in the November
19, 1940 issue of the Minneapolis Times Tribune"
(McFarlane [1943, emphasis added]). This event was
remembered on August 12, 2002 in the rubric "Today in
Minnesota History" (the Minneapolis StarTribune, Aug.
12, 2002, Variety, p. 1).
According to G. Ritter (1943-44), "the first model of
578
Adz(e) Adz(e)

a 1/4 -ton combat car was delivered by the American

Bantam Car Company in September, 1940, and was
called a Bantam, not a jeep." (Ritter discusses the names
Bantam and Willys but offers no etymology of jeep.) His
statement finds confirmation in all the literature
devoted to the history of the jeep.
Another important statement is Ralph Martin's
(1944:39): "The name first broke into newspaper print on
February 22, 1941, when the jeep gave an exhibition of
what it could do by climbing the steps of the nation's
Capitol. Some reporter asked the driver what he called
his vehicle, and the driver said, 'Why, I call it a jeep.
Everybody does.'" Martin, who served overseas, was
aware of both hypotheses concerning the origin of jeep.
Mention of his feature in The New York Times Magazine
appears in the bibliography in American Speech 19, 1944,
p. 297. King (1962:77) cites the same article. According to
his recollections, those "in uniform and on maneuvers
during the summer and fall of 1941 referred to that car
as a jeep."
Jeep

579
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Jeep

Martin's date needs an adjustment. Jeep also turns

up two days earlier (RHHDAS), but the name "broke into
print" in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on August 14, 1940.
Since neither Wells (1946:33), who correctly identifies
the date, nor RHHDAS quotes this place (RHHDAS only
refers to the files of Merriam-Webster, Inc., formerly
G.&C. Merriam Co. and WCD10 for the date 1940), it may
be useful to reproduce it. On page 2, under two photos,
a short unsigned note reads "'The Jeep' and the General
See Action." Its opening sentences run as follows: "When
the Germans crashed through Belgium and France, they
used mechanical units like the one in the upper picture, a
part of the United States Army equipment being utilized
in the battle of Camp Ripley. Officially known as a prime
mover, the soldiers call it a 'jeep.'"
The etymology of jeep has not been settled to this
day. Letters to the editor written during the war (TLS,
May 6, 1944:223; May 13, 1944:236; May 27, 1944:259;
NQ 184, 1943:349; 185, 1943:28; 188, 1945:87) go back
and forth between G.P. and Se-gar's Jeep. Rapkin (1945)
contains the following addition: "...the designers of the
car, the Willys Automobile Corporation of Toledo, Ohio,
just recently were refused a copyright on the word
'Jeep'." An anonymous note in the German journal Der
Sprachdienst (7, 1963:102) mentions Paul W. Spillner and
580
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Ward Cannel as researchers into the origin of jeep, but

gives no references. Judging by Spillner (1963), he was
the author of the note. The information the journal
supplies is not new. A curious detail is added in
anonymous (1963:165): many Germans think that Jeep is
the name of the German who constructed the car! In the
postwar years, the deeds of the omnipotent rodent were
still remembered. Hardie Gramatky's book for children
Creeper's Jeep (Eau Clare, Wisconsin: E. M. Hale Co,
1948) features a jeep that "did the plowing, milked the
cows, and many other helpful
things."
Dictionaries, if they say anything at all on this
subject, state that jeep is "prob[ably] alter[ation]
(influenced by Eugene the Jeep, a small fanciful wonder-
working animal in the comic strip Thimble Theatre by
Elzie C. Segar...) of g.p. (abbreviation] of general
purpose" (W3; compare WNWD1: "< Eugene the Jeep,
later associated with G.P. = General Purpose Car"
[emphasis added]). The only unexpected explanation
appears in WBD: "American English; reduction of
"Jeepers Creepers!" (the exclamation of Major General
George Lynch, Chief of Infantry, U.S. Army, upon the
occasion of his first ride in the prototype model of the
vehicle in 1939 at Fort Myer, Virginia; coined at the time
by Mr. Charles H. Payne, his companion in, and designer
of, the vehicle); perhaps later influenced by the initials
581
Adz(e) Adz(e)

G.P., for General Purpose, official designation of the

vehicle."
Stewart (1992:63) called the origin of jeep obscure
but added: "Most likely, it was a pejorative Army term
for anything insignificant or not yet proven reliable, like
a new recruit or a test vehicle." This also seems to have
been Colby's opinion. Mencken4 (p. 759) came to the
conclusion that the history of the word is almost as
obscure as the history of the car itself: "The fact that the
code symbol of Ford on Army cars was G.P. has led to the
surmise that the word jeep was born there and then, but
there is no evidence for it. Nor is there any evidence that
the word came from the same letters in the sense of
general purpose, for the first jeeps were not called,
officially, general purpose cars, but half-ton four-by-four
command-reconnaissance cars." In his opinion, it seems
to be much more probable that the name was borrowed
from the cartoon.
New documents that will elucidate the origin of jeep
cannot be expected to turn up. The facts at our disposal
are as follows. Jeep, the combat car, got its name in
August 1940 at the latest. By February 1941 "everybody"
in the army, but, apparently, not among journalists,
knew the word jeep. The first jeeps were marked G.P.
McCloskey's decipherment of the abbreviation ('General
Production'), if it is correct, was reinterpreted 'For
General Purpose.' Alexander (1944:279) mentions both
582
Adz(e) Adz(e)

possibilities, but his case is an exception. 'For General

Purpose' has the variant 'For General Purposes.' It
follows from Roscoe (1944) and Partridge (1947b:146)
that the preferred variant in England was the plural.
The practice of giving etymologies in dictionaries
without references makes it impossible to trace the
editors' sources and evaluate their conclusions. What
they say about the origin of jeep sometimes seems to be
arbitrary. For example, in AHD1, the explanation is:
"Originally G.P., 'general purpose'." AHD2 has a longer
entry: "[A]lter[ation] of G.P. (for General Purpose)
Vehicle, a special use of Eugene the Jeep, name of
fabulous animal in comic strip 'Popeye' by E. C. Segar."
Finally, in AHD3, jeep is etymologized so: "[P]robably
pronunciation of the name of this vehicle in the
manufacturer's parts numbering system: G(overnment) +
P, designator for 80-inch wheel-base reconnaissance
car." According to the universal conviction of war par-
ticipants, jeep was named after Segar's Jeep (in England,
Thimble Theatre was published in the
Daily Mirror, though it does not seem to have en-
joyed the same popularity as in the United States:
Olybrius [1943]). During the war, researchers shared this
conviction (Fleece [1943:69]). However, the official point
of view (assuming that it existed) favored the derivation
from G.P. 'General Purposes.' Jeepers-Creepers was

583
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Jeep's 'big brother' (see McFarlane, above), but no

confirmation of WBD's etymology has been found.
It is true that the first jeeps were not general
purpose cars, and Bishop (1946:244), to whom Mencken
refers, emphasizes that G.P. is not a normal Army
abbreviation. Also, the development from the
pronunciation g-p to jeep would be unusual. The idea
that jeep was a pejorative army term for anything
insignificant or not yet proven reliable runs contrary to
the widely held opinion about jeep as a term of
endearment for the wonderworking vehicle. The earliest
examples of jeep 'foolish, inexperienced, or offensive
individual; recruit or basic trainee' in RHHDAS do not
antedate July 1938. No connection can be established
between Eugene the Jeep and the slang word for 'recruit,
rookie.'
With the emergence of the car, jeep 'recruit' did not
drop out of the language, and the two coexisted through
(most of?) the war; the latest example from that period
in RHHDAS is dated 1943. Jeep, according to WFl, is
"[f]rom the Army term 'GP' (general purpose) reinforced
by the noise 'jeep' made by a mythical animal who could
do almost anything, in E.C. Segar's comic strip, 'Popeye'."
Jeep is glossed in their dictionary as 'new Army recruit,
rookie; link trainer; naval escort carrier; slow,
painstaking man' (not common), and 'complaint' (not
common). Jeepers, and jeepers creepers (euphemisms
584
Adz(e) Adz(e)

for Jesus! and Jesus Christ!) were first recorded in 1928

(RHHDAS). Jeep (the car) had some short-lived progeny.
American Speech 19 (1944:233) lists among trade name
novelties jeeps 'a make of shoe in white or army russet
with popular wedgie heel.'
The derivation of jeep from the cartoon character is
acceptable. Both Segar's fabulous creature and the new
car could "perform anything." The abbreviation G.P.,
marking the first jeeps, was an unlikely source of the
car's name. The suggestion that jeep owes something to
jeepers (creepers) or that it is an extension of jeep
'recruit' does not carry conviction. The case of jeep is
instructive: the word was coined in the full light of
history, we have eyewitness reports (conflicting as such
reports always are) of the car's production, and we still
have doubts about the origin of its name.
KEY (1000)
The word key has cognates only in Old Frisian: kaie
and keie. From an etymological point of view, it is
probably the same word as English northern regional key
'twisted.' The West Germanic protoform *kaigjo- must
have designated a pin with a curved end. Judging by the
recorded cognates, OE aieg(e) ~ aiega reached English
and Frisian dialects from Scandinavia.
The sections are devoted to 1) the protoform of key,
2) the earliest attempts at etymologizing key, 3) E key
and G Kegel, 4) key and the Germanic root *ki-, 5) the
585
Adz(e) Adz(e)

proposed etymology of key, 6) the interaction of *kag-

and *kag- words in Scandinavian, and 7) the homonyms
of key.
1. Dictionaries and manuals state that Old English
had competing forms: cxg (f jo-stem), cxge (f weak), and
cxga (m weak), but they do not explain how the jo -stem
and the length of the root vowel have been established.
It may be useful to do so. OE cxge was feminine; see
phrases like seo cxg and pxre cxgean (BT, A.S.C. Ross
[1937:67-68, 86], and DOE). In Old English, short-syllabic
strong feminine nouns preserved their endings and could
look like caru 'sorrow' (o -stem), beadu 'battle' (wo -
stem), or duru 'door' (u-stem). Short-syllabic jo -nouns
like brycg 'bridge' had geminated root final consonants.
OE cxg never ended in -u or had -w in oblique cases, and
g in it was always short. Consequently, its vowel was
long. That conclusion is borne out by the fact that the
few Old English words ending in [j] and spelled with the
letter 3, xg 'egg,' cxg, and clxg 'clay' among them, had
long vowels or diphthongs in the root (SB, sec 175.2).
The vowel x in cxg could not be a reflex of Gmc *e 1
because before *e 1 initial k would have become an
affricate, but before x < *a, as before all umlauted
vowels, k preserved its velar character (cf chin < cinn
versus kin < cynne). It follows that x in cxg is the product
of i-umlaut. The cause of the different treatment of
velars before old and new front vowels, the chronology
586
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of umlaut in relation to the change k > k (palatalized),

and the syllabic structure of Old English words (discussed
in detail in Hogg [1979] and Colman [1986]) are
immaterial for the etymology of key.
Among phonetic details, the history of -g in cxg
deserves mention. That OE cxg was [kaerj] rather than
[kae:g] follows from the modern pronunciation [kei], the
predecessor of [ki:], and from the fact that in Anglian
dialects it did not become *ceg: Anglian x lost its open
character before velars and remained unchanged before
palatalized consonants (A. Campbell [1959:sec 233]). In
the string *[k£e:g] > *[k£e:g] > *[k£e:j] > *[ke:j] > [kei] >
[ki:], only the last link is puzzling. The modern pronun-
ciation of key is usually ascribed to Northern influence,
though it is unclear why the Scottish norm should have
prevailed in the South (Diensberg [1999:107]). Kaluza
(1906-07:11, sec 356, note 1, and 385f) cites weak, bleak
(from Scand veikr and bleikr), and either ~ neither (when
they rhyme with bequeathed) as also having [i:] from
[ei], as well as ley 'pasture,' a doublet of lea.
Since x in cxg could not go back to *e and was the
product of z-umlaut, cxg must have developed from
*kag before i or j. The only regular source of OE a is Gmc
*ai; consequently, an earlier form of *kag must have
been *kaig. The necessity to reconstruct i or j after the
root leaves us with two choices: the i-stem or the jö-
stem. However, strong long-syllabic feminine nouns of
587
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the i-declension (such as be n 'plea') had the same form

in the nominative and the accusative singular, while the
accusative of cxg was cxge. Consequently, cxg belonged
to the jö-declension and had the protoform *kaig-jö-.
See SB (secs 257 and 276, note 5), Wright and Wright
(1914:sec 275), A. Campbell (1959:secs 429, 439, 593),
Kaluza (1906-07:1, secs 60, 89, 90a, 109), Luick (1964:sec
187, 238, 361.1, 373, 378b, 400, 408, 637.1, 709.3, 710),
HL (287-88), and OED (the last mainly on the modern
pronunciation of key).
2. The earliest attempts to discover the origin of key
did not go beyond the comparison between key and L
clavis 'key,' L claudo 'shut, close,' Gk KlElOO 'shut,' and
so on. Ital chiave offered an especially tempting model:
by "striking out" l, one obtained a form resembling key
[kei].
Cockayne (1861:sec 822) and Lynn (1884) kept de-
riving key from clavis. More cautious etymologists cited
only the Old English form. Thus Junius, although he was
the first to discover a cognate in Frisian (Old Frisian had
kai and kei), could not think of any etymology of key
(spelled cey in his dictionary). Somner introduced the
nonexistent infinitive cxggian (with a short vowel)
'obserare,'
'shut fast or lock.' Tooke (1798-1805:375) declared
cxg to be the past participle of this ghost verb (he
looked on most words as past participles) and listed a
588
Adz(e) Adz(e)

few other words he thought related to it: cage, gage,

wages, gag, keg, and quay.
Wedgwood followed Tooke in that he tried to find
the same etymology for key and its homonym quay. He
correctly identified the Celtic ancestry of F quai and
suggested the loss of l in Celtic, so that L cla vis again
turned out to be the etymon of key. He referred to G
schließen 'close' (with l) and E shut (without l), but as we
now know, those verbs are not cognate. Many later
dictionaries contain variations on Tooke's and
Wedgwood's themes; see
Johnson-Todd (OE cxggian 'shut up'), Richardson
(quay and cxggian 'shut up, confine'), Mackay (1877; he
repeats Wedgwood), Chambers (1868; he cites Welsh
and Latin forms), and DDEW (L cla vis). Skeat1
reconstructs the protoform *kagan, denies its
connection with quay, and says that the origin of key is
unknown. Skeat4 gives only the English and Frisian forms.
W (1828) cites Old English cxg but offers no
etymology (that tradition continued into the present:
throughout its history, no edition of Webster's dictionary
has risked a hypothesis on the origin of key). The same
holds for OED, all the "Oxford" dictionaries, and
Weekley. The verb *cxggian had an amazingly long life.
It appears in Bosworth (1838) with reference to Somner
and in BT, vol. 1. Only Toller entered cxggian and said:
"delete." OED cited the Middle English forms but
589
Adz(e) Adz(e)

found it necessary to add: "An OE cXggian is alleged

by Somner."
When an etymology does not immediately suggest
itself, one usually witnesses various attempts to guess
the origin of a difficult word. Most conjectures turn out
to be wrong, if not fanciful. But key provides relatively
little food to an imaginative researcher. The Latin
hypothesis (key < cla vis) died a quiet death because
Skeat did not mention, let alone endorse, it. A Celtic
connection, prompted by the Celtic origin of quay, has
been explored and abandoned. The first to suggest that
key is related to (or borrowed from) Welsh cau may have
been Bosworth (1838), who gave the Welsh form with a
misprint (as can 'shut, inclose'). Jellinghaus (1898a:464)
cited the form correctly and followed it, in its putative
capacity as a cognate of the Anglo-Frisian word, by a
question mark. (Old) Welsh cau 'close, clasp; conclude;
shut; hollow: enclosed' (from *kouos: GPC) cannot be
related to E key (from *kaigjo -). A loan from Welsh is
equally improbable. Neither Celtic nor English etymolo-
gists seem to have shown much interest in the Welsh
hypothesis, and today it is forgotten.
Key surfaced in one of the oldest Scandinavian
dictionaries with an etymological component. Serenius
(1757) compared it with OI kuga 'tyrannize, force,'
whose very Latin gloss ('cogo,' that is, 'force, compel;
collect') looked like a cognate. He was not an original
590
Adz(e) Adz(e)

etymologist and was probably repeating the derivation

of one of his predecessors. Those were rather numerous
(Rogstrom [1998:179201]), but key does not turn up in
any of them. Nor does it appear in Ihre, in whose
dictionary we find Sw kag, but not E key. If OI kuga, a
verb of obscure origin, goes back to *kufga (AEW, ABM),
it may be related to G Kugel 'bullet,' E cog, Sw kugge
'cog,' and perhaps E cudgel. The meaning 'compel' will
not be part of it. Finally, W. Barnes (1862:96) listed
key under one of his all-encompassing roots, namely
k*ng 'stop back anything.'
One can see that early etymologists, insofar as they
did not derive key from Latin or Welsh, sought its origin
in words designating some sort of restriction or
confinement, and this is the reason their labors yielded
nothing worth salvaging. Key is not obviously related to
any verb, and it contains no suffix of a nomen agentis.
EWDS11 says that English words for 'key' are of Romance
origin. Holthausen (1934:35) was quick to point out the
mistake, and it was expunged from later editions.
3. Students of English have given up the etymology
of key as hopeless, but the word often appeared in
German and Dutch scholarly sources, in which it was
compared with G Kegel 'skittle, ninepin.' The first vowel
of OHG kegil 'nail, pin' is the product of i-umlaut (kegil <
*kagila), and the cognates of *kag- are well-known. Kag
'stalk, cabbage stump' is current in southern German dia-
591
Adz(e) Adz(e)

lects. Schmid mentioned it but could not think of a better

comparison than Swabian Kag ~ L cavus 'hollow.' Some
other words having the root *kag- are Sw reg kage 'low
bush' (compare E reg cag 'stump,' of Scandinavian
origin), N kage 'low bush,' OI Kagi (a nickname), OE
ceacga 'broom; furze' (mod reg chag), MDu kegghe
'wedge' (> ModDu keg ~ kegge), OI kaggi 'keg, cask' (the
etymon of E keg), possibly MDu kake ~ kaek and MLG
kak 'pillory,' OI kakki 'water jug,' and several words with
the infix n (KM, AEW). Whatever the causes of the
alternation -gg-/-kk- may be, the words with the voiced
and the voiceless geminate seem to belong together (see
especially Tamm, kagge 'keg').
Kegel does not have any reliable cognates outside
Germanic. Several Greek words have been proposed as
candidates and dismissed (Uhlenbeck
[1901:299-300]). Bezzenberger and Fick (1881:237
/27) compared Kegel and Lith zaginys 'pole, stake,'
and Fick (1891:320) traced Kegel and L baculum 'stick' to
the etymon *gagld-. Zaginys, along with zagaras 'dry
branch,' and zagre 'plow, plowshare,' turns up in most
modern etymological dictionaries featuring G Kegel.
However, Fraenkel (LEW; zaginys: see zagas) may have
doubted the connection, for he compared Kegel only
with Lith gegne
'rafter.' Uhlenbeck (1896:101-02) added Russ zhezl

592
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'rod, baton' to the Lithuanian words, but, according

to Trubachev (1960:137-40), it should be kept apart from
the Baltic group. Even more remote is
Arm cag 'top, peak' (WP I:570; IEW, 354), though
Holthausen (VEW) gives it in the entry koggull
without discussion. The Kegel group probably has no
cognates outside Germanic.
A single native English word related to Kegel is chag
(reg). Schwenck1-3 connected Kegel and key and cited OE
*cxgjan [sic]. In Schwenck4, key is absent. His dictionary
enjoyed considerable popularity both among lay readers
and in professional circles. Bezzenberger must have
consulted it, but Bezzen-berger and Fick (1881:237/27)
do not refer to any predecessors (this is where OHG kegil
and OE cxg are for the first time compared with Lith
zaginys
'stake, pole'). Holbrooke (1910:254) glossed OE
cxg as 'binder, bar, key' and listed it with OI kaggi
and many other words having the root [s]kag ~ [s]kaggi.
Kluge apparently disapproved of Schwenck's
etymology, yet it made its way into Dutch dictionaries,
perhaps independently of Schwenck. Franck did not deny
the possibility that Du keg ~ kegge are
related to key. In EWNT2, Van Wijk deleted
Franck's perhaps, but in the supplement to the same
edition, he declared the old etymology untenable,
because, if OE cxg were related to Du keg, its initial velar
593
Adz(e) Adz(e)

would, he said, have become an affricate. Here he was

wrong, for an affricate, as has been shown in sec 1,
above, did not arise before umlaut-ed front vowels.
Vercoullie1-3 compared Du keg and E key, but Indo-
European dictionaries did not recognize his comparison.
Torp (1909:33, kag) made no mention of key. WP I:569-
70 cited OE cxg and ModE cag under the root *geg(h)- ~
*gog(h) 'branch; stake; bush,' yet on p. 570 this
etymology of key is called into question. IEW (354)
replaced "unlikely" with "unclear." If key goes back to
*kaigjo-, it cannot be related to *kag, for *ai and *a
belong to different ablaut series. The same problem
arises in the etymology of HEATHER and OAT. Unless we
agree that ai and *a may alternate in the same root
(compare Foerste's rule about the alternation *ai ~ *a,
discussed at CLOVER), key and Kegel must be separated
as impossible partners. Van Haeringen made a brief
statement to that effect (see his supplement: keg), and it
is strange to find Vercoullie's etymology in Van Veen
(keg).
Van Veen is not the only supporter of
Schwenck's etymology. Markey (1979; 1983:98100)
offered a detailed investigation of the extant forms of
the word for 'key' in Frisian dialects (Siebs [1889:202]
and Lofstedt [1963-65:316] give a full array of the
relevant forms; the Standard has kaei, plural kaeijen)
and place names with the element kog (< kag; ModDu
594
Adz(e) Adz(e)

kaag and koog 'polder,' that is, a piece of low-lying land

reclaimed from the sea or a river and protected by
dikes). He concluded that kog "was regarded as an
opening, a central break in the water, the aperture for
subsequent territorial expansion: it was a 'key' to the
formation of new land, and Frisian kog ~ kag ~ keg <
kaug(i) is thus semantically related to Anglo-Frisian key <
kaigi- as apophonic variants of a common root (*gogh)"
(1979:50). The Anglo-Frisian term for key is said to have
"originally denoted the locus, the aperture receptive to
the object employed to perform that act" (p. 41). The
semantic base of Markey's reconstruction will be
discussed below, but the main problem with his
hypothesis is the reference to "apophonic variants of a
common
root."
Less clear-cut are Lerchner's examples (1965:129-30).
The head word in his list is kei (m, f) 'cobblestone,
boulder, oblong stone.' The etymology of this Dutch
noun is debatable (NEW). If the original meaning was
*'wedge-shaped stone,' then kei is a cognate of G Kegel.
A connection between Du kei and kiezel 'gravel' (G Kies
'gravel,' Kiesel 'pebble,' and so on) is less probable.
Lerchner borrowed his etymology from E. Zupitza
(1896:194), though Zupitza's formulation is not clear.
Makovskii (1968:133) mistranslated Lerchner's gloss and
rejected his conclusion. He pointed to the difference in
595
Adz(e) Adz(e)

meaning between E key and Du kei, but the

incompatibility of their etymons, whatever the origin of
the Dutch word, is more important.
In a book full of far-reaching but shaky hypotheses,
Zollinger (1952:46-47) noted that words for 'hook' have
the root kag- all over the world. Examples in works of
this type usually do not bear close scrutiny. Among
words from Germanic, Slavic, Basque, Japanese, and
other languages, Zollinger cites OE kXg and E key (p. 46).
He does not seem to be aware of the literature discussed
above; nor can attention to details be expected from
such compilations, and this makes them practically
useless. Vennemann (1995:70), who noted the
irregularities in the hook set, believes that key, like hook,
is a substrate word and compares it with Basque (reg)
kakho 'hook' and gako 'key' (Vennemann 2002:233-36).
Unless it can be shown that we deal with a key of some
special construction (otherwise the borrowing is hard to
explain), his hypothesis has little appeal. Nor is the
phonetic match (Basque [ak(h)] versus pre-OE *[ag])
close enough, at first sight.
Although one can surmise that kag- and *kag-
interacted and were occasionally confused in the oldest
northern dialects, for etymological purposes the two
roots should be kept apart. The Germanic words for
'hook' furnish a parallel to the kag- / kag relation, but
here we have a case of regular ablaut. The words of the
596
Adz(e) Adz(e)

hook group also had varying root final consonants (see E

hook, G Haken, E hoop, and E hasp, with their cognates,
in etymological dictionaries).
4. The next group of attempts to explain the origin of
key centers round the root *kt-, attested in all the Old
Germanic languages. Go keinan*
'sprout' has correspondences in Scandinavian and
West Germanic, OE cinan 'gape, yawn, crack' being one
of them. The only Modern English reflex of *ki- is
probably chine 'crack,' which would have disappeared
too if it had not been generalized from place names in
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in the meaning 'deep
narrow ravine cut by a stream' (OED, ODEE). In some
obscure way, chink must be related to chine. In German,
words with the root *ki have wide currency: Kien 'pine
tree, pine branch used for kindling; torch' (< OHG kien;
OE ce n occurs only as the name of a rune), Keim 'shoot,
sprout' (< OHG kimo), keimen 'germinate' (< OHG kinan),
and Keil 'wedge' (< OHG kil) (see Keim, Keil, and Kien in
KM and KS, keinan in Feist34, and kiem
in NEW; see also WP I:544 and IEW, 355). OHG kil
had a Middle High German doublet kidel related to
OE cid 'seed, sprout; mote'; see CHIDE. Thus we obtain
the complexes ki-l, ki-m, ki-n, and ki-d. The original verb
has been assigned the meaning 'break
open, burst open' (Seebold [1970:290-91] and KS,

597
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Keim, Kien), which takes care of sprouting, splitting,

producing cracks and fissures, and so forth. The
reconstructed form *kaigio- 'key' may belong to the ki-
group, for unlike a in OHG *kagila, i is a legitimate
apophonic partner of ai.
Wood (1902:52/92a; repeated in Wood
1920:340/135) was the first to connect OE cXg and the
words of the ki- group. He also mentioned G Keil and OI
keipr 'oarlock, rowlock' as possibly derived from the root
*geio- 'move suddenly, jerk, snatch.' Keipr is problematic
(see below), but Keil has found its place in etymological
dictionaries with Go keinan and the rest. Holthausen
(1912:48), who may have missed Wood's etymology, ad-
vanced a similar hypothesis, but the cognates he lists do
not cohere too well. He begins by connecting OE cXg and
OHG kegil and then adds MDu keige 'javelin, spear,'
MHG kidel ~ kil 'wedge,' and OI kill 'inlet, canal.' He
traces those words to *kaijo(n), in ablaut relation with
*ki-, and argues that ancient keys were simply pins or
pegs. However, he cites only OE cid as a possible cognate
of cxg(e) in AeEW and gives no etymology of key in EW.
The weakest part of Holthausen's reconstruction is that
he lumped together words of the Kegel and the *ki-
groups.
Although OE cxg and cinan may belong together
(though cxg would then turn out to be the only word of
the structure *ki-g— *kai-g- among the cognates of Go
598
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*keinan in any grade of ablaut), the semantic base of this

etymology is not fully convincing. Nouns related to the
verb *kinan, with its dominant meaning 'burst into
bloom,' could hardly designate pieces of deadwood (like
pins, pegs, and splinters), whereas resinous branches,
shoots, and sprouts are unsuitable for barring doors.
In the first ten editions of EWDS (but not in KL), OE
cxg turns up as a possible cognate of Keil. Götze
removed the English word from the entry, and it never
appeared in Kluge's dictionary again.
5. The English word denoting an instrument for
moving the bolt of a lock is unusual in that it is opaque
and has no cognates except in Frisian. The isolated
nature of cxg ~ kei has been recognized for a long time
(Jellinghaus [1898a:464], E. Schwartz [1951:210]). Nor
does key resemble its counterparts in the other
Germanic languages, such as Du sleutel, G Schlüssel, and
(O)I lykill, all of which are etymologically transparent
(Kluge [1926:sec 90]). Words designating keys, latches,
and bolts may be borrowed. Such are, for example, E pin
(Förster [1902:324-27]), OE clustor (< L clustrum; SN
II:324), E latch, bar, and bolt, and see other examples in
Buck (1949:7.24), to which Russ shchekolda 'latch, bar,
bolt'-stress on the second syllable-apparently, from LG
Steckholt (Vasmer IV:500) can be added. They may have
unexpected origins. Consider E reg haggaday 'latch,' an
obscure word (Skeat [1895]), G Riegel (equally obscure),
599
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and G Dietrich 'skeleton key' (from a proper name, like E

jenny). But cxg < *kaigjo-, if we disregard the Basque
connection, seems to be a native word, and at one time
it must have been coined from an easily identifiable
root.
In most cases, words for 'key,' unless they mean
'lock-er' ~ 'clos-er' ~ 'shut-ter,' are derived from words
for 'peg,' 'nail,' 'pin,' and 'hook.' The most primitive keys,
when they were keys rather than bars, had bits. In many
languages, the root of the word for 'key' means
'curvature.' See WP I:492-94, qleu, and IEW, 604-05,
kleu-; WH (clava, claudo) also give the comparative
material. A typical example is Russ kliuch 'key,' related to
kliuka (stress on the second syllable) 'hooked staff,
crook.' SN II:327 reproduce several pictures of old keys.
The earliest extant locks used by speakers of the
Germanic languages show the influence of Roman
locksmiths (Falk [1918-19]), but the native Germanic
words for 'key' go back to an older period
(Heyne [1899:31]). Wattle doors of the type desig-
nated by Go haurds (its English cognate is hurdle) had
openings in the front wall, not real doors; they did not
need elaborate locks. Go -lu kan 'lock up' and its
congeners originally meant 'bend, turn' (Feist3-4). Since G
schließen, Du sluiten 'lock up, close,' and so on are
related to L cla vis, they, too, must have meant 'put a
bolt across the door.'
600
Adz(e) Adz(e)

At all times, some keys have been made to lock the

door, others only to unlock it (so that we should
distinguish between 'closers' and 'openers'), and still
others to perform both functions. Keys and locks of
medieval Scandinavia have been especially well
researched. If the answer to Old English Riddle 44 from
the Exeter Book is 'penis' and 'key,' the key it describes
has a modern form. Most of the oldest Norwegian,
Danish, and Swedish devices for fastening the door do
not antedate the epoch of the Vikings, but the shape of
some of them is archaic (Berg at al [1966:48-61], Norberg
[1967]). The long discussion on words for 'key' in
Scandinavia has a bearing on both the linguistic and the
material aspects of keys everywhere in the Germanic
Middle Ages. See Brondum-Nielsen
(1931-32, 1933-34, 1971-73) and R. Pipping (193334);
Brondum-Nielsen (1931-32) contains numerous
illustrations. Nor are relations between OI lykill and
*nykill irrelavant for understanding how keys got their
names elsewhere. See Jirlow (1936),
Andersson (1936), Hamp (1971-73) and Holm
(1993:109-10). If *nykill is not a phonetic variant of
lykill (Byskov [1909]; DEO3-4, n0gle; this point of view is
much better argued than Andersson and Hamp's), then
*nykill should be understood as a bent stick. It will be
suggested below that cxg, too, was 'a curved pin,' as
Holthausen proposed.
601
Adz(e) Adz(e)

E key is both a noun and an adjective. Preserved now

only in northern dialects and as follows from the
occasional spellings kay and keigh, pronounced [kei], key
(adj) goes back to Middle English. OED (kay, key) gives
two citations, one dated 13??, the other 1611, but the
material in EDD (key) is abundant, even though by
Wright's time the adjective key was obsolescent in some
areas (Audrey [1883-84]). Key (adj) has been traced to
Scandinavian. OED refers to Sw reg kaja 'left hand' and
kajhandt 'left-handed.' EDD cites Sw reg kaja (from
Rietz) and also northern Frisian kei 'awkward;
inarticulate, lacking fluency.' In English dialects, the most
widely-known meaning of key is
'twisted,' as in key-legged 'knock-kneed, crooked'
and key-leg 'crooked or bandy leg.' The verb key means
'twist, bend,' used especially with reference to the legs
twisted by illness, and so forth.
'Left' must have originated as 'twisted' and 'bent,'
like OI vinstri 'left' (< *wenistru), with *wen-most
plausibly glossed by Huisman (1953:105) as 'bent
downward' (see also AEW, vinstri). Despite Frisk's doubt
(GrEW), Gk Amoj, L laevus, Proto-Slavic *levu, and their
cognates, including E left, originally seem to have meant
'bent down, twisted.' See etymological dictionaries and
Beekes
(1994:89). Malkiel (1979:esp 517 and 520) discusses

602
Adz(e) Adz(e)

words for 'left' and 'right' against a broad back-

ground and refers to a few important earlier works. OI
skeifr 'oblique' and G schief 'crooked, lopsided, tilted'
(from Low German) versus L scaevus 'left' provide a
parallel to the Scandinavian word, which served as the
source of E key 'left.'
Without s- we have not only Sw reg kaja 'left hand'
but also (with root final v) Nynorsk keiv(en) 'clumsy,
awkward; false, unfortunate,' keivhendt 'left-handed'
and keiva 'the left hand of a left-handed person'; Dan reg
kei 'left hand' goes back to *keg (NEO, keiv). Next come
words with root final t, for example, Dan kejtet 'left-
handed, awkward,' kejthdndet 'left-handed,' and kejte
'left hand' (cf Sc katy-handed 'left-handed') and words
with root final k: OI keikja 'bend back,' from keikr 'bent
backward.' A near synonym of keikja in the zero grade is
OI kikna 'give way at the knees' (kikna must be the
etymon of E kick, as Skeat suggested; OED and ODEE
deny the connection and call kick a word of unknown
origin). Alongside kei-f, kei-g, kei-k, and kei-t, kei-p has
been recorded. The etymology of OI keipr 'oarlock,
rowlock' (see sec 4, above) is debatable, but several
scholars (Torp in NEO, keip, and see the references in
AEW, keipr) treat keipr and keikr as related.
EDD lists several words with final k and g (from all
over England) that resemble keikja, keck-fisted, -handed,
cack-handed, and cag-handed (the last two sometimes
603
Adz(e) Adz(e)

end in -fisted) 'left-handed; clumsy, awkward.' From

Warwickshire, EDD has keggy and ceggy 'left-handed.'
Keggle and kiggle 'be unstable, stand insecurely' appear
to be related to cag-and keggy. The northern forms keck
and kecker may also belong here. A kecker is "the bar
which connects the body of a cart with thills; a piece of
wood or iron in front of a tumbril to enable the body of a
cart to be raised to any angle. ...When the cart is kecked,
the front is raised, and a peg is put into one of the holes
in the kecker to keep it at the required angle" (EDD).
The verb keck can mean
'twist to one side.' AHD3 (cack-handed, chiefly British
'left-handed; awkward, chumsy') offers a plausible
etymology: "Perhaps from Old Norse keikr, 'bent
backwards'; akin to Danish keite, 'left-handed'," except
that kejte means 'left hand,' while the derivation in
Longman 1984 (kack-handed, the same definition, but in
the opposite order 'awkward, clumsy; derog[atory] 'left-
handed') is unacceptable: allegedly, from E reg cack
'excrement, muck,' from ME cakken 'defecate,' from L
caca re.
SOD (DG, 241-42) offers a rich pallet of words for
'left-handed': cack-handed, cat-handed, cuddy-
handed, kaggy-handed, kay-reived, keck-handed, keggy-
handed, and kittaghy among others.
In all likelihood, both E reg key 'twisted' and the
noun key (< *kaig-jo) belong with the words given
604
Adz(e) Adz(e)

above. The same holds for OFr ke ie and ka ie. Key was
then 'a stick (pin, peg) with a twisted end.' It may have
been a northern word from the start. Many links connect
it with Old Icelandic and modern Scandinavian dialects
(however, according to ABM, ModI kigi 'the front part of
a beam' is not related to OE cXg), while leads to old and
modern West Germanic are absent. Scyttel(s) and
forescyttels testify to other Old English words for 'key.'
They, too, designated a bar, for they represent the zero
grade of sce otan and were thus 'shot' across the door
like modern bolts. The phrase isen scytel 'iron bolt' (OE)
was synonymous with isen steng. Bolts could also be
used on wattle doors, as follows from OI loka and
hurdarloka.
The disappearance of OE scyttel(s) is probably due to
the fact that it was used too broadly: it also meant 'dart,
missile, arrow.' In similar manner, shuttle 'weaving
implement,' which emerged in texts in the 14 th century,
has been recorded with the meanings 'floodgate' and
'drawer.' Anything that can be shot or shut is potentially
a 'scyttel' or a 'shuttle' (see shuttle in OED). On the other
hand, neither Scand *lukila, *hnukila (assuming that
*hnukila existed) nor OHG sluzzil ~ LG slutil had English
cognates. E reg slot(e) ~ sloat 'lock' (akin to G Schloss)
are borrowings from Middle Low German or Middle
Dutch (OED). They are not related to slot 'groove.'

605
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Frisian had kaie ~ keie and sletel. Both may have

been borrowed: the first from Scandinavian, the second
from Dutch. Scandinavian dialects have not preserved a
cognate of OE cXg meaning 'key,' and this circumstance
weakens the hypothesis of the northern provenance of
key, but cases when a word survives as a borrowing but
is lost in the lending language are not uncommon.
The Old English noun and its Old Frisian cognate
must have had the same meaning. Markey's idea that in
most Germanic languages the word for 'key' refers to a
tool, whereas in Frisian it refers to an orifice, lacks
foundation. We have no evidence that the object called
*kaigjo- needed an orifice. It was rather a bolt, a
synonym of OE grindel. Furthermore, the key probably
never derives its name from the hole into which it is
inserted.
6. Proto-Old English *kaig-jo gave way to *kagji,
with *ai smoothed (monophthongized) but *g still a
velar stop, though palatalized as, for instance, in ModI
elgi 'elk,' engi 'meadow,' and ergi 'malice.' The root kag-,
which meant 'crooked, bent, twisted,' came into contact
with a near homonym and partial synonym kag-, not
limited to the North. Consider OI kaga 'bend forward;
peep, pry, gaze' and kovggull 'joint in the finger or the
toe' (usually in the plural: koglur). OI kcegill 'small barrel,
any small vessel; ladle' can be understood as a
diminutive of kaggi 'keg, small wine barrel,' another kag-
606
Adz(e) Adz(e)

word (it had a doublet kaggr): wooden vessels were

made by weaving wattling or by interlacing pliant twigs
(see these words in AEW and ABM). The geminate -gg- in
kaggi and kaggr may be of expressive origin (Martinet
[1937:116]). The cognates of Kegel do not necessarily
have the connotation of curvature, but those mentioned
above do. The English verb kedge 'change the position of
a ship by winding in a hawser attached to a small
anchor,' that is, 'warp a ship,' known from texts since the
15th century, may be related to OI kaga. In the 14th
century, cagge denoted the action described by kedge.
The final consonant of kedge could arise only in a native
or an Anglicized word, but like OI kaga, it refers to
bending or moving sideways. Cadge, a regional variant of
kedge, is even closer to kaga.
The following picture emerges from the exposition
offered here. A Scandinavian root *kaig-'crooked,
curved, twisted, bent, oblique' alternated with *kaif-,
*kaik-, *kait-, and probably *kaip-. It was the base of
several verbs, adjectives, and nouns. One of those
adjectives entered northern English and Frisian dialects;
its reflex is E reg key 'left.' Some local designation of a
device for fastening a door (a stick with its end turned
down or bent), namely *kaigjo-, reached the north of
England and Frisian dialects before i-umlaut, the
palatalization of g and the monophthongization of Proto-
Old English *ai to a. English adopted it as a feminine jo-
607
Adz(e) Adz(e)

stem, but the word never acquired one standard form: in

the feminine, it vacillated between the strong and the
weak declension (cxg and cxge) and could also be a weak
masculine noun (cxga). After the monophthongization of
*ai, the word was pronounced *kagji or *kagi and
interacted with synonyms having the root *kag-. The
late occurrence of cxg(e) and cxg(a) in Old English texts
(no recorded examples before the year 1000) does not
necessarily mean that they had reached southern
dialects only by the end of the 10th century.
7. Key 'low island,' in place names, is a different
word, and OED explained its origin correctly (key sb3 and
cay). The spelling of Key must have been affected by the
English noun key. From an etymological point of view, it
is the same word as quay, and it goes back to Sp cayo
'shoal, rock, barrier reef.' Later research (Friederici and
DCECH, cayo) adds nothing new to this information. FEW
II:46b states that the pronunciation of Key is the result of
the confusion of the two homonyms in English, but the
pronunciation of quay shows that it is not necessary to
posit the influence of key on Key. The literature on
Florida place names (books, dissertations, newspaper
articles) contains discussion of the origin of particular
names like Key West but not of the word Key. The only
exception is McMul-len Jr (1953).
The other words spelled key, for instance, key 'clef,'
developed from the basic meaning of key. Only key
608
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'pericarp of certain trees,' briefly mentioned above,

looks problematic, but the explanation in OED appears
adequate. See key sb3 IV.14: 'a dry fruit with a thin
membranous wing, usually growing in bunches, as in the
ash and sycamore' and the 1562 quotation: "They are
called in Eng-lishe ashe Keyes, because they hangh in
bunches, after the manner of Keyes."
A Note on OI kqgurbarn and G mit Kind und Kegel
In the history of the k-g words referring to curvature,
OI kovgurbarn 'infant' and G Kegel 'ninepin' are of
special interest. The latter is also known from the phrase
mit Kind und Kegel 'with the whole family' and is extant
as the last names Kegl, Kegelmann, and Kbgel (KS). OI
kogurbarn (akin to Far kogilsbarn, Nynorsk koggebarn:
AEW) carries a strong overtone of contempt. A despised
child was most often born out of wedlock, and, as could
be expected, MHG kegel meant 'bastard.' Seebold (KS,
Kegel) is not sure whether Kegel and kovgurbarn are
related. They probably are, and OScand *kogurr may
have been a word of much stronger abuse than its Old
Icelandic reflex.
AEW suggests the derivation of kovgur(barn) from
kagi ('low bush' in Modern Icelandic). In light of the
widespread syncretism of branch,
shoot, stump / child in Germanic, this suggestion
makes sense (the same in Holthausen [1900]), but it
leaves out of account the negative connotations of
609
Adz(e) Adz(e)

kogurr and Kegel. Couldn't these words contain

reference to crookedness and hence illegitimacy, a
conceptual ancestor of bend sinister? The idea of
curvature is especially strong in the words with the infix
n: OI kengr 'bend, hook' (E kink and akimbo reached
English from Low German and Scandinavian respectively;
both contain the same root as kengr), kongurvdfa and
kongulvafa 'spider' (spinner, like G Spinne 'spider'),
kongur 'texture,' and kongull 'cluster of grapes or other
berries,' reminiscent of E key 'pericarp of an ash.' Proto-
Scand *kankur, which yielded OI kakki (only in vatnkakki
'water basin') and kokkr 'ball' (ModI kokkur 'lump, clod';
Nynorsk kokk ~ kakk 'small wooden vessel'), belongs
here too.
If OI kogurr 'quilt with a fringe, counterpane, bed
cover, pall (over a coffin)' is a native word, it is not akin
to kogur, as follows from Russ kov'er 'rug, carpet,' earlier
also 'thick cloth for carrying or perhaps burying a dead
body.' We seem to be dealing with a migratory culture
word, whose association with kogurbarn is due to folk
etymology. See
Fritzner (1883:28-29), Detter (1898:56), Sahlgren
(1928:258-71), H. Andersen (1930), M. Olsen (1940),
Elmevik (1974), IsEW (323-24), and AEW (kogurr,
with references to earlier etymologies). Consider also
Gotze's fanciful etymology of Kegel in Kind
und Kegel [1921:287] that can be found in all the
610
Adz(e) Adz(e)

editions of KM. None of those authors, except partly

J. de Vries, is ready to dissociate kogurr from kogurbarn.
On the Icelandic place name Kogurr see Jonsson
(1916:78).
KITTY-CORNER (1890)
Kitty- in kitty-corner (as in the drug store is kitty-
corner from the gas station) is a jocular substitution for
or a folk etymology of cater-corner, through a possible
intermediate stage catty-corner. Numerous compounds
have cater- as their first element. The verb cater 'place
diagonally' was first recorded in the middle of the 16 th
century. The compounds with cater- occur mainly in
dialects, and their attestation does not predate the end
of the 18th century; the only exception is cater-cousin
(1547). Attempts to trace cater- to F quatre 'four' and
(for cater-cousin) to cater 'supply food' did not yield
satisfactory results. Cater- means 'across, askew, diago-
nally,' and its etymon was probably some Danish word
like Dan kejte 'left hand' or kejtet 'clumsy.' Folk
etymology connected cater-corner with cat, and cater-
cousin with cater 'supply food.' Some evidence points to
a synonymous root of similar form, namely Gmc kat-, but
it seems to have left no traces in English.
The sections are devoted to 1) the dating of kitty-
corner, 2) the Scandinavian origin of cater-, 3) the
etymology of cater-cousin, and 4) words with the root

611
Adz(e) Adz(e)

kat- and the possibility of projecting the roots of cater-

and kat- words to Proto-Indo-European.
1. According to DARE, kitty-corner was first
recorded in 1890 and is a possibly folk etymological
variant of cater-cornered 'placed diagonally.' OED has
cater-cornered and its synonym cater-ways but no pre-
1874 example of either. However, the verb cater 'cut
(move, go) diagonally' turned up in 1577. Since cater
'place diagonally' was known in the 16th century, any
compound with it may be equally old or older. Although
dictionaries agree in calling cater-ways an Americanism,
it originated in British dialects and is one of many similar
compounds featured in EDD: cater-cornelled, cater-
flampered, cater-slant, and seven more, all meaning
approximately the same: 'askew, out of proportion,
oblique, lopsided.' On the other hand, kitty-corner,
pronounced kiddy-corner, can be marked as an
Americanism.
2. The best-known suggestion about the origin of
cater- in cater-ways traces it to early ModE cater 'four' (F
quatre; see cater sb2 and quater in OED). Not only
amateurs like Terry (1883), Fish-wick (1883), and G.L.G.
(1883) but also the editors of OED found that etymology
plausible. All later dictionaries repeated it. The idea of
diagonal placement allegedly goes back to the shape of a
square object (so Fishwick), but no one explained why a
square came to be associated with a diagonal rather
612
Adz(e) Adz(e)

than a straight line. Numerals occasionally form the

foundation of idioms. Such are E be at sixes and sevens
'be in confusion' (a folk etymological reshaping of a
metaphor borrowed from dice: Whiting [1968:522,
S359]) and G fünf gerade sein lassen 'turn a blind eye to
an obvious transgression,' literally 'let five be straight,'
but it is unimaginable that a specialized foreign numeral
(its principal sphere of application was dice) should have
become a fully domesticated adverb meaning 'across.'
Equally puzzling would be the development from
'square' to 'out of square.'
The conjecture that cater- is related to G quer
'across' (H.E.W. [1883]; the author invites "cunning
linguists" to find out what happened to the sounds)
caused Skeat (1883) to write one of his fiery letters to
the editor. Walsh (1939) begins his note so: "This word
of interesting etymology (French quatre coins)... " His
implication seems to be that cater-cornered is a calque
of the French phrase. But, although some French phrase
like les quatre coins du monde (du pays, de la terre)
'everywhere' and even courir les quatre coins 'run from
place to place' (there is also a children's game les quatre
coins, figuratively 'wild goose chase') have easily
recognizable counterparts in English: the four corners of
the earth, within the four corners, and the four corners
'crossroads,' this fact is not ground enough for explaining
the origin of cater-cornered, especially because cater- is
613
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the first element of a whole series of compounds that

have nothing to do with corners.
Most probably, cater- is a loan from an East
Scandinavian language. Consider Dan kejte and Sw reg
kaitu 'left hand' (see Rietz, kaja). Kejte goes back to Old
Danish (ODS, O^DS). 'Left,' as opposed to 'right,' often
contains the idea 'bent, twisted,' as opposed to
'straight.' (See more on this subject at KEY.) T.T.W.
(1872) elucidated the usage of cater- in Lancashire: "An
angular stone or piece of wood is... said to be 'cater-
cornered' when one of the angles is 'out of square' or too
far distant from the rest. A person is also said to walk
'cater-cornered' when he moves with one side in
advance of the other. This is specially applied to those
who have suffered from paralysis" (the same, E.S.C.
[1872]). Here the meaning 'bent, not straight' agrees
with Dan kejtet 'clumsy, awkward.'
OIr cittach 'left handed; awkward' (> IrE kitho-gue)
had the same source as the English cater-words (see the
comment in O'Muirithe [1997:68]). It is a curious
coincidence that not only cater- 'out of shape' but also
clumsy, awkward, and possibly gawky are of
Scandinavian origin (see GAWK). Were they first used to
describe Scandinavian settlers? Final -r must have been
added to disyllabic *cate (< kejte) under the influence of
some similar forms. Compare caterpillar from AF katplbz
(it may have been pronounced *cat-a-pillar for some
614
Adz(e) Adz(e)

time) and see what is said about caterwaul at

RAGAMUFFIN. The verb cater 'bend' is probably a back
formation from compounds beginning with cater-.
Compounds with cater- as their first element must have
been borrowed centuries before the time of their
attestation.
3. Additional light on cater-cornered and its kin
comes from the history of cater-cousin (1547). Today this
word is remembered only because it occurs in The
Merchant of Venice (II, 2, the line number differs from
edition to edition: 125, 139 [OED], 143 [SG]): "His
Maister and he ... are scarce cater-cosins," which is an
ironic litotes for 'they are hardly friends' = 'they hate
each other.' OED observes that the derivation and
original literal meaning of cater-cousin are doubtful. In
the 1547 citation, cater-cousin is explained as
'cousingerman,' that is, 'intimate friend but not cousin
(relative) by blood.' This meaning appears to be late.
T.T.W. (1872), in a note quoted above, states that in
Lancashire, cater-cousin "is applied to those
relationships which are extremely distant or very
doubtful. When a person claims relationship to any of
our local ancient families he is immediately twitted with
being 'only a cater-cousin,' in intimation that his
connection is both doubtful and distant." EDD refers to
this note and gives two glosses of cater-cousins:

615
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'intimate friends' and sometimes, though not generally,

'distant relations'
(cf P.P. [1872]). DOPE glosses cater-cousin 1.
'intimate friend,' 2. 'parasite' (!), but without
citations or references.
They are scarce cater-cousins may have had the
sense 'they are distant relatives of the remotest type
imaginable,' with scarce having its oldest meaning
'scanty, niggardly, *deficient in quality'. A connection
between cater- in caterways, cater-cornered, and so on
and cater in cater-cousin was forgotten, so much so that
even the editors of OED, who saw these words on the
same page, did not think of it. If cater-cousin was more
often used with reinforcing adverbs like scarce, it was
misinterpreted as 'friend,' the opposite of what it once
meant. Also, cater- 'caterer' perhaps made people think
of providers and helped to ameliorate the ancient term;
see below. (Although the following is not an analogue, it
may be of some use as an example of how a phrase can
acquire the opposite meaning. Goldsmith still uses the
idiom there's no love lost between them when he wants
to say 'they love each other'—She Stoops to Conquer
IV:1. And this makes perfect sense: their love is not lost!
Now the idiom means only 'they hate each other,' with
the implication that there was no love to lose.)
The author of the first etymology of cater-cousin was
Skinner. He wrote (quater-cosin; the original is in Latin):
616
Adz(e) Adz(e)

"... we say about those who bear no secret ill will against
each other that they are not cater or Quater cosins; in
French ils ne sont pas de Quatre cousins. There are seven
degrees of kinship, but only four principal ones. Thus,
when we use this phrase, we refer not to close relatives,
not to the ties of kinship." Skinner probably invented the
"absurdly impossible" (OED) French idiom quatre
cousins. Samuel Johnson mentioned "the ridiculousness
of calling cousin or relation to so remote a degree." Lye
(in Junius), copied Skinner's etymology, and reference to
quatre remained in all the editions of Webster's until W1.
OE had the legal term sibfxc 'degree of affinity,' but
cater-cousin has nothing to do with that usage.
Nares's definition of cater-cousins as 'friends so
familiar that they eat together' must have reflected his
identification of cater- with cater 'provide food.' Hales
(1875:287 = 1884a:177) states emphatically that
Skinner's French phrase does not exist and suggests a
connection with cater(er), for cater-cousins are
messfellows. He adds: "This explanation has been
offered before; but it may still require confirmation." No
confirmation has been found. Yet OED supported the
messfellow idea, and cater-cousin emerged as a
compound of allegedly the same type as foster father,
foster brother, and foster child. But foster parents really
foster (nourish) their foster children, while cater-cousins
are not known to have provided for each other or
617
Adz(e) Adz(e)

boarded together. See a short survey of opinions on

Shakespeare's word in Furness (1895:72). Skeat included
cater-cousin only in the fourth edition of his dictionary
and adopted the idea of OED. All the "Oxford"
dictionaries, RHD, and AHD did the same. CD had
Skinner's etymology, and, surprisingly, UED says:
"Intimate friend; originally quarter-cousin, meaning
distant or fourth cousin." This is almost exactly what one
can find in Richardson: cater cousin 'quatre cousin.' ED
also leaned toward cater- = quatre. Quatre as the
etymon of cater- in cater-cousin is useless; cater(er)
yields good sense, but its ties with cater-cousin are a
product of folk etymology that may have played some
role in its semantic history.
4. If cater- goes back to Dan kejte or some similar
form, the search for its etymon can be considered almost
closed. The only problem would be the absence of
corresponding Scandinavian compounds. Conversely, in
the history of lad compounds with -ladd have been
found, whereas the simplex exists only in English. Most
likely, lad, lass, slang, and key are also words of
Scandinavian origin (see KEY, LAD, LASS, SLANG), but the
most careful search yields only their non-immediate
etymons. One is bound to admit that English speakers
reshaped and restructured them.
From a historical point of view, cater-corner has
nothing to do with cat, but folk etymology connected
618
Adz(e) Adz(e)

them, whence catty- and kitty-corner. An almost

identical process happened elsewhere in Germanic.
Kaspers (1938) examined the place names Katwijk
(Holland), Kattewegel (Flanders), Katthagen (northern
Germany), Kattsund(sgatan) (Sweden), and many others,
including G Katzwinkel (-winkel 'corner'), with the
elements Kat(t)-, Katz-, and Kett-, and came to the
conclusion that all of them could not mean 'cat's village,'
'cat's hedge (haw, enclosure),' 'cat's bay,' and so forth.
All those places are crooked, situated in a corner, and
are in general associated with curvature. Northern G
Kattrepel (Redslob [1913-14:32]) may belong here too. In
Westphalia, the past participle verkat means 'wrong,
perverse,' and Kaspers (1938:220, note 2) wonders
whether the expression für die Katz, literally 'for the cat,'
used about the work that turned out to be a waste of
time, has the same origin. He does not deny the
possibility that some place names he investigated
contain allusions to cats, but many others must have
meant 'crooked street (piece of land, etc).' If so,
Katzwinkel and Katzecke are tautologies unless they
really were the favorite haunts of alley cats or resembled
such. Judging by the fanciful conjectures offered at one
time about such German place names (Bause [1907]; see
also Carstens's response [1908]), Kaspers was the first to
offer a plausible etymology of Katwijk and others, but
the discussion continued for a long time. See Gülzow
619
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1938, 1943-49; 1950) on LG Katschüße 'narrow passage

between two houses.'
Unlike E catty-cornered, Du Katwijk and the rest are
neither folk etymologies of keit- words nor their
cognates (ei and a belong to different series of ablaut). E
key cannot be confidently referred to any Proto-Indo-
European root, for the existence of PIE *gei- 'bend, twist'
(WP I:545-46; IEW, 354), whose putative reflexes are
discussed at KEY, is doubtful. A list of the forms clustered
around PIE *geu-, a synonym of *gei-, covers seven
pages in WP I:555-62. In IEW, this material takes up only
a page and a half (pp. 393-94; Pokorny also expunged the
entire section on L scaevus 'left hand' from WP I:537).
Kaspers's Proto-Indo-European root *ge- 'crooked, bent,'
from which he derived Gmc *kat, is a typical product of
root etymology. With vocalic enlargements he obtained
*geu- and *gei-, while a dental enlargement in the a-
grade yielded *gad-, *god- and Gmc *kat-. Amputating
one consonant after another until a minimally short
residuum like ge- is allowed to carry the meaning 'curve'
is a procedure to be avoided. Germanic probably had at
least three synonymous roots, *kag-, *kag-, and *kat-,
meaning 'bend, curve.' Their ultimate origin is obscure,
but nothing suggests an ancient element *ka to which
different consonants were appended in the manner of
word-formative suffixes.
LAD (1300)
620
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Several etymologies of lad have been offered—from

Hebr yeled 'boy' to Go (jugga)laups 'youth' and the past
participle of OE laädan 'lead' (lad = 'one led'). But lad, as
was also suggested long ago, appears to be a word of
Scandinavian origin, though its etymon has not been
found. The closest analogues of ME ladde are OI lodd-
in the name Loddfaf-nir, along with -ladd in N Oskeladd
'male Cinderella' and tusseladd 'nincompoop.' Numerous
Scandinavian words were formed in the zero grade of the
Germanic root *leudh-'grow.' Their radical vowel is
either u or o from *u. They designate fully-shaped
objects and attributes of luxuriant growth: 'furry, hairy;
woolen; covered with thick grass.' The root lud- was
stable, but the root lod < lo8- alternated with
lad-.
One of the nouns belonging to this group is N ladd
'hose; woolen stocking (sock).' Its a is secondary; the
original vowel was o < *u. Words for socks, stockings,
and shoes seem to have been current as terms of abuse
for and as nicknames of losers and fools. Lad(d)
'youngster,' with an ending of the weak declension (ME
ladde), must have emerged in the north of England. The
existence of many other similar words with the l-8, l-d, l-t
structure probably contributed to the rise of lad with its
slightly patronizing meaning 'young fellow,' while OI li8i
'follower, retainer,' which is possibly a blend of Gmc
*galidja- 'follower' and ML litus 'person belonging to a
621
Adz(e) Adz(e)

group between freedmen and serfs,' may have played a

role in its acquiring the earliest recorded sense 'serving
man, attendant.' The proper name Ladda (OE) surfaced in
texts two centuries before ME ladde did, but the
evidence of their kinship is wanting. The same holds for
the few Middle English place names beginning with
Lad(d).
The sections are devoted to 1) the dead-end
etymologies of lad, 2) Germanic words having the
structure l + vowel + dental, and 3) the proposed
Scandinavian-English origin of ME lad; lad and li5i ~ litus;
lad and Ladda.
1. All the better-known etymologies of lad were
offered long ago.
1) Minsheu derived lad from Hebr w l y (yeled 'boy').
A similar idea occurred to Webster (W [1828]), who set
up a 'class,' that is, a root *ld 'procreate' and cited
allegedly related forms from Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian,
and several other languages. A. Hall (1904) reinvented
this etymology and connected Go liudan* 'grow,' as well
as some words from Greek, Arabic, and Assyrian, with E
lad. Cohen (1972a) cites a suggestion by one of his
correspondents, "that lad (ladde) is a loan-word from
Arabic, a product of the age of the Crusades and intense
commerce and intercourse between Europe and the
Near East." Cohen comments: "My friend Gilbert
Davidowitz had already in 1965 pointed out to me the
622
Adz(e) Adz(e)

similarity between English lad and Arabic (wa-) lad-,

Hebrew (ye-) led (boy). There is therefore an awareness
among some people that lad may be connected with
Semitic -lad-, but this awareness has not yet reached the
writers of etymological dictionaries (even as a possibility
to be rejected)." In fact, this awareness goes back to
1617 at the latest. The history of lad, originally a regional
word restricted to the north of England and alien to the
other countries that took an active part in the crusades,
speaks against the idea of its being a loan from Arabic.
Not unexpectedly, Mozeson favors the Hebrew
etymology of lad (see Gold [1990a:117] and [1995b:373]:
lad is mentioned as one of the words figuring in
Mozeson's fantasies).
2) Another possible connection, according to
Minsheu, is between lad and the English verb lead.
Skinner supported this idea and compared lad and
"Belgian" (= Flemish) leyden (= leiden), because "lads are
led by the hand or educated to manly virtues" (the
English formulation is from Gazophylacium), though he
did not object to deriving lad from OE lyt 'little' as the
etymon of lad. Junius also treated the verb lead as the
etymon of lad (only he cited OE lxdan rather than a
Dutch form). Minsheu's etymology turns up in Johnson
and Johnson-Todd. Richardson mentions it among
others.

623
Adz(e) Adz(e)

3) For a long time, the most popular derivation of

lad was from OE leod 'man'. According to Lemon, its
originator was Casaubon (lad does not appear in the
index to Casaubon [1650]). Lye, in his additions to Junius,
gravitates toward that etymology. Reid and Robert
Latham followed Lye. CD1 had almost nothing to say
about the origin of lad but made a special point of
separating it from leod.
4) OED revived the suggestion that lad goes back to
OE lxdan. Bradley (1894) published a note in which he
says the following: "The word ladde coincides with the
adjectival form of the past participle of the verb to lead.
It seems not impossible that this may be the real origin
of the word; a 'ladde,' in the older sense, being one of
those led in the train of a lord or commander. We may
compare the Italian condotto, explained by Tommaseo as
'soldato di banda, mercenario.' Holthausen
(1896:266; the same in 1903a:323) supported Brad-
ley. (In his 1903 review, Holthausen faults Kaluza for
tracing a in lad to OE a; in Kaluza [1906-07], that place no
longer appears.) Skeat4 repeated Brad-ley's etymology
but added probably.
Bradley's formulation in OED is slightly different
from his earlier one: "ME. ladde, of obscure origin.
Possibly a use of the definite form of the pa. pple. of lead
v.; in ME lad is a regional variant of led pa. pple. The use
might have originated in the application of the plural
624
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ladde elliptically to the followers of the lord. Actual

evidence, however, is wanting. It is noteworthy that a
'Godric Ladda' attests a document written 1088-1123
(Earle Land Charters 270). If this cognomen be (as is
possible) identical with ME ladde, its evidence is
unfavourable to the derivation suggested above."
CD2 ignored Bradley's hypothesis, but an anonymous
reviewer (anonymous [1901b]) endorsed it and
suggested kinship of lad with Gk Idxpij 'servant, slave;
messenger; priest' and L lat-ro 'mercenary; robber' from
the Proto-Indo-European root *lat- 'follow; serve,'
related to Gmc *lith- 'go,' whence the verb lead. It is
unclear why Bradley no longer mentioned Ital condotto,
the only semantic analogue he had of a substantivized
past participle meaning 'servant.' Among the numerous
Germanic words for 'follower, attendant,' none seems to
have the derivational model reconstructed by Bradley
for lad. One would expect some recorded examples to
bear out his idea that the plural form ladde could be
applied elliptically to the lord's retainers, but as is said in
the entry, actual evidence is wanting. The origin of the
cognomen Ladda is unknown (see sec 3, below). The
existence of Ladda cannot be used as an argument either
for or against Bradley's later suggestion.
5) Wedgwood had a few innovative conjectures on
the origin of lad. He listed all kinds of words supposedly
related to lad. In the first edition of his dictionary, he
625
Adz(e) Adz(e)

equated lad and OHG laz 'freedman' (actually, lazze; it is

a Middle High German word), a noun that made him
think of E lass, and mentioned in passing Welsh llawd
'youth.' But in the fourth edition, he derived lad directly
from llawd and Ir lath 'youth, companion,' while G Leute
'people' and Go juggalaups 'youth' are said to be distinct
from lad. G Leute would have returned him to OE le od; -
laups, a suffix related to Go liudan* 'grow,' is also akin to
leod. Skeat1 agreed with Wedgwood but cited Go -laups
as a cognate of lad, which he separated from G Lasse ~
MHG lazze 'a vassal of a lord' (Skeat's gloss).
OED declared all those ideas untenable:
"Quite inadmissible, both on the ground of pho-
nology and meaning, is the current statement that the
word is cognate with the last syllable of the Goth.
juggalaups young man; the ending -laups (stem -lauda-
adj., laudi-* sb.), which does not occur as an
independent word, has in compounds the sense 'having
(a certain) growth or size,' as in hwelaups how great,
swalaups* so great, samalaups* equally great. The Celtic
derivations commonly alleged are also worthless: the
Welsh llawd is a dictionary figment invented to explain
the feminine 'lodes (in Dictionaries llodes), which Prof.
Rhys has shown to be shortened from herlodes, fem. of
her-lawd, a ME herlot 'harlot'; and the Irish lath does not
exist in either the earlier or later sense of 'lad,' but
means 'hero' or 'champion'."
626
Adz(e) Adz(e)

6) Few of Thomson's etymologies have withstood

the test of time. The same holds for his treatment of lad,
but in this case some of his suggestions are not devoid of
interest. Like Wedgwood after him, he was in the habit
of stringing together various look-alikes if their meaning
matched that of the head word. Thus at lad we find Go
laud- and laup-, as well as OE leode 'a rustic,' all of which
"are apparently from leod, 'the people,' G and Sw ledig
'single, unmarried'" (he derived ledig from E let and its
cognates: "Our Lads and Lasses are invariably
understood to be young unmarried persons"), and VL
lati, lidi, lassi, lazzi, and latones, who "were freed
servants, not engaged either to a feudal lord or in
marriage." Thomson mentions the unindentifiable
"Gothic" nouns lxtingi and leisinghi, but his statement
that they correspond to Gk λύθεν (the epic third p pl
aorist passive of λύω 'untie, set free') or λύτο (the
second mediopassive of the same verb, third p. sing.),
anticipates Bradley's idea; only Bradley wanted lads to
be led ones, whereas Thomson thought of freed people.
He may have known Lemon's derivation of lad from λαός
'people,' "quasi λαοδ, leod, lad; a common, vulgar boy."
Lemon compared lad and lewd and traced both to λύω,
the same verb that attracted Thomson's attention.
Mueller was unable to offer a convincing etymology
of lad, but he remarked that OE leod could be the
etymon of the English word only if VL li-tus ~ lidus ~
627
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ledus, cited by Du Cange, served as intermediaries

between them. A litus (with numerous variants) was a
person called a colonus in Rome, someone belonging to a
group between those of freemen and serfs. Niermeyer's
list (see litus) is even longer than Du Cange's: litus, letus,
lidus, ledus, liddus, lito and liddo. These words turn up in
numerous legal codes of medieval Germanic tribes.
Weekley (1921), who thought he had discovered a
tie between lad and OI lidi 'retainer,' offered the
following etymology of lad: "? Corrupt[ion] of ON. lithi...
from lith, people, host. I am led to
make this unphonetic conjecture by the fact that the
surname Summerlad is undoubtedly ON. sumar-lithi,
viking, summer adventurer, a common ON. personal
name, found also (Sumerled, Sumerleda, Sumerluda,
etc.) in E[ngland] before the Conquest. The
corresponding Winterlad once existed, but is now
app[arently] obs[olete]. Ladda also occurs, like boy...as a
surname earlier than a common noun." (See the names
listed by Weekley in Reaney.)
7) A few suggestions disappeared without a trace.
H.C.C. (1853) compared lad and lady and observed that
the oldest form might begin with hl-. He pointed out that
the change OE hlafxta > lad would be parallel to hlaford
> lord and hlafdige > lady. Hlafxta, which is literally 'loaf
eater,' meant 'dependant,' and, but for phonetic
difficulties (t > d, x > a), a better etymology could not be
628
Adz(e) Adz(e)

imagined. Townsend (1824:340) noted the similarity be-

tween lad and Russ molodoi 'young.' According to
Glenvarloch (1892), lad goes back to the Sanskrit root LI
'helmet,' with the basic meaning 'cover,' because a lad is
"the nobleman's son who was allowed to remain
covered in presence of royalty." This is a sad retreat by
an amateur from former scholarly achievements.
Hellquist (1891:144) wondered if Sw reg larker
'adolescent boy' (halfvuxen pojke) was allied to lad. The
answer is no, unless Sw r can be shown to go back to d.
This type of rhotacism (r < d) is common in West
Germanic dialects, and Mayhew (1894) suggested that
the Australian English noun larrikin 'rowdy' is a phonetic
variant of *laddikin 'little lad.' The Swedish word occurs
only in one area (so Rietz), and its connection with lar-
rikin cannot be made out, but the coincidence is curious.
Tengvik (1938:257) suggested that lad is "a
hypocoristic form *Hlxdda < OE *hlxda, a weakly
inflected variant of OE hlxd 'load; heap, pile,' formed
from a stem with the original meaning of 'to heap,
accumulate.' ... Cf. discussion of OE Mocca (< Germ[anic]
mok(k) 'to heap up, accumulate')..." Since his
reconstruction does not explain how the meaning 'heap'
could change to 'serving man,' his proposal fell on deaf
ears. Note, however, the reemergence of the idea that l-
in lad goes back to hl-.

629
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Makovskii offers a usual assortment of wild guesses:

lad is a ghost word, the sum of l (the last letter of L vel
'or' in a gloss) and the Latin preposition ad, a
combination some scribe misunderstood for an English
noun (1977:62-63) (Shchur [1982:153] cited this
suggestion approvingly); lad is a cognate of Go -leipan
'go' and also of Russ letat 'fly' (v), as well as of E reg led
'spare, extra,' so that lad turns out to mean 'heir'
(1988b:141); lad and lath go back to the root *al- 'burn':
lath because it is hard, lad because it is shining
(1988a:17); lad is related to Go -leipan, Russ lad'ia 'boat'
(because the souls of the departed were carried to the
kingdom of the dead in boats) and L le tum 'death'; lad
originally meant
'man, human being' (1993:132; the same in 1999a,
lad), but Makovskii (1999a) mentions OI eldr (because
male firstborns were sacrificed and thrown into the fire),
along with OI lindi 'belt' (the victim was usually tied up),
OE hland 'urine,' Sw led 'member' (because boys have
penises), and G Latte 'lath' (because words for 'boy' and
'wood' are often connected). In a footnote, he added OE
le odan 'grow' and Indo-Aryan *laddika 'boy, servant.'
8) A definitive conjecture on the origin of lad goes
back to FT; see sec 3, below. If we disregard implausible
guesses and apparent nonsense, the results of the pre-FT
research into the origin of lad are as follows. Lad
resembles words for 'boy' in several languages of the
630
Adz(e) Adz(e)

East, but no connection between them can be made out;

although lad bears some resemblance to at least one
Irish word, it is not of Celtic origin; neither OE le od nor
hlafxta would have become lad for phonetic reasons;
lad, from the past participle of OE lx dan (because lads
were instructed or led by their superiors), would be
unique among the recorded names for servants in the
Germanic languages; the Latinized Germanic words for
'freedman' known at one time over a large territory of
Germania magna merit further consideration.
2. Here are the most important words that may be
relevant for the etymology of lad. All of them begin with
l- and end in d, t, and 5, with vowels alternating in the
root, and nearly all of them figure in someone's
explanation of the origin of lad. See them in
etymological dictionaries of Germanic languages, MW
(lod(d)er), VV, WP II:
382, and IEW, 684-85.
1) Words with -o-, -u-, and -u - between l and a
dental: OE loddere 'beggar,' ME lodder 'wretched,' LG
lod(d)er, loderer 'idler' and luddern 'to be idle,' G
verlottern 'degrade, run to seed,' lott(e)rig 'slovenly,'
Lotterbett 'old bed,' and Lotterbube 'wastrel' (the last
two nouns are obsolete and can be used only
humorously). The radical vowel o goes back to u and is
part of the ablaut series *eu — *au — *u — *u. In the
normal grade, *eu sometimes seems to have alternated
631
Adz(e) Adz(e)

with *u , which, when fronted to y by umlaut, is

occasionally represented by T. Therefore, loddere and
the rest are probably related not only to OE lydre 'bad,
wicked, wretched' (E lither) but also to G liederlich
'dissolute, slovenly.' E loiter, most likely a borrowing
from Dutch (Du leuteren), is now considered to be a
doublet of loteren (differently in EWNT2) despite its
diphthong.
Several Icelandic words and their cognates in other
Scandinavian languages and dialects belong here too: OI
lydda 'rogue, wretch, scoundrel, nonentity, coward,'
lodda 'whore' (and a term of abuse in general), Lodd- in
the mythological name Loddfdfnir, and lodrmenni
'wretch, bungler.' OI loda 'cling fast, stick (to)' has the
same root structure but a different meaning. OI ludra
'stoop, cringe' may perhaps be compared with MDu
loteren.
Alongside the terms of abuse, similar words
designating rags and articles of clothing exist, some in
the normal, some in the zero grade: OHG ludara ~ OS
ludara 'rag, diaper' and OE loda 'upper garment, mantle,
cloak,' with cognates in several languages. Their best-
known modern reflexes are G Loden Toden,' that is,
'thick, heavily fulled fabric,' and Du luier 'napkin.' OI lodi
'fur cloak, a cloak made of coarse wool' (LP) and perhaps
'fur' (Mohr [1939:158]) was a rare word; it occurred only
in poetry and did not continue into Modern Icelandic. J.
632
Adz(e) Adz(e)

de Vries (AEW) relates OI lodi 'fur coat' to OS ludara

'rag,' and OI lodinn 'shaggy, thick' to Go liudan* 'grow'
and its cognates, so that lodinn would, in his view, mean
*'overgrown' and be unrelated to lodi. At Loden, KM and
KS cite OI lodi but not lodinn. Johansson (1890:346)
preferred not to separate lodi from lodinn, while AEW
(lodinn) is ready to admit only their later interaction.
2) Words with a between l and a dental: E lath
goes back to OE lxtt; its th is at least as old as Mid-
dle English. The origin of the doublets OHG latto ~
latta 'lath,' with unshifted -tt-, and lazza is obscure.
Old Saxon and Middle Dutch had latta and latte,
respectively. The source of tt in OHG latto may be
*pp, but reliable examples of WGmc *pp ~ *dd > tt
are lacking. Reference to an expressive geminate
in such a word would be vacuous, even though the
lath is held to be the embodiment of thinness in
both English and German (thin as a lath, eine lange
Latte). Assuming that lath has cognates outside
Germanic, the geminate may be the result of as-
similation (Liihr [1988:252]: tt < px? or tt < xpl),
but the most ancient reconstructed meaning would
still come out as *'rod, slat.' MHG lade(n) 'board' is
apparently akin to Latte. ModG Laden 'shop, store'
owes its meaning to laden 'board, counter'; d in it
must be from p (cf E cloth ~ G Kleid). West Ger-
manic seems to have had the words *lap- and *lat-
633
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'thin narrow strip of wood.' The Yorkshire word

lad means 'the upright bar of an old-fashioned
spinning-wheel, which turns the wheel; a stay for
timber work; a back stay for corves or wagons'
(EDD, lad sb3). Regardless of whether the word is
of English, Scandinavian, or 'mixed' origin (a blend
of two synonyms), its similarity with E lath and G
Latte is remarkable.
3) Words with o, not derived from *u, between
l and a dental, and with o going back to *au. Here we
find several words for 'sapling, seedling': Du loot (MDu
lote), Fr leat (ea < *au), and Fr loat. G Lode, not attested
before the 15th century, is from Low German: its High
German counterpart is Lote. Old Saxon had loda and
lada. In MHG sumerlat(t)e 'sapling, one-year-old tree' (as
opposed to OS su-marloda), a, according to KM and KS
(Latte), should be ascribed to the influence of Latte. The
etymology of the words with a long vowel is clear thanks
to the existence of Go liudan*, OHG arliotan, OS liodan,
and OE leodan 'grow.' If OI lodinn 'hairy, shaggy,'
mentioned above, has been explained correctly, the
unattested Old Icelandic strong verb *ljoda must be
reconstructed, of which lodinn is the past participle. OE
le od, OHG liut (ModG Leute), OI lydr 'people,' and so
forth, possibly including L liberi 'children,' have the same
root as lodinn. In Gothic, the hapax legomenon laudi*
(dat sg) 'shape, form' and the suffix -laups (which
634
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Bradley discussed in his refutation of the idea that lad is

a cognate of Go juggalaups 'youth, young man') repre-
sent the au grade; in the zero grade, we find Go ludja*
'face.'
Among the words having the structure l + vowel +
d/t/5, the following are especially close to lad
phonetically: OS -lada 'seedling, sapling,' MHG lade
'board,' E reg lad 'stay for timber work,' and if words
with -o- can be considered, then also OE loddere
'beggar,' ME lodder 'wretched,' OE lo5a 'cloak,' and OI
lodda (a term of abuse). They do not form a unified
group with regard to their origin (which is often
unknown), but they sound so much alike that when their
reflexes coexisted in one and the same language, their
paths must sometimes have crossed. Various metaphors
facilitated their confusion. The syncretism 'peg'/'child,'
'wood'/'child' guaranteed the interaction of lath and lad.
E lath and G Latte mean 'strip of wood' and E stripling
means "quasi 'one who is slender as a strip'" (ODEE). The
distance between 'garment' and 'child' is also short. Here
a good example is OIr bratt 'mantle' and E brat, from
Irish (see also GIRL and LASS, sec 3). The proximity
between 'lad' and 'seedling' and between 'lad' and 'one
grown' needs no proof.
3. The turning point in the search for the origin of lad
was a remark by FT in the entry ladd. The text in both
editions is the same. It is given here in an English
635
Adz(e) Adz(e)

translation: "Ladd 'stocking put on over another piece of

clothing, woolen sock,' in dialects also lodde, Sw reg
ladder f pl 'old shoes,' ladder 'socks,' lodde 'Frisian shoe.'
The forms with o seem to belong with lodden ['shaggy,
hairy, covered with grass'], cf Nynorsk raggar and lugg
with the same meaning. The vowel a may owe its origin
to the synonymous N reg labbar 'woolen socks,' but Sw
reg lddda with old umlaut speaks against this conclusion;
the forms with a are perhaps related especially closely to
Celtic ldtro-, as in Welsh llawdr 'trousers,' Cornish loder
'shoe.' Nynorsk ladda 'shuffle, slouch along' are also
related; cf labbe and tefle af [the same meaning; N t0ffel
'shoe, slipper']. Other words belonging here are
tusseladd, and Askeladd, that is, 'someone who walks
awkwardly, clumsily' (perhaps borrowed by English as
lad)." Torp's entry is the same, but the references to
Celtic are gone. Askeladd (actually, Oskeladd) 'ash-lad' is
male Cinderella, the third son in fairy tales, a
counterpart of Icel kolbitr (literally 'coal-biter'), Boots, as
he is called in George W. Dasent's translation of
Asbjornsen and Moe's collection of folklore. ODEE (lad),
too, uses Boots in glossing those words. Tusseladd
means 'nincompoop.'
The idea that lad was borrowed from Norwegian
found an enthusiastic supporter in Bjorkman
(1903-05:503; 1912:272). The comment in ODEE is

636
Adz(e) Adz(e)

also favorable: "...the earliest evidence and even

modern currency point to concentration in the east and
west midlands and so perh[aps] to Scandinavian] origin
(cf. Norw. aske/ladd neglected child, Boots, tusse/ladd
duffer, muff." Diensberg (1985a:330, note 7; 334) has a
similiar opinion. However, FT's suggestion bypassed
several difficulties: 1) Ladd has not been recorded in any
Scandinavian language with the meaning *'(young)
fellow.' 2) Tusseladd and askeladd (oskeladd) seem to be
the only compounds with -ladd, and neither could be
known well enough to produce the basis for a new
English word. 3) Despite some parallels, it is unclear why
someone wearing woolen socks or old shoes and walking
awkwardly should be called 'fool,' the more so because E
lad never meant 'fool, duffer, nincompoop.' 4) Finally,
the earliest recorded English form is ladde, and Tengvik
(1938:257) is right that -e was not a mere graphical
character in it.
On the other hand, a connection between a
disparaging word for 'young person' and 'shaggi-ness' ~
'hose, stocking, trousers' has been recorded elsewhere,
namely among the words having the same root as E
strumpet. Since the entry STRUMPET contains all the
data, it will suffice to cite here only the main forms, with
and without a nasal: E strumpet 'prostitute' and in one
dialect 'fat hearty child,' G struppig 'disheveled,' G
Strumpf 'hose, trouser leg, stocking,' originally 'stub,
637
Adz(e) Adz(e)

stump'; G Strunze 'slattern,' MHG strunze 'stump';

early ModI strympa (its present day variant is strumpa)
'dipper; tall hat; bucket; building with a cone-shaped
roof; virago, big woman' are its cognates. The way from
'rag' to '(thing with an) uneven surface' and 'con-
temptible person' is also short: compare OI rovgg 'tuft,
shagginess (said about the fur on a cloak)' (CV), Sw ragg
'coarse hair; goat's hair' (see the other cognates in AEW),
and Sw Raggen 'devil' (even if the association with ragg
is secondary; SEO), as well as such a recent coinage as Sw
raggare 'hippie' (see more on Raggen at RAGAMUFFIN); G
Lumpen 'rag' and Lump 'scoundrel' (from a historical
point of view Lump and Lumpen are variants of the same
word). E ragtag (or tagrag) and bobtail 'rabble' (OED,
rag-tag) are words of the same type.
OI *lodd must have existed as an informal word
meaning *'ragtag; worthless fellow.' For some reason, it
has come down to us only in the compound Loddfdfnir.
Lindquist (1956:150-52) suggested that the educational
verses incorporated into Hdvamdl (strophes 112-37) and
addressed to the otherwise unknown Loddfafnir, were
part of the initiation rite. The use of an address form
consisting of an offensive slang word (*lodd) and the
name of a great mythological figure (Fafnir was the
dragon killed by Sigurd [SigurBr]) would not be out of
place in the rite of initiation (a youth of no consequence
becomes a warrior and a [potential] husband).
638
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The etymology of lodd- poses problems, but,

contrary to Bechtel's hesitant suggestion (1877:215), its -
dd does not go back to zd. It is rather a geminate typical
of many expressive formations, including pet names, and
its alternation with 5 would be regular, for reinforced
fricatives in Icelandic yield long stops, as in Stebbi, a pet
name for Stefdn, and OI koddi 'pillow, scrotum' versus
ModI kodri 'scrotum' (numerous similar examples in the
old language and in living speech). Grammatical, non-
emphatic alternations are equally numerous. For
instance, the past of loda is loddi. It follows that lodd- is
probably related to the Icelandic lod- words. The
absence of an independent noun *lodd and the fact that
in its disparaging sense it may be extant only in
Loddfdfnir remain unexplained.
A connection between Du lot ~ G Lode and *leudh- is
certain. The same holds for Go -laups ~ laudi* and a few
words in the zero grade: Go ludja*, OE lud- in ludgxt, and
Sc lud(dock). Their meanings range from 'seedling' (lot,
Lode) to 'Gestalt' (laudi*), 'object fully shaped' ('face,'
'posterior,' 'loin': ludja*, lud, luddock), and 'shaped' (in
the suffix -laups). The few recorded words for 'matted
hair, thick fur,' and the like (for instance, OI lodinn) align
themselves with the lud- words, for in both West
Germanic and Old Norse, u changes to o according to
regular sound laws.

639
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OI loda 'cling, stick to' is more problematic. Things

that adhere to the surface make it shaggy, hairy, and
rough. This is especially obvious in plant names. Middle
Dutch lodwort 'Symphytum officinale' (comfrey) has
cognates in Low German. Stapelkamp (1946:57-60)
related lod- to G Lode and explained the compound as
'fast-growing plant with a tall stalk.' But a similar plant
name was OE lelodre, though the Latin part of the gloss
is La-padium ('silverweed'?) perhaps from *le(a)-lodre
(leah 'meadow, lea'), and both plants can owe their
names to the hairs on their leaves (Wilhelm Lehmann
[1906:298/6]). Despite some disagreement between
Pheifer (1974:99, note 606) and Bier-baumer (BWA
3:160-65), they accept Lehmann's etymology. It is
preferable not to separate OI lodi ~ OE loda 'fur cloak'
from OI lodinn 'shaggy.' Whether the Icelandic word is a
borrowing from Old English, as Mohr (1939:158)
suggested, or native (which is more likely) is immaterial
for the present discussion. The verb loda should be
added to the lodi / -lodre group.
A particularly important word is OI Amlodi 'fool,'
famous as the source of Shakespeare's Hamlet. If o (the
long vowel) in Amlodi is old, it cannot alternate with o.
But the original form was probably Amlodi (E. Kock
[1940:sec 3221] suggested the unlikely variant Amlodi).
Only Nordfelt (1927:6269) doubted that Amlodi is a
compound. See some even less credible suggestions in
640
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Gollancz (1898:XXXV, note). Saxo's Amlööi, the hero of a

Danish chronicle, must have been called this because, to
avenge his father's murder, he acted in an irrational
manner. The modern reflexes of *amlodi (such a
common name was not recorded in Old Icelandic) are
ModI amlodi 'wretch, bungler, fool' and Nynorsk amlod
'nincompoop.'
K. Malone (1923:52-58; 1927; 1928) summarized the
extensive research into the proper name Amlodi and the
homonymous common name and offered his own bold
hypothesis. See also Detter (1892:67), Meißner
(1927:382-88), and ABM. Both aml-6di and am-l6di lend
themselves to an etymological analysis. If *Amlodi
changed to amlodi under the influence of odi 'mad,' it
perhaps meant *am-lodi 'ember lad.' This was Bergdal's
idea (1929). K. Malone (1929) vehemently contested it,
but a good deal of what Bergdal (1931) says in his
rejoinder makes sense. *Am-lodi looks like an exact
counterpart of Askeladd (Oskeladd). Jöhannesson
(1940:2-5 and ISEW, 87) also assumed that -lodi is akin to
Icel lydda and originally had a short vowel.
A question that has not been answered in a sat-
isfactory manner concerns the relation between -lod- ~ -
lodd and -ladd. Whitehall (1939:22), the author of the
etymology of lad in MED and of the most authoritative
article on this subject, traces sumarlota to the root
*leudh-, as in Go liudan* 'grow' and its cognates, and
641
Adz(e) Adz(e)

remarks that "...OHG -lota, -lata, -latta ... is ultimately an

ablaut derivative" of this root. The adverb ultimately has
little value because Germanic a and o belong to different
ablaut series and no evidence supports Whitehall's state-
ment on the same page that all those words, "as we
have seen," are related to *leudh-. We have seen only
this: "...he [Bradley] was unable to reconcile the au of
Goth. -laups with the a of ME. ladde on simple
phonological grounds. Yet a moment's thought on the
peculiar social conditions of the Middle Ages should
serve to reveal how easily a primary notion 'growing
youth, one not yet of man's condition' would pass over
into the notion 'one attendant upon or in service to
another'" (ibidem). But that is semantics, not phonetics.
Stapelkamp (1946:58), who also says that -lode and -lade
are related by ablaut, cites several occurrences of LG
laide but offers no explanation of the spelling.
References to ablaut in this case should be abandoned.
West Germanic alternating forms like sumer-latte ~
sumarlode may have arisen as the result of the confusion
of two roots (see KM, KS, Latte), but in the Scandinavian
languages and dialects, -ladd is the only word of this
structure with a. We must admit that in both West
Germanic and Scandinavian, the root lod(d)- alternated
with synonymous ladd-. No regular phonetic change
connects them, and they are not related by ablaut.

642
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Perhaps initially they were regional variants, like ModE

strap and strop.
4. If the premises set forth above are acceptable, the
early history of lad, though still containing a few gaps,
will no longer look obscure or uncertain. A biography
with a blank here and there is not the same as an
undocumented life. After all, we know more about
Shakespeare than about Homer. The Germanic root
*leudh- 'grow' has been attested in all grades of ablaut.
In the zero grade, the words important for unraveling
the origin of lad have u and o < u. The kinship of some of
them is controversial, but they form a cohesive group,
with the meanings referable to such concepts as 'well-
shaped,' 'grown,' 'furry, hairy, shaggy,' not improbably
'cling, stick to, adhere.' Words with old o occasionally
have a meaning suggestive of 'growth,' but they are not
related to the derivatives of *leudh-. The root of lath and
Latte is not related to them either, but lod-, for
unascertained reasons, alternated with lad-, at least in
the Scandinavian area, and the lack of stability may have
resulted in some confusion of the two groups.
One of the words designating furry (woolen, hairy)
objects was *loS- ~ *la5- 'woolen sock; hose; stocking;
shoe.' It acquired the figurative meaning *'worthless
fellow,' but, again for unclear reasons, it has come down
to us only in a few compound names and nicknames, and
usually with an expressive geminate: OI Loddfdfnir, and
643
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*Amlo5i (asterisked because the recorded form has 6)

and N Askeladd (or Oskeladd) 'ash-lad' and tusseladd (a
word with folkloric overtones). OI lydda shows that
other possibilities for coining worthless people's names
from the zero grade of *leudh- also existed. Since neither
*ladd nor *lodd has been attested as a free form
(*'wretch, nincompoop') in any Scandinavian language, it
must be assumed that the semisuffix -ladd, as in
tusseladd, gained special popularity in northern England
and developed into a regular word for *'worthless
person,' later 'person of low birth.' To become fully
independent, it joined the weak declension (*ladd > ME
ladde). This is the most probable origin of E lad.
Consequently, lad is not a borrowing from Scandinavian,
but rather a product of a northern English dialect heavily
influenced by Scandinavian (Norwegian?) usage.
The idea that lad is a "corruption" of lidi does not
deserve credence, but lidi might influence the earliest
feudal sense of ME lad 'serving man, attendant, varlet.'
Although ML litus and its many variants were not in
active use in Scandinavia, their undiscovered Germanic
etymon, usually given as *laetus (the original radical
vowel in it may have been a or a), probably interacted
with similar-sounding synonyms derived from other
roots. "A G[erman]ic *lipu-, *lepu-, though swamped by
*leta-, has left some traces. OI lidar... may well represent
a type P[roto] G[erman]ic galid-jan- 'one who travels
644
Adz(e) Adz(e)

along' The compounds sumar-lidi, vetr-lidi are

irrelevant]; yet a technical term *lipu- may have been
merged with it and may also have contributed to the
formation of lid n. 'retinue' (*galidja-)" (L. Bloomfield
[1930:90-91]). See also Szemerenyi (1962:186, with
reference to Marco Scovazzi).
The Old English name Ladda (from Somerset)
that Bradley (OED) found in Earle (1888:270), ap-
pears in a collection of documents dated 1088-1122. The
context is not helpful: Godric Ladda is mentioned as a
witness ("herto is gewitnesse godric ladda"). If Ladda is
the precursor of ME ladde, the recorded history of lad
will, as Weekley noted, mirror that of boy: first the
(nick)name, then the common name. However, the
actual order of events must have been the opposite.
Ladda, identified with N -ladd, would not be a
respectable cognomen for a witness, but official
medieval nicknames were often derogatory (see more on
nicknames at LILLIPUTIAN). O. Ritter (1910:472-74)
dissociated himself from Bradley's etymology of lad 'one
led' and emphasized a connection between lad and
Ladda. Holthausen agreed with Ritter (1935-36:326) but
later preferred to derive Ladda from Landberht or
Landfrid (Holthausen [1951-52:9/107]). These ever-
changing hypotheses found their reflection in his
dictionary: three possibilities (< OE Ladda?, < N ladd?, <
OE lxdda?) (EW1), no etymology, only the
645
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Middle English form (EW2: < ME ladde), and from

OE Ladda < Landberht (EW3). In extensive lists of
Scandinavian cognomens, Ladda does not turn up (Lind
[1905-15; 1920-21]; Jonsson [1907], Kahle [1903; 1910],
Hellquist [1912]).
Ekwall (1960) traces Lad- in the place name Ladhill
(Warwickshire) to Hlod-, whose etymology is unclear.
A.H. Smith II:10 mentions Ladgate and Ladhill in
Yorkshire. Barnhart leaves open the question of the
origin of Laddedale (ca 1160). Not only Godric Ladda had
such a name. One finds Richard Ladde
(Northamptonshire, ca 1175), Ywein Ladde (1177), Rog.
Lade (Hampshire, 1200), Steph. Ladde (Essex, 1205),
Ricardus Ladde (1210), Walter le Ladd (Kent, 1242), and
Thom. le Lad (Sussex, 1254).
Dietz (1981a:398-99) does not doubt that those
names can be identified with ME ladde, though the
impression is that their bearers were people occupying a
comparatively high place in the feudal hierarchy (note
the emphasis on their real or assumed French heritage).
However, since Oskeladd is called Boots in English,
we again have reference to footwear. Berger-son (2002)
is probably right in comparing Boots with Afrikaans botje
'pal' and E buddy and arguing for the Dutch origin of all
three nouns. Boots may have been a folk etymological
interpretation of some word like buddy, and the idea
that it is the name of a youngster cleaning gentlemen's
646
Adz(e) Adz(e)

boots could arise in retrospect. The late attestation of

Boots (1798) makes all conjectures on this subject
fruitless, but it is hard to imagine that Dasent would
have chosen the name of a servant at a hotel for the
Norwegian folklore hero. Boots satisfied
English readers of fairy tales, and OED mentions the
phrase lad of wax 'shoemaker.' Consequently, the
presence of Sw reg ladder 'old shoe' among the cognates
of N ladd has a few marginal counterparts on English
soil.
The root *leudh- is not isolated in Germanic (see
Feist, liudan), but since the vowel a in lad (assuming that
the reconstruction offered above is correct) is
unetymological, Latin and Greek words like latro 'robber;
mercenary,' l&xpov 'remuneration,' and Idxpij 'servant'
cannot be cognates of lad. By contrast, a study of words
with initial s-(Icel sladdi 'slattern' and E slattern) may
broaden our knowledge of the English word's field of ap-
plication but will not add anything to what we have
learned about the origin of either OE Ladda or ME ladde.
The same is true of slat, almost a doublet of lath ~ Latte,
for lath ~ Latte ~ slat and lad share nothing except the
thinness of their referents in the real world.
A Note on Some Other Words with the Structure l +
vowel + d (5) Lad emerged against the background of nu-
merous l - d (5) words with sexual connotations. We do
not know whether they interacted with Scand -ladd and
647
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contributed to the pejorative sense of lad or to its

becoming a free form. They are given below, to make the
picture complete.
Some words with long vowels between l and a
dental seem to have no bearing on the cognates of lad;
see, for instance, ljotr 'ugly' in AEW. However, it is
instructive that in this group -t and -p also alternate, as
they allegedly did in E lath ~ G Latte, and that paronyms
turn up here too: OI leidr 'loathsome' has approximately
the same meaning as ljotr.
1) Words with o, not derived from *u/*au, between
l- and a dental
ModI loda (adj) 'in heat' surfaced only in the 16th
century and is at present hard to distinguish from the
noun lod in the adverbial phrase d lodum, also meaning
'in heat' (ABM, 5 lod, 1 loda). CV mis-leadingly included
loda and derived it from loda 'cling fast'—an excellent
semantic match, but o and
0 are incompatible. Despite the late attestation,
loda must be an old word, for it has Celtic and less
certainly Slavic cognates (Liden [1937:91-92]; IEW,
680; WP II:428; ESSI XVII:19-20, letu). From Scan-
dinavian it reached Frisian (Lofstedt [1948:80-81]).
01 lod 'produce of the land' is akin to ldd 'land' and
cannot be traced to *leudh-. G Luder, originally a
hunting term ('bait'), now a term of abuse ('imper-
tinent woman'), also had a long vowel in the past,
648
Adz(e) Adz(e)

judging by MHG luoder and MLG loder. The Scandinavian

divine name Lodurr occurs only once in Old Icelandic.
Nothing is known about the god L65urr, except that,
while traveling with OBinn and Hoenir, he met Askr and
Embla, two trees destined to become the first human
couple.
2) Some words of obscure origin having the structure
l + vowel + dental
One such word is OI litr, recorded in the phrase litom
fcera. In Bergbuapdttr, litr means 'oar.' In the scurrilous
eddic verse Hdrbardzliod 503-4, the sense may be 'penis'
(see all the proposed interpretations of litom fcrra in von
See et al [1997:243-45]). According to the Old Norse
creation myth (Volospd 18), the first human couple
lacked, among other things, lito goda, and received it
from the god L65urr (see above). His gift may have been
good genitals rather than good complexion, as is usually
believed. The origin of his name remains a matter of
dispute. If it has the same root as lod(a) '(in) heat,'
Lodurr may have been a god of sexual urge, and his gift
of the genitals would be in character. A connection with
lod 'the produce of the land' would fit his appearance in
the capacity as a fertility god. The length of the vowel in
Lodurr is uncertain (cf Amlodi, above). *Lodurr, a hairy (=
virile) god, would likewise be a proper deity to supply
the first man and woman with the organs of repro-
duction.
649
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Another obscure word is OS lud (Heliand 154). After

having the prophesy about himself and Elisabeth,
Zacharias says that to both of them is "lud geliden, lik
gidrusnod" ('our lud is gone, our bodies are withered').
Lud, usually glossed as 'form, figure' or 'bodily strength,'
is allegedly derived from the same root as Go liudan*
(see a survey in Grau [1908:205-06]). Sehrt gives the
traditional gloss 'Gestalt (?),' but, according to Rauch
(1975), 'sexual power' is meant. Rauch cited Sc lud
'buttocks,' a variant of luddock. The gloss in OED is:
luddock 'the loin, or the buttock.' It appears that lud-
words could designate anything that is fully shaped and
recognizable as a Gestalt. The concrete manifestation of
the Gestalt would be impossible to predict. In Gothic, it
was the face. In Old Saxon, it was probably functioning
genitals (a less abstract referent than sexual power). In
some circumstances, it might even mean 'womb.'
Whether the Gestalt was in front or behind did not
matter, whence luddock both 'loin' and 'buttock' (for an
initial approach to these words see Liberman [1995:265]
and [1996b:80]). Herein lies the origin of the hitherto
unexplained OE ludgxt 'postern, a door behind the
house.' One can imagine lud- 'fetus' or even 'child.' Thus
the Old English cognate of Go kilpei* 'womb' and inkilpo
'pregnant' is cild 'child.' Lud- words occurred so rarely
because except in Gothic they were probably considered

650
Adz(e) Adz(e)

not delicate enough for literary use; compare OI lydda

'nonentity' ('a prick'?).
Runic inscription 8 of Maeshowe, Orkney, reads:
"Ingibjorg, hin fagra ekkja. Morg kona hefir farit lut inn
her. Mikill oflati. Erlingr." The transcription is from M.
Barnes (1994:99), who translates: "Ingibjorg, the fair
widow. Many a woman has gone stooping in here. A
great show-off. Er-lingr." The graffito is undoubtedly
obscene, especially if lut or lud rather than lut is meant,
for fara lut may be synonymous with fara litom in Hdr-
bardzliod 50 ('many a woman had a ride on a lut in
here'). If the Old Swedish deity Lytir (less likely Lytir) can
be identified with Freyr in his function of a fertility god,
his name makes one think of Lodurr (or Lodurr), OS lud,
and OI lut (that is, of a phallic idol) rather than of OI lyta
'deform, disgrace' (which would turn Lytir into the devil),
as Stromback (1928:292-93) believed, or of OI hljota 'get
by lot' (Lytir 'soothsayer'), as Elmevik (1990:497-503)
suggested.
LASS (1300)
Contrary to the belief that held out for several
centuries, lad and lass are unrelated, that is, lass is not a
contracted form of *ladess or *ladse. However, both
words surfaced in English simultaneously in the same
northern texts, and both are of Scandinavian origin. The
two seem to result from a similar jocular usage (slang)
that encouraged the transfer of the names of (worthless)
651
Adz(e) Adz(e)

clothes to children. The etymon of lad means 'woolen

stocking; hose; old shoe,' while lass is traceable to Dan
las 'rag' and its cognates in Swedish dialects and Old
Norwegian. Lass never meant 'young unmarried woman'
except by implication. Consequently, MSw losk kona 'free
woman,' a phrase cited in OED and repeated in most
later dictionaries, is neither a possible etymon nor an
analogue of the English word.
The sections are devoted to 1) the rejected
etymologies of lass (old and recent), 2) Bradley's
etymology of lass, 3) the metaphorical origin of lass
('rag' 'girl'), and 4) the interaction between the las- and
lask- forms in and outside the Scandinavian area; lass
and windlass.
1. According to the oldest etymological dictionaries
of English, the originator of the idea that lass goes back
to *ladess was George Hickes (Hicke-sius), but none gives
an exact reference. From the point of view of the history
of English ladess is a ghost word. Coined in 1768 by
Horace Walpole, it has not taken root in the language
(nor was it meant to). Skeat 1 tentatively derived lad
from
*ladess, though the suffix -ess is said to be of Welsh
rather than of French origin. Lad and lass were habitually
regarded as borrowings from Celtic at that time (see, for
example, Boase [1881:377].

652
Adz(e) Adz(e)

O. Ritter (1910:478) explained lass as a sub-

stantivized comparative, that is, as the continuation of
OE (seo) Ixsse (f), literally 'the lesser one,' and cited as
analogues OE pa ieldran 'parents,' se ieldra 'father,' se
geongra 'youth, disciple, vassal,' and a few others. It may
be added that Jünger is still the only German word for
'disciple,' and E elders has retained a meaning not too
different from G Eltern 'parents.'
Two arguments weaken Ritter's etymology. First, it is
unclear who would call girls, and why only girls, 'the
lesser one(s).' Eltern and Jünger presuppose a deferential
attitude toward the parents and the teacher on the part
of the followers and children. Lass belongs to a different
style. Ritter cited G die Kleine (f) 'the little one' as a
synonym for 'sweetheart.' However, lass is not a term of
endearment typical of wooers' language. The parents
might perhaps call their daughter 'the lesser one,' to
distinguish her from the mother of the family when the
division of property or inheritance rights were at stake
(cf John Smith Jr.), but lass has never been a legal term.
Second, it is preferable to have the etymology of lass
that would take into account the word's northern
provenance; lass understood as 'the lesser one' has no
recorded counterparts in any Scandinavian language.
The other hypotheses (except Holthausen's: see
below) are worth mentioning only for completeness'
sake. The same people who thought they knew the
653
Adz(e) Adz(e)

origin of lad often had something to say about lass.

H.C.C. (1853:257) traced lass to OE *hlafestre, the
nonexistent feminine of OE hlafleta 'servant' on the
analogy of lad, allegedly from hlafxta (see LAD for
discussion). Makovskii
(1977:63 and 1980:67) suggested that lass is the re-
sult of a misunderstood gloss: puluis, that is, pulvis 'dust,
ashes,' was allegedly confused with puella 'maiden,' and
the gloss l.asce 'or ashes' merged into lasce, whence the
English word. He did not explain how lasce < l.asce
became a common word and why it surfaced only in
Middle English. (Shchur [1982:153] cited both of
Makovskii's etymologies— of lad and of lass—
approvingly.) Later he derived lass from the concept
'squeeze (milk)' and related it to L lac 'milk' or to Skt
lasah 'resin' and laslka 'lymph, serum,' as well to Lith
lasas 'drop' (sb) ([1992a:52]; he did not mention a
different opinion
in KEWA III:94, 96). Finally, he said that lass was
akin to words meaning 'battle' (lass 'warrior
maiden'), such as L lis 'dispute, lawsuit' and Skt las
'move' (v), though Skt las 'appear,' he added, should not
be ignored either (lass emerged as 'the producer of
children'). As an afterthought, he mentioned OE lxs 'field'
and E reg lash 'comb,' because fights play themselves out
on battlefields, while the comb is a metaphor for the
woman's
654
Adz(e) Adz(e)

genitals (1999a:190-91).
2. Modern dictionaries call lass a word of ob-
scure origin but often cite Bradley's etymology
(1894) as tenable. This is how Bradley presented it
in his article: "The feminine lass first occurs about
the year 1300 in two Northern works, the 'Metrical
Homilies' and the 'Cursor Mundi,' and in both
passages is spelt lasce. This spelling suggests that
the word is one of those in which Northern dialects
represent a Scandinavian sk by ss, as in ass for
ashes (Scandinavian aska), Sc buss for bush (Scan-
dinavian buskr). Hence the etymology of the word
may be sought in the Scandinavian *laskw, the
feminine of an adjective meaning unmarried; cf.
Middle Swedish lbsk kona, unmarried woman.
...The original sense of the adjective (which is ety-
mologically akin to the verb to let) is 'free from ties,
loose,' whence the meaning 'vagrant,' also found
in Middle Swedish, and the Icelandic sense (...lbskr)
'idle, weak.' The association of the words lad and
lass is, if this explanation be correct, due to their
accidental similarity in sound." OED and ODEE
repeated Bradley's etymology in an abridged form.
Although Thomson, as usual, cited several uniden-
tifiable forms, he had an idea similar to Bradley's:
lass, he suggested, means 'free, single,' with refer-
ence to a word that looks like OI losk. Lass, as
655
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Bradley pointed out, was first recorded in north-

ern texts, and it is current mainly in northern and
north midland dialects, so that its Scandinavian
origin is likely. However, *laskw, the presumed
etymon of lass, did not exist (Ekwall [1938:259]).
Nor is it necessary to reconstruct the substitution of
ss for sk in this word.
3. The most probable etymon of lass is, as
Bjorkman (1912:272) suggested, a word like Old
Danish las 'rag,' which has identical cognates in
Swedish dialects and Old Norwegian. In a way,
Bjorkman's predecessor was Holthausen
(1903b:39), who compared lass and E lash and re-
ferred to his earlier etymology of Sw flicka 'girl'
from Sw flicka ~ G flicken (v) 'mend, darn'
(1900:366). But lash 'make fast with a cord' sur-
faced in English only in the 17 th century and is
probably a borrowing from Low German, like the
analogous Scandinavian words discussed at the
end of this entry, while the verbs G flicken ~ Sw
flicka belong with flip, flop, and the like (see FUCK). The
sought-for similarity at the semantic level is between las
'rag' ~ lass 'girl' and flicka 'patch, shred' ~ flicka 'girl.'
Holthausen wanted to correlate his conclusion with
Bradley's and suggested that lass was the development
of the northern form lash (< *lask).

656
Adz(e) Adz(e)

In slang, words for 'rag' frequently acquire the

jocular meaning 'child' and especially 'girl.'
See some examples in Gebhardt [1911:1896]. Pauli
(1919:225-26) cites various Romance examples and
endorses Bjorkman's derivation of lass (see p. 225, note
5). Not only Sw flicka 'girl' but also E brat, from brat
'ragged garments,' has a similar origin (Sc bratchart may
be an extension of brat, though the usual idea is that
brat is a clipped form of bratchart); compare the history
of dud (if it is from dud 'coarse cloak') and LAD, end of sec
2.
Sometimes the path from 'piece of cloth' to 'child'
was from 'diapers' or from the similarity between a baby
and a doll (dolls were made of rags), or from the practice
of calling females after the clothes they wore (see the
examples given at DRAB and GIRL, sec 4). In other cases,
the transfer of the name followed more circuitous
routes. OI lebarn 'infant, baby in arms' corresponds to E
bastard (< OF bastard), held to be from bastum 'bat,
packsaddle' (OED). With regards to lebarn, see N reg ljo
'padding for a pack saddle, consisting of a woolen
blanket, a straw cushion and a skin'; barn
means 'child' (AEW lebarn; Elmevik [1986:84]). Ini-
tially, the suffix -ard need not have had a depreciatory
meaning.
Despite the guarded support by OED and Skeat of
Mahn's idea that E bantling 'illegitimate child' is a
657
Adz(e) Adz(e)

"corruption" of G Banking, from Bank 'bench' ('a child

begotten on or under a bench'), the old derivation from
*band-ling 'one wrapped in swaddling bands' may be
correct, the d ~ t problem notwithstanding. Since
Bankling, which first occurs in Fischart (the same
example in DW [Bankling] and HDGF [Bank]), seems to
have had minimal currency in Germany, its spread to
England in this form would be hard to demonstrate.
Old designations of illegitimate children were not
always coined as terms of abuse, and bastard was
probably no closer to 'packsaddle son' (whatever it is
supposed to mean) than lebarn. Likewise, OF coitrart
(from coite 'quilt') and LG Mantelkind 'mantle child' that
ODEE cites (bastard) do not sound offensive. In all those
cases, '(piece of) cloth' served as the foundation of a
word for
'child.'
Like LAD, ultimately from 'old or unseemly, or
worthless garment' ('hose; sock; shoe'), lass emerged
from the metaphorical use of a word for 'rag.' Both are
words of Scandinavian origin, but neither is, strictly
speaking, a borrowing, for they do not mean 'youngster'
and 'girl' in any Scandinavian language. Their recorded
Middle English meanings developed in the northern
dialects of England. If this reconstruction is acceptable,
the only unanswered question will be whether ME lass
and lasce are related. Bradley suggested that lasce was
658
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the original form, with sc later simplified to ss, but the

interplay of las- and lask- is typical of the word for 'rag'
far beyond the Scandinavian area.
4. Although ModG Lasche means, among other
things, 'loop; tongue of a shoe; flap of a pocket,' MHG
lasche and MLG lassce (with several variants) meant 'rag;
patch; gusset' (KM, KS). The technical senses of the
Middle Low German word contributed to its popularity
in other countries. Dan lask is a doublet of las 'rag, patch'
(the same in Nynorsk). In Swedish, lask 'metal plate'
occurs, while in Icelandic, laski means 'crack in the wood,
top of a glove, loop in knitting, splinter; section of an
orange; slip of dry ground between two streams, etc'
(ABM). Some of these senses must have developed on
Scandinavian soil, others may have been taken over with
the German word.
G *las has not been recorded, whereas forms like
la(s)ka 'rag, patch, shred' are known over a large
territory: such are Gk ICXKIJ 'rag,' L lacer 'torn,' Russ
loskut 'shred,' Sp and Port lasca 'piece of leather, chip,'
and many others. Gmc *laska is possible, but its origin
and the relationship between the Germanic and the
Romance forms are unknown (in addition to
etymological dictionaries, see Hubschmid [1953:84-85]).
Meyer-Lubke rejected Gmc *laska as the etymon of the
Spanish and Portuguese word in all the editions of his
dictionary (ML 4919), and it is strange that Holthausen
659
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1929a:108 and GEW, *laska) repeated Grober's

opinion to the contrary (1886:510) without com-
ment. We seem to be dealing with a European word
traceable to an ancient etymon, but borrowing and
chance are the probable causes of the similarity that
would otherwise be natural to ascribe to common
heritage.
Gmc *laska and Dan las may be unconnected despite
the near identity of sound and meaning. Las 'rag' seems
to be akin to Go lasiws 'weak,' but regardless of whether
this etymology is correct, ME lasce was, in all likelihood,
a Middle English diminutive of las, for lask(e) is known to
have appeared in the Scandinavian languages only in the
18th century, and that is why it is believed to be a
borrowing from Middle Low German. Lasce must have
been a word like ME polke 'small pool,' ME dalk 'small
valley (dale),' OFr donk 'small dune' [sic], and OFr tenk
'small pail' (Kluge [1926:sec 61a]; KrM, 214). E reg
lassikie (EDD) is a formation
parallel with it or a continuation of ME lasce.
Windlass (1500) has nothing to do with lass; its
etymon is OI vinddss. It may have been influenced by
some word like ME windle 'winnowing fan,' but once
windlass came into existence, it was felt to be wind +
lass. Humorous and grim references to females in the
names of tools and weapons are not rare. Consider
Scavenger's daughter 'instrument of torture,' Dutch wife
660
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(in tropical countries) 'open framework used in bed as a

rest for the limbs'; maiden, one of whose meanings is
'guillotine'; gun, held to be the first syllable of
Gunnhild(r), as well as Big Bertha and Katyusha
(cannons). See gun in Weekley (1921) for many more
examples of the same type.
LILLIPUTIAN (1726)
The word Lilliput(ian) became known in 1726, when
Jonathan Swift brought out the first (anonymous) edition
of Gulliver's Travels. Like most of Swift's neologisms,
Lilliputian has been the object of numerous attempts to
explain its origin. English, French, and Latin words have
been cited as its possible etymons. Some conjectures
centered on codes and anagrams. Probably lill(e)- is a
variant of little and -put is E put(t) 'lout, blockhead.'
However, put- is the root of a vulgar or colloquial word
for 'boy, lad' in Latin, as well as in the modern Romance
and Scandinavian languages. Lilliputian has a common
European look—a circumstance that Swift could not fail
to have noticed and that contributed to its worldwide
popularity. Later he seems to have modeled Laputa (=
the whore?) on Lilliputian. A definitive answer about the
origin of a coinage can be given only by its originator,
but Swift left no hints to the history of the words he in-
vented.
We can only try to guess at the origin of Lilli-put(ian),
a word Swift coined. He did not elucidate the meaning of
661
Adz(e) Adz(e)

this name, but even if he had done so, his explanation

might have been offered in jest, to confuse and mislead
rather than enlighten. For example, Gulliver mentions
two etymologies of Laputa: one by local sages and one
that occurred to him. It is hard to tell whether both
ridicule contemporary philologists or whether Gulliver's
interpretation contains a clue to Swift's parody.
Lilli- is almost certainly a variant of little, despite the
fact that the second i is unetymological and may have
been inserted for euphony's sake. The earliest
conjectures on the origin of Lilliputian do not antedate
the eighties of the 19th century.
Kleinpaul (1885:17-18) traced the German family
name Lütke (the spelling Lüdtke also exists) to LG lütje (=
HG lützel) 'little' rather than Ludwig and added in passing
that Swedish and Danish lille 'little' seems to be the first
part of Lilliput. Chance (1889) found Kleinpaul's
hypothesis plausible and suggested that Lilliput was a
Scandinavian-Italian hybrid: lille + Ital putto 'boy.' At the
same time, H. Morley (1890:17-18), the most authorita-
tive editor of Swift's works, wrote the following: "The
small representative of lordly man has a name of
contempt familiar in Swift's time; he was a 'put.' But he
was of the little—lilli—people, as Swift's 'little language'
phrased it, of the land of Lilli-put. 'Put' may have been
from the Latin 'pu-tus,' a little boy, allied to puer. But it
was used in Romance languages—the put and pute of old
662
Adz(e) Adz(e)

French, the Spanish and Portuguese puto and puta, the

Italian putta—in the sense of boy or girl stained by the
vices of men. This made it once current in England as a
word of scorn; and it has been suggested that the root
was in the Latin putidus, stinking, disgusting. This use of
the word was probably repeated in Laputa." Most of
what has been said on Lilliputian since 1890 represents
variations on Morley's hypothesis, and some researchers
(for example, Kelling [1951:772]) see no need to modify
it (but see below).
E put(t) 'blockhead' turned up in printed texts no
later than in 1688 (OED). Country put means 'lout,
bumpkin.' According to R. Smith (1954:186), "it may have
come into English from Irish pait, puite, pota 'pot'; cf.
poteen (Ir. poitin, 'illicitly distilled whisky, little pot').
Swift probably heard the word many times, since it
appears in both Lhuyd and Begley." The etymology of
put(t), be it from Latin (put = 'stinker') or Irish (put =
'pot') is of no consequence for the modern attempts to
decipher the workings of Swift's mind. Important only is
the fact that Lilliput may have been composed of two
English words, whatever their ultimate origin.
Swift knew and disliked the phrase country put,
defined as 'silly, shallow-pated fellow' in 1700, for he
had a strong aversion to recent monosyllables (see,
among others, J. Neumann [1943:200, note 50] and
Söderlind [1968:75]). Söderlind remarks that Swift's
663
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dislike of the word put "does not preclude its occurrence

as an element in the title of Gulliver's first story, but it
detracts a little from the probability of that derivation."
This is a non sequi-tur. Swift would have relished the
idea of endowing the citizens of the great empire of
Lilliput (and by implication, of Blefuscu) with the name
he detested.
K. Crook (1998:171) considered an association
between -put and L caput 'head,' and Clark (1953:606)
mentions and rejects the interpretation Lilliput = 'put
little.' Clark's own etymology (1953:606) seems fanciful.
He says that, according to OED, "put was a dialectical
form of the word pretty, or, rather ... a truncated familiar
form of putty, which is one of several variants of pretty.
... Moreover, children commonly pronounce the adult
pretty as piti. If Swift's usual interchange of u for i is
effected, a form puti is obtained, a form consistent with
a good dialectical English and the 'baby talk' of the
element lilli. In other words, Swift has combined the two
adjectives describing his fictional land according to the
practice he followed with Langro and Peplon. Little (and)
pretty (in the sense of delicate, nice, elegant, 'without
grandeur') were combined as Lilli-putti Finally,
of course, pretty may be used adverbially, as pretty
little, proper and common usage in Swift's time as in our
own." Still another idea is Brückmann's (1974). She says
that since "[e]verything is small among the Lilliputians,
664
Adz(e) Adz(e)

not least their conceptions, of every kind," Swift may

have had L puto 'reckon, suppose, judge, think, imagine'
in mind; the Lilliputians would then translate 'petty-
minded.'
One finds the strongest defense of Lilliputian) as a
nonce word of Scandinavian origin in Söderlind (1968).
His perspective is that of a Swede, "who cannot hear the
word Lilliput without associating it with the perfectly
natural and usual Swedish phrase lille Putte, where lille
means "little" and Putte is a pet name for a little boy" (p.
77). Söderlind goes on to show that Swift's knowledge of
Swedish and interest in Sweden justify his hypothesis.
Baker (1956) suggested that Swift had borrowed his
word from Catullus 53:5. In the episode related by
Catullus, someone who heard Calvus's speech in court
exclaimed: "Di magni, salaputium disertum!" ('Great
gods! What an articulate [fellow]!'). Baker contends that
Lilliputian rather than Lilliput needs an etymology and
that salaputium may have provided the inspiration for
Swift's word. The same idea occurred to Tor-
pusman (1998:31).
Salaputium has not been recorded anywhere else in
Latin literature; only the name Salaputis (in the ablative)
occurs in an African inscription. The manuscripts have
salapantium and even salafantium (f = ph), but Seneca,
who quotes Catullus's phrase, says salaputtium, whence
salaputium (with one t) in all modern editions. The origin
665
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of the Latin word (in whichever form) is unknown. The

conjecture that putus, a vulgar form of puer 'boy,' and
salere 'mount' (in reference to copulating animals) con-
tributed to this coinage may not be wide of the mark.
Similarity between salaputium and praepu-tium
'foreskin' is also obvious. Except for What-mough's
derivation of salaputium from Celtic (1953:65), all the
others are at least probable, though rarely attractive.
See Thielmann (1887), Garrod (1914), L.A. Mackay (1933;
mentions soli-pugas 'a species of ants'), Bickel (1953;
glosses the word as 'penis'), and Pisani (1953:181-82).
For a brief survey of earlier opinions see Kelly (1854:41,
note 1) and Knobloch (1969:25, note 5). Etymological
dictionaries and editions add nothing new. See the most
detailed commentary in Riese (1884:100),
Benois-Thomas (1890:497), G. Friedrich (1908:240),
and Fordyce (1961:223-25).
The latest translators vie with one another in
searching for particularly obscene words to render
salaputium, but its meaning is presumably lost. The fact
that it occurs in an inscription does not necessarily add
to its respectability: the most opprobrious nicknames
had wide currency and were used openly and even
officially, strange as it may seem today. The bystander
said something that according to the poem, made
Catullus laugh (perhaps approximately: "This (little)
fellow can ejaculate, he can!"), and the speaker may
666
Adz(e) Adz(e)

have used a regional word, which would have enhanced

the comic effect. Seneca states that Calvus was short. It
is then the small size of the orator and the high level of
his performance that suggested the joke. If salaputium
really made one think of coitus and genitalia, everybody
would have understood the allusion.
Catullus was known in England long before Swift.
The first author in Duckett's anthology (Duckett
[1925:14]) is John Skelton (1460?-1529), and Swift's
fondness of Catullus is a fact (McPeek
[1939:53, 249; 287, note 42; 307, note 33; 376, end of
note 204; 387, note 30]; Baker [1956:478]). Although H.
Williams does not mention Catullus in
his survey (1932:42-48), Swift owned the 1686 and
the 1711 editions of Catullus's poems (LeFanu
[1988:15], and see the catalog appended to Wil-liams's
book). However, Swift did not translate no 53 and his
works contain no echoes of it. The early Italian editions
of Catullus ([1554:58]; the same throughout the 16 th
century) call Catullus's poem "Ad rusticum" and include
it in "Epigrammata" (after "Liber Quartus"). The word in
question appears as salapantium. The extensive
commentary in the 1554 edition discusses its obscurity,
and the relevant passage from Seneca is quoted. Catullus
(1686:27, "De quodam, & Calvo," already numbered
53) and Catullus (1702:49, the same title, no 54),
substitute salapantium for salaputium but give no
667
Adz(e) Adz(e)

textual notes. This practice prevailed for a long time

(see, for instance, Catullus [1715]). Unless Swift knew
and remembered that Seneca had once called Calvus
short (paruolus statura), he would hardly have thought
of salaputium when selecting the name for his little
people.
The Catullus connection, however unlikely, should
not be disregarded, because the question it raises is of
crucial importance to students of Swift's language
games. Did Swift want his readers to guess the meaning
of the words he coined? As a rule, literary riddles are
asked to be solved. If that rule applies to Swift, the use
of an obscure word from Catullus would have defied its
purpose, but, considering how impenetrable some of
Swift's coinages are, one cannot be sure that he did not
indulge in verbal games only for his own (and oc-
casionally Stella's) amusement.
Since the appearance of Pons (1936), Rabe-lais's
influence on Gulliver's Travels has been commonplace.
Pons showed that the phrases in the Lilliputian language
made sense when 'translated' into Rabelais's French
(which does not testify to Swift's interest in being
deciphered!). He endorsed Morley's hypothesis (p. 224)
and, like Morley, believed that Lilliput and Laputa belong
together; see the same reasoning in Argent (1996:39,
note 2). Despite a few attempts to understand Laputa as
a near anagram of Utopia, All-up-at, and the like, the
668
Adz(e) Adz(e)

first association it arouses is with Sp la puta 'the whore,'

and the clue could not have been offered as a red
herring. That circumstance increases the probability that
Lilliputian contains some scurrilous or at least impolite
allusion.
The simplest way of reconstructing Swift's process of
arriving at the name he sought for is this: He needed a
word meaning 'contemptible little fellow' and came by
little put, which he changed to *lillput and added a
connecting vowel (lill-i-put) on the model of other words
of this rhythmic structure (see them at COCKNEY and
RAGAMUFFIN). When the word was coined, he must have
noticed how lucky his find was, for put-is also the root of
a colloquial word for 'boy, lad' in the Romance
languages. If his knowledge of Swedish was sufficient, he
could congratulate himself on reaching out to
Scandinavia as well. Laputa came as a reward for
inventing Lilliput. The fact that Ireland was always
uppermost in Swift's mind makes plausible V.
Glendinning's suggestion about the debt of Gulliver's
Travels to Irish folklore and the Irish language
(1998:164), but Lilliput(ian) does not seem to owe
anything to Irish. In light of the reconstruction proposed
here, the Swedish hypothesis is beginning to look
uninviting.
Henrion (1962:53-63), the author of a bilingual
(English-French) book on Swift's alleged alphanu-merical
669
Adz(e) Adz(e)

code, deciphered Lilliput as Nowhere and Laputa as

Saxony (= England). If so, it remains unclear why Swift
should have buried his secret so deep, why only the
kingdom of the Lilliputians emerges as some kind of
Thomas Moore's Utopia or Samuel Butler's Erehwon, and
why Lilliput and Laputa despite their phonetic near
identity should have yielded such dissimilar glosses.
Since Swift did not explain how he created his
neologisms, of which Lilliput is the most successful (it
entered many other European languages), our
conjectures are doomed to remain guesswork, and the
etymology of Lilliput, like that of any 'natural' word,
resolves itself into choosing the least improbable
variant. Dictionaries, which usually discuss the origin of
coinages (gas, theodolite, and so forth), only state that
Lilliput was Swift's invention.
MAN (971)
Man has cognates in all the Germanic languages,
and its most probable congeners are the divine names
Gmc Mannus ~ Skt Manu and some words for 'man' in
Slavic. The relevant Germanic forms of the word for
'man' are nouns with the thematic vowels -i- (in two
ethnic names) and -a-, as well as athematic (weak)
nouns. If Mannus ~ Manu belong here, the u-declension
for this word should also be reconstructed. There have
been attempts to combine mann- and Gmc *guma ~ L
homo, but the artificial etymon *ghmonon- carries little
670
Adz(e) Adz(e)

conviction. Two other hypotheses (ignoring the fanciful

ones) trace the word for 'man' to the root of L manus
'hand' or to the Proto-Indo-European root *men-, glossed
as *'think' or *'be excited, aroused', or *'breathe.' The
probability of those reconstructs is low.
Among the earliest meanings of man and its
cognates 'slave' and 'servant' are prominent.
Occasionally such words refer to women; OI man could
be neuter. Go gaman 'partnership' and 'partner'
(originally, as its suffix shows, a collective noun) provides
the main clue to the origin of man. Evidently, gaman at
one time meant *'partnership in the god Mannus,' that
is, a group of his votaries (men and women alike). Hence
the ancient sense 'servant.' Later, *'partnership in
Mannus' yielded the meaning *'votary, worshipper of
Mannus'; the Gothic word still designates both a group
and an individual. The subsequent secularization of this
word resulted in the attested sense 'human being.'
Likewise, G Mensch (< men-nisco) must have been coined
with the meaning *'belonging to Mannus.' The god's
name seems to have meant 'causing madness,' as is
typical of ancient words for supernatural beings.
Words for 'man' sound alike in various language
families. It remains unclear whether we are dealing with
a near universal baby word or with reflexes of a so-called
Nostratic formation.

671
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The sections are devoted to 1) the morphological

structure of the most ancient Germanic words for 'man,'
2) the attempts to etymologize man, 3) the suggested
connection between man and Mannus, and 4) the origin
of the name Mannus.
1. The oldest recorded forms to be considered are Go
manna, Ol madr, OE/OFr mann ~ monn, and OHG/OS
man. In addition, there is Mannus, the mythic progenitor
of the Teutons, whom Tacitus mentions in Chapter 2 of
Germania, a proper name, apparently but not
necessarily related to manna and the rest. The theme
(Stammvokal) of the original noun is unclear, because
there are unusually many variants. Since the etymology
of manna and its cognates partly depends on how we
will reconstruct their declension, the question of their
morphology has to be discussed before everything else.
Gothic had manna (weak, n-stem) and two forms
entering into compounds: man- (as in man-leika
'likeness, image') and mana- (as in mana-seps 'world,
mankind,' mana-maurprja 'murderer,' and un-mana-
riggws 'wild, cruel'). Manauli*, possibly man-auli,
rendering Gk σχήμα 'likeness, shape,' and the indefinite
pronoun ni-manna-hun 'no one' belong here too. In Old
English, mann was an athe-matic noun, but compound
names ending in -mann seem to have been declined as a-
stems (A. Campbell [1959:secs 620-22[). In Old High
German, man, also an athematic noun, had the geminate
672
Adz(e) Adz(e)

in all cases except the nominative (SB secs 238-39). OS

man, athematic, had occasional forms from the a-
declension (Holthausen [1921:sec 322]). The situation in
Old Norse is the same as in West Germanic: although
madr (cf the attested runic form man[n]R) is athematic,
as the first element of compounds it has a geminate and
ends in -a (manna-). In two compounds, man- appears.
CV (madr) cite Man-heimar, the name of a farm in
western Iceland and make a special point of the local
pronunciation: man-, not mann-. Both CV and Fritzner
(ODGNS) give mannvit 'understanding'; however, Bugge,
in a note appended to Fritzner's dictionary (vol 3, p.
1110), says that manvit is a better form, and A. Noreen
(1970:sec 318, note 5) shares his opinion.
A. Kuhn (1853:463, 465, and esp 466-67) compared
the Germanic forms with Skt Manu (the Old Indian
counterpart of Germanic Mannus). He came to the
conclusion that nn had developed from *nw and cited Go
kinnus* 'cheek' as one of several similar cases.
Numerous researchers, including Delbrück (1870:406),
Feist (1888:75, manna),
and Pedersen (1893:253), accepted his reconstruc-
tion (it can also be found in DW), though it runs into
both morphological and phonetic difficulties. The
overwhelming evidence of Germanic forms points to
athematic mann, and even in Gothic, in which the u-
declension was productive, *mannus did not occur. The
673
Adz(e) Adz(e)

thematic vowels of Gothic nouns were usually preserved

in compounds (for example, fotus was a u-stem, and,
predictably, -u-shows up in fotu-baurd 'footstool'). Only
kinnus* (cognate with yevuj) is a fairly certain example
of the change *nw > nn in Germanic, but Bammes-berger
(1999:3, note 6) tried to discredit even that single
example.
Later, another etymology of the geminate was
offered. Bezzenberger (1890) took Feist to task for
repeating "the old but improbable explanation [of mann]
from manv, though the parallelism abne, ab-nam :
manne, mannam cannot escape anyone" (Go aba means
'man, husband,' and its forms in the genitive and dative
plural differ from those of other weak masculine nouns,
such as hanane, ha-nam, of hana 'rooster'). Wiedemann
(1893:149) reconstructed the original paradigm (in the
singular) so: *man-e , *man-n-az, *man-n-i, with the
second -n-carried over into the nominative. It appears
that the originator of this reconstruction was J. Schmidt,
who, according to his statement (Schmidt
[1893:253, note]), had taught "for years" that the
earliest form of mann was *manan- (weak). Thus the
first -n- was said to belong to the root, with the second
being a thematic consonant. The two
allegedly came into contact after the syncope of *a,
but in *manns (genitive singular), the geminate was
simplified, as in mins 'less' (adverb): cf minniza 'lesser'
674
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(adjective). Since Schmidt expressed his opinion only in

his lectures, one wonders how Feist could be aware of it.
In KrM 43-47, the ancient paradigm of hana has the
following appearance: *hane n (or *hano n), *hanenes
(or -os), *haneni, *hanonm; *hanones, *hanono m,
*hanonmiz, *hananuns. Asterisked paradigms change
according to the changing views on unstressed vowels in
Germanic (see for comparison J. Wright [1954:sec 207];
first published in 1910). Bammesberger (1999:4), with
special reference to Boutkan, offers such a set of the
protoforms of manna: *mano n, *mannaz, (the dative is
not given), *mananu(n); *mannenez, *manno(n), and
(accusative plural) *mannunz.
After 1893, references to Bezzenberger, Wiedemann,
and Schmidt became an indispensable element of the
works on manna. Uhlenbeck's change of mind is a case in
point. In the first edition of his Gothic etymological
dictionary (KEWGS), manna is traced to *monus,
*monwes (or *mnwes). Streitberg (1897:255) made the
same objection to him that Bezzenberger had made to
Feist (see also Streitberg 1896:140, note 1), and in the
second edition, Uhlenbeck gave the expected three
references and modified his views. Brugmann
(Brugmann and Delbrück 1906:303) followed suit (see
Trutmann [1972:26, note 77] on the change of
Brugmann's position). Feist held out longer. He repeated
the statement from his 1888 work in Feist 1, but in Feist2
675
Adz(e) Adz(e)

no mention of *nw remained. Kluge (as evidenced by

Kluge [1913:16, sec 59]) never abandoned Kuhn's idea.
Among the recent philologists, Lühr (1982:133, note
2) is unswayed by Schmidt's reconstruction, though she
mentions -nn- < *-nw- in passing and offers no
discussion. Lubotsky (1988:43) was mainly concerned
with short a in the Sanskrit word (the regular vowel in
this open syllable would have been long, according to
Brugmann's Law) and notes that "this word probably had
hystero-dynamic inflection in P[roto]-I[ndo]-E[uropean],
cf. Germ. *mann- < *monu." Boutkan (OFED: man) finds
this explanation probable; "alternatively, we can
perhaps assume *monHa-, both forms yielding regular
gemination of the *-n-." Since he reconstructs the
laryngeal only to explain the geminate, his hypothesis
has no value. The prevailing opinion on manna does not
differ from Van Helten's: manna supposedly originated
as a weak noun and changed to the athematic declension
later (Van Helten 1905:225). Uhlenbeck concluded that
since mann- does not go back to *manw-, manna cannot
be related to Mannus. Most researchers still associate
the Germanic word for 'man' with Mannus. Connecting
them has even become commonplace (see
Bammesberger [1999:3], among others).
According to Ramat (1963b:25), the compounds
manamaurprja and manaseps preserve the most ancient
form of the root in question. OHG manslaht ~ OE
676
Adz(e) Adz(e)

manslieht 'murder,' he says, point in the same direction.

He compared andbeitan *'scold' (v) ~ andabeit 'rebuke'
— traditionally explained as *andbeitan ~ *dndabeit —
with brupfaps 'bridegroom' ~ hundafaps 'centurion' and
reconstructed hunddfaps (p. 28). Given his premises, the
antiquity of *mana- and *man-, as opposed to *mann-, is
incontestable; yet he recognized the primacy of the
weak declension and did not assign *man- to the a-stem.
Mitzka's editions of EWDS state that three de-
clensions can be discerned in the Germanic word for
'man': weak, athematic, and thematic (-i-, in the tribal
names Marcomanni and Alamanni). However, if we do
not follow Uhlenbeck all the way and do not give up
Mannus as a cognate of manna, the admission is
inevitable that at some time somewhere in Germania
the u-stem played a role in the morphology of the word
for 'man,' because, judging by Skt Manu-, and the Iranian
personal name Manus.cidra (H. Bailey [1959:113]),
Mannus was a genuine Germanic rather than a Latinized
form of the god's name. Christensen (1916) is especially
important for Iranian.
Since Gothic compounds show that *man(n)-was
sometimes declined as an a-stem word, nothing can be
said against positing at least four, rather than three,
declensions of the word for 'man' (so Delbrück
[1870:406]). By a coincidence (?), L manes, too, had the
by-form ma nis (according to the i-declension). Beekes
677
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1995:346) reproduced the ancient Scandinavian runic

alphabet (futhark) and gave the name of the M rune as
mannaz. Bammes-berger (1996:314) contends that no
facts justify such a form, but he does not discuss Gothic
compounds. According to him (Bammesberger 1999:6),
M could be called *mannz, *mannuz, or *mannon. He
both denies the role of the u-stem in the history of
*man(n)- and accepts Skt Manu- as a cognate of Gmc
*mannu- (pp. 2-3); his position is contradictory. See a
detailed discussion of the morphology of *man(n)- in
Wagner (1994). Feist (1888) suggested that in manaseps
and other compounds, -a-appeared on the analogy of
the most productive declension. This is possible but
unlikely. Gothic preserved relics of several morphological
types, and all of them look genuine. No reason exists for
giving preference to any of the five declensions (-n-, -a-, -
i-, -u-, and athematic) in reconstructing the history of the
Germanic word for 'man.' This grammatical instability,
the impossibility to set up a secure protoform (*manon?,
*manas?, *manis?, *manus?, *mans?) cannot be
disregarded in the search for the etymology of *man(n)-.
2. All the conjectures surveyed below aimed at
finding an ancient meaning of *man(n)- that would
adequately describe some properties or habits of human
beings. However, it is not immediately obvious what we
are looking for. The ancient word for 'man' could have
designated 'one possessing in high degree the distinctive
678
Adz(e) Adz(e)

qualities of manhood' (that is, 'vis') or 'being of the

speaker's race and language, his like, of his kind or kin.'
As Trumbull (1871:139 and esp 158) points out, man
'individual, homo' is untranslatable into any Native
American lanugage, for distinction is always made
between native and foreigner, chief and counselor, male
and female, etc. 1) Kluge traced mann- (with nn from
*nw) to the root of Gmc *guma and L homo and came up
with *ghmonon-, "possibly a sideform of *ghemo."
*Ghmonon appeared in the fourth edition of EWDS and
stayed there until Kluge's death. His reconstruction
gained wide approval. Berneker (1898:361) cited Go
magaps* 'maiden,' allegedly from *ghmogh1, as a
parallel case, for he believed that magaps* and Lith
zmogiis went back to *ghmoghus. Similar operations
were performed on ccvQpamoc; 'man' and ccvfp 'male,
man.' Here the most popular protoform was *m9pamoc;,
presumably related to OHG muntar 'awake, lively' and so
on (Bezzenberger [1880:160]; see similar combinations in
Sabler [1892:276] and J. Schmidt [1895:82]
and discussion in Güntert [1915:6]).
Götze and others who reworked Kluge's dictionary
expunged both nn from *nw and *ghmonon-, and it
became customary to express one's disagreement with
Berneker. However, *gmanon- as a Germanic
development of *gumon-, which seemed realistic to
Wyld (UED), reemerged in Seebold's editions of EWDS,
679
Adz(e) Adz(e)

along with Lith Zmones 'people.' The title of Berneker's

article opens the short bibliography appended to the en-
try Mann in EWDS22-24. Berneker was aware of the fact
that not a single example of the change gm- > m had
been attested in Germanic but said that such a
simplification was a natural process. His argument does
not go far because no Germanic word ever began with
gm-. Manczak (1998) argued against the simplification of
*gm- with reference to his idea that words for 'man'
usually become shorter; in his opinion, the uniform
change *gm- > m- in all the Germanic languages would
be uncharacteristic from the point of view of his theory.
Yet if the posited change occurred early, man- < *gman-
can be ascribed to Common Germanic. The phonetic
handicap is not the only one. By combining Mann with
guma ~ homo, Kluge destroyed the connection between
*man(n), Mannus, and Manu — an undesirable situation
(see what was said above about Uhlenbeck).
Hermodsson (1991:229) rejected Seebold's etymology on
those grounds, without entering into the history of the
question, but the entry in EWDS23-24 is the same as in
EWDS22.
2) Another etymology traces Gmc *mann- to the root
of L manus 'hand.' Its author is Hempl (1901, esp pp. 426-
28), who wrote: "The figurative use of hand for the
whole man is very natural and appears in almost every
language. It refers to the hand as the skillful member
680
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and generally designates a laborer or a skillful person"

(p. 426). Brugmann (1905-06:423, note 1), once an
advocate of Kluge's derivation of mann from *manw-,
found Hempl's hypothesis persuasive, and so did Nie-
dermann (1911:35), who, however, offered a different
semantic development ('hand' > *'a handful of people,
team' > 'man' — from a group to an individual), but
Uhlenbeck (1905:301/232) and WP II, 266 disagreed.
Uhlenbeck doubted that Gmc *mann-, an athematic
noun, could have been derived from the root of manus,
and Walde offered the counterargument that at the
dawn of civilization women did all the work (that
consideration could at most have undermined
Niedermann's, not Hempl's idea). Among the supporters
of Hempl's etymology we find Paschall (1943:9, note 45),
who devoted his study to the Proto-Indo-European root
*nem- 'to grasp, grab' but as an afterthought suggested
that *nem- may be related to *men- and said at the end
of his article: "Perhaps Goth. manna and Skt. mdnus
'man' belong together with Lat. manus. The presence of
a Lat. a in the e-o series need no longer trouble anyone,
and the connection in meaning should not seem difficult.
Hempl's connection of these words...might have
appealed more to Walde...if the latter had grown up on
an American farm and had learned from actual
experience how often man and hand are synonymous
terms." Wust (1956:43, note 1) quoted Paschall's
681
Adz(e) Adz(e)

statement approvingly, though his starting point was the

hunt with its taboo terms.
Hempl's reconstruction disregards a serious difficulty
of word formation. Germanic had a cognate of manus,
namely mund (f) 'hand' (OE, OI; OHG munt), whereas
*man- 'hand' has not been attested. Go manwus 'ready'
is isolated (there are also the adverb manwuba, the verb
manwjan 'prepare,' and so on). Hempl glossed manwus
as 'ready at hand; handy' (p. 428), but since related
words in the same grade of ablaut are unknown, it is
better not to explain obscurum per obscurius, the more
so as the origin of manus is equally unclear. Manwus and
manus have been compared more than once (see Feist3),
and Kroes (1955), in a one-paragraph note, revived that
comparison without new arguments or discussion.
Lehmann (see Feist4) followed him, but, as it seems, on
insufficient grounds.
The widespread existence of the synecdoche
'hand'/'man' needs no proof. Yet hardly any old word for
'man' is based on it. Like Kluge, Hempl sacrificed a tie
between *mann- and Mannus, though the chance of
their affinity is higher than that between *mann and
manus.
3) Perhaps the oldest hypothesis traces the
Germanic word for 'man' to the root *men- 'think'
(so A. Kuhn [1853:466]). Since, outside Germanic, *e
alternates by ablaut with *a, rather than *o (compare
682
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the comment in OED, man), the supporters of this

etymology posited *mon 'man' that alternated with
*man or only later became *man. *Mann- and Mannus ~
Mânu again turned out to be unrelated. However,
primitive man as 'thinker' did not appeal to anyone,
except perhaps to Rudolf Steiner's followers (Beckh
[1954:34-35]), not only because such a derivation has
little, if any, typological support but also because in the
remote past people endowed animals with the same
mental capacities as human beings.
To save the situation, various detours have been
proposed. One of them is to interpret the noun with the
root mon- (in ablaut relation to men-) as 'geistig erregt'
(approximately, 'mentally alert') or simply 'erregt'
('excited' or perhaps 'aroused'). The gloss 'aroused'
would satisfy those who stress the link between thought
and sex and cite mentula 'penis' as possibly belonging to
the root men-. See an early discussion of mentula in
Aufrecht (1885:220-21) and a more recent one in Katz
(1998:211, note 79). 'Thinker' and 'one mentally alert'
are close. With respect to excitement, Gk άνήρ 'male,
man' ~ Proto-Slavic *nrovU (Russ nrav, with cognates in
other Slavic languages) 'habit; character' may furnish a
parallel, assuming that they are related (Greppin
[1983:284] takes their kinship for granted).
Since men- is the root of L memini 'remember' (Go
gamunds* 'memory, remembrance,' in the zero grade, is
683
Adz(e) Adz(e)

akin to it), of interest is Skalmowski's attempt (1998:105-

06) to trace *martia, the Iranian word for 'man,' as in Old
Persian martiya-, not to the root *mar- 'die' but to *smr-
(Skt smarati 'remember, recollect,' Av mara 'notice').
Skalmowski derived the Iranian word from a past
participle 'remembered, called to mind' and (by
implication) 'recognizable, familiar; one's own; a
member of one's tribe.' However, the Germanic word for
'man' was so short (often athematic) that it hardly meant
'remembered' or 'aroused, alert' (cf also the unsuccessful
attempts to connect the Gothic adjective filu-deisei*
'cunning' with OI dis and OE ides 'woman;' see Feist).
FT explained that since *men- 'think' is too abstract
for providing the etymon of 'man,' it must have
developed from a more concrete meaning, for example,
'breathe, blow.' Numerous laudatory references to their
explanation cannot conceal the fact that the path from
'breathe' to 'think' remains unmapped. The cryptic note:
"compare μαίνομαι" sheds no light on *mann-. Gk
μαίνομαι 'I am furious' and μανία 'madness' are akin to
mens, mentis 'mind,' but neither has anything to do with
breathing. Wüst (loc cit), too, looked for a concrete
meaning of which 'think' would have been a derivative,
but his reference to the hunt is obscure. Despite
occasional disclaimers, the derivation of *mann-from
*men- is the preferred one. In this respect, little has
changed in the period between A. Kuhn
684
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1853:466-67), Müllenhoff (1900:115) and Bammes-

berger (1990:201). See also Curtius (1873:101-02)
and WP II, 264, but Pokorny (IEW, 700) isolated the
root *manu 'man,' which, he says, is perhaps related to
*men- 'think.' The same wording occurs in Meid
(1992:497). It will probably not be an exaggeration to
state that the *mann-/*men- etymology has survived
not because it has merit but because, to quote OED, "no
plausible alternative explanation has been suggested."
4) A few more conjectures on the origin of the
Germanic word for 'man' exist. Vanicek (1881:208)
repeated Curtius's etymology but added L manere 'stay,
remain' as a cognate of G Mann. Loewenthal (1917:127-
29/95) reconstructed the root *man- ~ *men- 'catch,
seize, grab' ('ergreifen'). From 'catch' he moved to 'grasp'
(in the figurative sense 'understand') and etymologized
*men(u)os, the alleged protoform of man (he obviously
traced -nn- to *-nw-) as 'der Ergreifer, der Umarmer' ('he
who grasps; embraces'). He proposed a similar interpre-
tation for Oscan ner 'man,' OI firar 'men' (pl), and vir
'man': all of them turned out to be grabbers and
graspers. No one seems to have taken his proposal
seriously.
Tucker (1931, homo) says that man and mann are
probably related to the root of L mons 'mountain' and
emine re 'stand out, excel.' Under mons his comment is:
"ult[imately] this root does not differ from *men- 'turn,
685
Adz(e) Adz(e)

bend' (emineo 'stand out, project')." Tucker easily

crossed the line between etymology and fantacizing.
Holbrooke's long list of allegedly related words (1910:79)
does not inspire confidence either. His root is *ma-
'grasp, measure, etc.' The coincidence with Loewenthal's
'grab, grasp' (suggested seven years later) is probably
fortuitous. We are not told how 'man' is connected with
grasping (Tucker) or turning, bending, and jutting out.
Jensen (1951) is another researcher who came up
with *men- 'project' (v) as the etymon of man. He found
*men- 'rise; project, jut out; tower (over)' among WP's
five homonymous roots and proposed to etymologize
'man' as 'an erect being' (in opposition to animals), citing
analogues in Paleo-
Siberian languages. In a favorable comment on
Jensen's article, Káhler (1952) gave examples from
Austronesian languages in which the word for 'man'
coincides with those for 'pole, stake, mast, trunk,' but
they hardly confirm Jensen's derivation. The syncretism
'branch'/'child,' that is, 'offshoot'/ offspring' is widely
known, and Káhler's examples should probably be
understood in its light: from 'tree trunk' to 'child' and
'man.' Seiler's doubts (1953:232, continued on p. 233)
about Jensen's reconstruction seem to be justified.
Mezger (1946:239, note 41) understood *mann-as
'small' and 'growing': "Is manu- 'small, little' connected
with the word for 'human being'? Skt. mánu-, manú-
686
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'human being,' with its difference of accent, may be

explained as an original u-adjective with the accent on u,
whereas mánu- would represent the substantive. The
Germanic has consonantic n-inflection, o-stem (Goth.
manaseps etc.) beside the ancient u-stem, which, as Skt.
Manu- 'god of law' illustrates, belongs in the realm of
the cult. If there is a connection between Arm. manr
'small, little' and Skt. manú, etc., the noun mánu would
have originally designated a growing human being in
contrast to the grown-up person; the meaning small,
little would be secondary. This explanation of manu
agrees with the name of the god Mánu-'the progenitor
of mankind.' In general, a derivation of a word meaning
'human being' from a term meaning 'growing
(engender)' is much more in conformity with that of
other comparable expressions than a connection of
mann- with *men 'to think.'"
Of all the etymologies discussed above, Mez-ger's is
the most plausible, but a nearly imperceptible
substitution of concepts ruins it. For 'a human being' we
need 'growing' or 'grown,' whereas the progenitor is
'grower.' Mezger says: "growing (engender)"; the two
are not synonyms when we deal with an engenderer and
an engendered (small but growing) creature. Besides
this, putting too much credence in the idea that 'small' is
a concept derivative of 'growing' cannot be
recommended.
687
Adz(e) Adz(e)

5) Makovskii has dealt with the Germanic word for

'man' in several articles, reviews, and books. Since he
often repeats himself, reference will be made only to
one review (Makovskii 1988:139-40) and four books of
his (Makovskii 1988a:131; 1992:42; 1999a:207-08;
2000b:216-17). As usual, he offers a series of alleged
cognates compatible only within the framework of his
picture of an ancient pagan world (without any specifics:
just primitive and pagan) and his laws of reconstruction
that are based on uncontrollable semantic transitions
(allegedly happening in that primitive world), the
broadest comparison of languages and dialects, and the
thesis that most initial consonants are potential prefixes
(like s-mobile) and can therefore be subtracted at will.
Sound correspondences rarely play a role in his
reasoning. Makovskii's ideas are reproduced here for
completeness' sake. None of them merits discussion.
Proto-Indo-European *men- 'compress' yields 'earth'
(man as an earthly creature: cf OI madr and OE mada
'worm, maggot') and 'liquid' (cf L mano 'flow, pour out'
and ma nes 'deified ghosts of the dead'). Sperm is one of
such liquids (cf Go mimz 'flesh'). 'Compress' also yields
'soul' because souls were believed to reach the
underworld by water. In addition, 'compress' (< *'bend')
could develop the meaning *'fire,' whence *men 'rise'
(said originally about fire). Fire leaves spots, hence
'crime, harm' (cf OE ma n 'crime') and mo na 'moon,' be-
688
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cause the moon is a symbol of sickness and death. (The

moon appears in Wüst, loc cit, too, though in a different
and unclear context.) Fire is inseparable from burning.
The role of fire is not restricted to leaving spots. Human
beings are born by fire and are cremated after death.
Therefore, OE man goes back to *marn 'heat.' Likewise, L
homo is related to Russ kormit' 'feed' and Russ reg
komet' 'bend' (said about the flame). OE hxl-ed 'man,
hero' is cognate with OE xlan [sic] 'burn' (h < *k is a
prefix). OE ceorl 'free man' is the sum of *ker (< *er; k is
the same prefix) + *el-, *al-; both roots mean 'burn.' Gk
άνθρωπος is the sum of *ater- 'fire' and *peuor 'fire,'
whereas Russ chelovek 'man' is made up of *kel-'burn' +
uek-, *og-, *ag- 'fire' (the same root occurs in OI mogr
'young man,' in which m- is a prefix). Mano 'in the
morning' should be understood as 'the growing light of
dawn.'
OI madr, which has already been compared with
words for worms and maggots, can also be compared
with OE madum 'treasure.' Man is obviously related to
Gk μόνος 'alone, single' (literally 'put together,
compressed' < *'bent'). According to another version, a
single unit is a symbol of creativity, strength, courage,
and superiority: cf L mons 'mountain' (printed with a
typo; Tucker, also mentioned mons in connection with
men but gave no explanation; Makovskii has a high
opinion of Tucker's dictionary) and OI mozna 'jut out,
689
Adz(e) Adz(e)

project' (a conclusion probably arrived at without the in-

fluence of Loewenthal: Makovskii refers only to entire
books and usually in an appended bibliography, not in
the text). Further cognates: L mundus 'clean' (< *'purified
by fire') and manus 'hand' (<*'bent'), OI meidr 'tree'
(printed with two typos),
OE wullmod 'distaff,' mo d 'spirit; power, etc'
(printed with a typo), and mand 'basket' (Kroes, too,
mentioned E reg maund, which he, naturally, knew from
Du mand 'basket'), and G Minne 'love.'
"According to pagan beliefs, the world is the scene of
constant reincarnation, of constant transformations.
Man appears as a creature perpetually 'changing masks':
cf E man versus Russ meniat'(sia) 'change, alter' and Lith
mainyti (the same meaning); Russ chelo-vek 'man' versus
IE *kel- 'move; turn (into)'. We witness not only a
constant change of life and death but also the
reincarnation of
souls" (Makovskii [2000b:217]).
3. It is usually taken for granted that linguists have to
explain the original meaning of the word *man(n)-, while
the etymology of Mannus will take care of itself because
Mannus is simply 'man.' As a general rule, words for
'man' (= 'human being') arise to mark the opposition
'child of the earth; mortal' versus 'inhabitant of the
heavens; immortal' (see, for example, Buck 1949:79-
80/2.1), though in polytheistic religions the concept of
690
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an individual god emerges late, if at all: more often we

find a collective plural, as in Old Icelandic (gu5 'gods'). J.
de Vries (1935-37:216) said: "Mannus is of course to be
understood as protoman (Urmensch)."
However, no one needs a god or an eponymous
ancestor called 'man.' Drees (1974) found credible traces
of Mannus's cult, and personal names testify to its
existence too. In Hartmann and the like, -mann means
'man,' but some of the old names beginning with man-
must have been like Scandinavian names with the first
element por- ~ por-. Schönfeld (1911:160) cites
Mannelebus, Meyer-
Lübke (1905:40, 86) and von Grienberger (1913:48)
add a few others. In Searle's Onomasticon (1877:347-
49) and in Förstemann's Namenbuch (1900:1088-1089),
such names occupy several pages, though in the
Namenbuch most end in -mann. If J. Grimm's conjecture
(1835:XXVII) is right that Old Scandinavian Itermon
contains the same root, Mannus had worshippers not
only among the western Germanic tribes. E. Martin
(1907:77) doubted that Manalaub, Maneleub, Ma-
nipert, Manedruda, Manifrid, and Managold had any
relation to 'man' and compared their first element with
menni = mon le 'necklace,' but the connection with
Mannus is more likely: cf OI porvaldr, porveig, Freyfaxi,
and so forth.

691
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Perhaps we will make progress in the search for the

origin of man if we agree that all the ancient Germanic
tribes venerated a god called Mannus, and that it is the
etymology of the divine name that has to be explained
because the common name *man(n)- is the derivative of
Mannus. Gothic and Old Icelandic seem to have pre-
served an early stage in secularizing Mannus's name.
Gothic had gaman (n) 'fellowship' and 'partner'; OI man
(n or f) meant 'bondsman; girl, maid; concubine.' Feist 3
considers Go gaman to be a collective noun to man-, as
in manaseps and manleika, and J. de Vries (AEW) treats
OI man as a cognate of the Gothic word (in Old Norse,
prefixes were lost, so that Scandinavian *gaman is
probable). The original meaning of gaman must have
been 'a group of Mannus's worshippers.' The word con-
sisted of a collective prefix, the root of Mannus's name
(which, as Ramat observed, did not have a geminate),
and an ending (*-an or *-am), lost before the time of the
earliest texts. Trier's favorite Mannring was in this case
Mannus-ring.
The way from a collective plural to an individual is
usual in the history of such words. For example, OHG wîb
(> ModG Weib) and OE wif (> wife) were neuter nouns
and at one time probably meant 'a woman and her
family.' Old Gutnish piaup 'man' is neuter. The Old
English cognate of OHG liuti 'people'(> ModG Leute) was
leod, but leod also meant 'prince.' G Stute 'mare'
692
Adz(e) Adz(e)

corresponds to E stud whereas Rum feméie 'woman'

meant 'family' (< familia; Niedermann [1911:35, note on
manus]). L manes 'deified ghosts of the dead' (m pl) later
meant 'corpse.' OI gud 'gods' has been mentioned
above, and see DWARF. Go gaman is especially interesting
because it means both 'fellowship' and 'partner,'
whereas OI man points to the inferior status of him or
her who constituted the 'fellowhip' ('bondsman;
concubine'), regardless of the sex.
MHG man had a wide spectrum of meanings ('human
being; man; male, son; lover; fiancé; brave warrior,
servant, vassal'), but in courtly poetry 'vassal'
predominated (cf the English phrase all the king's men),
and in chess any piece except the king and the queen
could be called man. 'Son,' 'lover,' 'fiancé,' and 'warrior'
are lexicalized contextual meanings, but 'human being'
and 'servant' are not. The first of them allowed the
pronouns man, jemand 'someone,' and niemand 'no one'
to arise (-d is excrescent). The situation in Old English is
similar. The meaning 'human being' is present in the
compounds wœpnedmann 'male,' wifmann 'woman,'
and gumman 'person.' The pronoun man was used in the
same sense as in German, and man 'vassal; serf' has also
been recorded. The weak form manna, common in legal
texts, meant 'any person' and 'slave,' but not 'vassal'
(see a survey of Old English usage in dictionaries and in
Stibbe [1935:32-33]). The Old Icelandic counterparts of
693
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OE wœpnedmann and wifmann were karlmadr and

kvennmadr.
Compounds like mannsaldr 'human age' show that
madr could mean both 'man' and 'woman' (any human
being). Apparently, 'servant' is not a secondary feudal
meaning of man(n)-; only 'vassal' and 'serf' are.
Mannus's earthly votaries and worshippers were mortal
human being and his servants; the two meanings are
inseparable. All together — men and women — formed a
gaman. The development was from 'fellowhip in
Mannus' to 'a fellow in Mannus' ('partner,' as in Gothic)
and further to 'human being' and 'person of low status'
(first in relation to the deity, then to the lord — 'slave,'
'concubine,' and so on).
It follows that, unlike the cognates of Go wair and
guma (both mean 'man'), which go back to Proto-Indo-
European, *man(n)- emerged comparatively late.
(However, runic man(n)R is roughly contemporaneous
with Tacitus's Germania.) It was abstracted from the
compound *gaman-, and herein must lie the reason for
the instability of its grammatical form. The new coinage
could be assigned to any declension fit for a masculine
noun.
Attempts to find one and only one protoform were
doomed to failure. Mannus, a u-stem word, existed, but
the common name does not seem to have ever been
declined like fotus, and here Bammesberger is right. It
694
Adz(e) Adz(e)

naturally joined the a-declension, the most productive of

them all (wair and Karl ~ karl ~ ceorl were also a-nouns);
hence manaseps and so on. In the plural, when used as
the second element of tribal names, it, for unknown
reasons, followed the i-declension, that is, behaved like
Go wegs 'wave, billow' and aiws 'time, lifetime.' The
bare form man-, devoid of the support of tradition, was
a good candidate for the athematic declension, and
perhaps under the influence of its synonym guma, it was
sometimes declined weak.
The geminate in manna may have arisen as J.
Schmidt and Ramat suggested, but -n- may have
alternated with -nn- because a tie between the new
word for 'man' and Mannus was as obvious to early
speakers as its tie with *gaman-. In Man-nus, -nn-
probably had the same origin geminates have in other
divine names, that is, from the emphatic vocative: cf -p-
in Jupiter versus -pp- in Juppi-ter and -nn- in Beothian
MevvEj (Leumann [1954:3]).
When parallel grammatical forms compete in a
system, they tend to acquire distinctions in meaning and
usage. This is what happended to E brothers and
brethren, proved and proven, struck and stricken, my and
mine and in three German plurals: Manner, Mannen, and
Mann (each has its own sphere of application). As
already pointed out, OE manna did not mean 'vassal,
retainer.' Similar distinctions must have existed in
695
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Germanic between *mans, *manon, and *manas, but

the details are now beyond reconstruction.
Two scholars came close to discovering what appears
to be the correct etymology of man(n)-. J. Grimm
(1983:419-20) knew, as a matter of course, all the facts
discussed above and concluded that the earliest
Germanic word for servus had been man, but he
hastened to add: "However, this does not allow us to
trace the origin of the Teutons (des deutschen volks),
whose progenitor was called Man-nus, to an ignoble,
subjugated tribe (einem unedlen, unfreien stamme); I
believe that mann, in contradistinction to god, should be
understood as a person created by and subservient to
the Supreme Being (als der erschaffne dem höchsten
wesen dienstbare mensch [mannisco]). Those two
ancient words [that is, Mannus and mann] are no more
demeaning than homo and ccvQpamog rather, they are
based on the concept of noble and natural dependence
of all earthly creatures; likewise, the Latin and Greek
words are sometimes used contemptuously with
reference to worldly servitude" (the same in the later
editions). Grimm realized that 'servant' was one of the
original meanings of *mann- and that this meaning is
tied to Mannus's name.
Years later, Kluge (1901-02:43-44) developed a
similar idea. He must have noted the incongruity of
calling a god 'man' because he gave Mannus the gloss
696
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'protoman (Urmensch).' Like Grimm (whose name does

not turn up in his article), he emphasized the importance
of the word Mensch 'human being' and suggested that
Mensch (< mennisco) was not a substantivized form of an
adjective 'pertaining to man' but a derivative of the root
man- with a suffix meaning 'of a certain origin, descent.'
He concluded that men were understood as Mannus's
progeny (the same, in passing, already in Kluge [1897]).
One can only wonder why he kept inventing complicated
etymologies of Mann in his dictionary in disregard of his
own insights.
Grimm and Kluge were right in that they approached
man from Mannus. They were also right that servus
'slave' is one of the earliest meanings of the Germanic
word for 'man' (Grimm) and that Go mannisks* and its
cognates should be understood as 'belonging to Mannus'
rather than 'belonging to man' (Kluge). However, Kluge
may have been mistaken in reconstructing the original
meaning of mannisks* as 'the progeny of Mannus'; more
probably, it meant '(the circle of) Mannus's worshippers;
members of the gaman.' Having explained mannisks*, he
failed to explain *man(n)-, and his derivation of G Mann
obscured his view. According to GI I:396, in the
opposition gods : humans, *manu-, as in Sanskrit and
Germanic, represents the human element. But more
likely, manu- emerged as the name of the Godhead. In
Germanic, its circle of votaries was called gaman-. The
697
Adz(e) Adz(e)

movement from a group to an individual produced the

concept of man, and this is how Go manna and its
congeners originated (see also Eichner [1994:78-79]).
4. In the words of Scott, the author of etymologies
for CD: "It is not likely that any orig[inal] significant term
old enough to have become a general designation for
'man' before the Aryan dispersion would have retained
its orig[inal] signification." In principle, he was right, but
a few facts should be mentiond that seldom attract the
attention of Germanic etymologists.
The sound complex man- designates 'man'
not only in Germanic and not only in Indo-
European. Guntert (1930:20) and Jensen (1936:163)
cited Korean myâng (or myang). According to Jen-
sen, the coincidence is more likely due to chance
than to language contacts. Chinese manu also
means 'man' (see the discussion in Ulving
[1968:950]). In the Austronesian languages, the
words for 'man' are anaq muani, mone, and mwăăn
(Dyen [1970:439/73])."
Illich-Svitych (1976:58-59/292) isolated the Nostratic
root mănA 'man, male' common to the Hamito-Semitic,
Indo-European, Uralic, Finno-Ugric, and Dravidian
languages. In so doing, he partly followed Trombetti, to
whom he referred. However, this root is absent in
Bomhard-Kerns (1994). Andreev (1986:176/150;
1994:10-11) listed M-N- among his "Boreal" roots (Boreal
698
Adz(e) Adz(e)

is also Trombetti's term) and assigned the meanings

'man; think, thinking; ponder; remember, memory' to it.
The meanings ('man' versus the rest) are too divergent
to convince skeptics. The words he gives from a variety
of languages are glossed as 'man; mind; memory; brain;
say, talk over; remember; sly, cunning; tombstone with
an inscription.' Since the etymology of man as 'thinker'
or 'someone endowed with memory' is precisely what
needs proof, it would be advisable to stay with M-
N-'think' (assuming for the sake of argument that such a
Nostratic root is real) and leave 'man' alone. Ruhlen's list
(1994:301-12), like Illich-Svitych's, is more to the point. It
contains words meaning 'man, male, father, boy; a
phallic deity; herdsman; warrior; woman; people, kin.'
The similarity is noteworthy because the languages that
yield the examples cover the whole globe and sound
alike: mono , mun, iman, manja, mancho, meno, and so
forth.
Oehl, who compiled lists of the same type long
before the emergence of Nostratic linguistics, treated
the complex man as a universal baby word (Oehl [1921-
22:771; 1933a:43]). WH, 28 (the end of the entry manes)
and 54 (the end of the entry maturus) do not deny the
possibility that ma- is the root of some baby words.
Feist3 (manna) refers to Oehl (1933a) without comment.
At an early stage in the development of religious
thinking, gods, spirits, and elves are distinguished mainly
699
Adz(e) Adz(e)

according to the harm they can cause. People with

mental aberrations were said to be possessed by a god,
shot by an elf, and the like. Bogeymen of all kinds inflate
themselves, make a lot of noise, and frighten people.
The names of such demons are sometimes similar all
over Eurasia. See BOY and DWARF. Since such words are
usually expressive and onomatopoeic, sound corre-
spondences may be violated in them.
In Indo-European, the syllable man is often
connected with the idea of evil spirits and madness. The
Slavic material is especially rich. See the words collected
under the roots *mamu, *manija, and *manu in ESSI 17,
190-91, 201-03. They mean 'enticement; deception; fury;
an unclean spirit; apparition, ghost' and a few more like
them. Greek has μανία 'mania,' and Latin has moneo
'warn; instruct, tell,' a cognate of G mahnen (< manon)
'admonish.' Perhaps (as has been suggested) the original
meaning of such words was 'beckon, make a sign; a
demon making such signs.' Manes 'deified ghosts of the
dead' may belong here too. Dictionaries assign μανία
and the rest to the root *men- 'to think.' More likely,
man- 'make a sign; ghost' is a separate root.
Both Manu and Mannus probably arose in human
consciousness as frightening, awe-inspiring creatures.
Μάνης, the mythic progenitor of the Phrygeans and a
common Phrygean name, may be
their next of kin (Fick [1892:240]; Hermann
700
Adz(e) Adz(e)

[1918:228-29]) . Like so many other gods, with time

they acquired benevolent features. Wodan (OI 05inn),
the furious one, turned into the creator of culture and
founder of kingship. porr, the embodiment of thunder,
spent his time maintaining law and order. The Slavic-
Iranian *bog- may have made it all the way from bogey ~
buka to a dispenser of riches. Manu and Mannus became
divine 'protomen.' Those who belonged to Manu and
Mannus were called manus.a ~ manava and man-nisks*
~ mennisco, respectively. All together, Man-nus's people
formed a *gaman-.
The syllable man may, after all, be a baby word: first
a bogeyman with whom to scare little children, then an
evil spirit striking fear in the hearts of adults, then a
(wrathful?) god, and finally, the progenitor of the human
race. Such seems to have been the history of the
Germanic word. The syllable ma- tends to combine with
n, r, and semivowels to produce words meaning 'mirage,
apparition,' and the like (Solmsen [1908; p. 581 on ma-
n]). This is how a similar word may come into being in
the absence of a deity. For example, Proto-Slavic *man-
gi or *man-gu 'man' (Russ. muzh, and so on) is parallel to
manusa- ~ mennisco, but there is no Slavic Mannus.
Hiersche (1984:89) says that the secular meaning of the
Slavic word deprives it of any importance for re-
constructing the ancient Indo-Iranian religious vo-
cabulary. This is not necessarily true, for religious
701
Adz(e) Adz(e)

vocabulary is hard to separate from the vocabulary of

belief and superstition.
MOOCH (1460)
The verb mooch has numerous variants and
doublets. Among the doublets, miche is especially
important. Mooch and miche should be traced to the
same etymon. Two main conjectures on the origin of
miche and, by implication, of mooch exist: it is either a
borrowing from French or a reflex of OE *mycan, a
cognate of several words in Old High German and Old
Irish. More probably, mooch and miche continue an Old
Germanic verb whose root had cognates in Celtic and
Latin, whereas the French and Italian words of the same
type were taken over from Germanic. That verb possibly
had a root with the initial meaning 'darkness; mist,'
whence all kinds of underhand dealings and illegal
actions. But its onomatopoeic origin is not unthinkable
either. In English, the second component of hugger-
mugger, as well as -mudgeon in curmudgeon and mug
'(ugly) face' and mug (v), seems to be related to mooch.
The sections are devoted to 1) the forms of mooch ~
miche and their variants, 2) the Romance and the
Germanic suggestions about the origin of miche, 3) the
probable Germanic origin of OF muser 'hide' and the
existence of several early European slang words for
concealment and cheating, 4) the origin of hugger-

702
Adz(e) Adz(e)

mugger, 5) the origin of curmudgeon, and 6) the origin of

mug, noun and verb. Section 7 is the conclusion.
1. The verb mooch, although known for a long time,
appeared in etymological dictionaries late. OED gives its
meanings as '?act the miser, pretend poverty,' 'play
truant; in later use play truant in order to pick
blackberries; hence pick (blackberries),' 'loaf, skulk,
sneak, loiter; hang about, slouch along,' 'pilfer, steal,'
and 'sponge, slink away and allow others to pay for your
entertainment.' The last of those glosses was borrowed
from BL. For mooching as blackberry picking see EDD
and Venables (1875). 'Loaf' and 'steal' appeared in print
only in the middle of the 19th century. Moocher and
mooching are equally late. The meaning 'sponge, etc'
seems to have always been the prevalent one in
American English, but no American dictionary before
NCD recorded mooch. The citations for this verb in OED
show a gap between 1460 and 1622. 'Pretend poverty'
and 'obtain by cajolery or begging' are close, but the
meaning 'play truant, loiter,' although it also refers to a
socially unacceptable activity, bears no similarity to
them.
The following forms (or variants) of mooch have
been attested: mowche, mouche, mootch, mooche,
moach, moche, modge, and mouch. Modge, with its
voiced final consonant, is especially important for
reconstructing the history of mug, mugger, and -
703
Adz(e) Adz(e)

mudgeon. OED gives the head word as mooch, mouch,

with one pronunciation for both. However, mouch is
rather a doublet of mowch [-au-], as follows from the
name of Miss Mowcher, a heroic dwarf in David
Copperfield. The now obsolete or regional verb mouch
'eat up, eat greedily' (1570) also exists. Yet Miss
Mowcher was not a glutton; she feigned levity and
merriment, while being a stealthy observer of human
nature. Mooch has several variants, mowch(e) and
modge among them, and a doublet miche (1225), which
has its own variants, namely mitch(e), mich, and meech.
Micher 'petty thief' and miche surfaced in the same year.
The form meech does not antedate, as far as we know,
the 19th century.
2. Despite the wide range of vowels, mooch and
miche, along with mouch, meech, and so forth, probably
have the same etymon. All etymological dictionaries of
English discuss miche (or mich; Skeat), and Hamlet's
miching malicho (III,2:148), understood as 'sneaking
mischief,' made the verb miche famous among
philologists. Micher in lHenry IV II, 4:455 means 'truant.'
The earliest guess about the origin of miche proved
to be the most durable. Minsheu derived miche from F
muser (= musser) 'hide,' and so did Skinner, whose
starting point was micher 'miser,' for a miser won't spare
one a crumb of bread (mica panis); he apparently
connected E miche, F musser, and L mica. Whiter III:197
704
Adz(e) Adz(e)

made fun of Skinner's etymology. Todd (in Johnson-

Todd), Mahn (W
[1864]), Wedgwood, and Skeat1 followed Minsheu,
though each of them, especially Mahn, added a few
forms and a few details. Wedgwood's material is
particularly interesting.
Between 1617 (Minsheu) and 1862 (Wedgwood),
only two original etymologies of miche were offered.
Whiter III:197 compared micher with mud (because, in
his opinion, the most ancient meaning of all words was
'earth') and added hugger-mugger to a list of their
cognates. Hugger-mugger will be discussed in sec 4. W
(1828) and the later editions until 1864 connected miche
and Sw maka, which they glossed as 'withdraw.'
However, Sw maka means 'move (a little)'; like Dan
mage 'manage, arrange' and late OI maka 'make,' it goes
back to MLG maken 'make' and cannot be a cognate of
miche.
Richardson supported Skinner (miche from F muser).
His entry is a typical illustration of the state of the art
when Wedgwood became active: "A micher, a covetous
man, either from Lat. miser, or from the Fr. miche; mica
panis, because he counts all the crumbs that fall from his
table (Skinner). The later etymology is undoubtedly the
true one. Mr. Tyrwhitt tells us that in the Promptorium
parvum 'mychyn' stands as equivalent to 'pryvely stelyn
smale thyngs' and Lambarde in his Eirenarchia, says that
705
Adz(e) Adz(e)

one justice may charge constables to arrest such, as shall

be suspected to be 'draw-latches, miching or mightie
theeves' contrasting these different sorts of plunderers.
The Fr. Miche, Lat. mica, is a small thing." Like other
etymologists, Richardson was prone to using
undoubtedly in stating controversial cases.
Wedgwood noted the similarity between miche and
a set of verbs in German, namely SwiG mauchen,
mucheln, and mauscheln 'enjoy delicacies in secret;
steal.' He cited G verschmauchen 'smouch, or secretly
purloin eatables; conceal,' SwiG smussla 'do anything
furtively,' E smouch (v), and E smuggle as related. In
Wedgwood1, the list was even longer. There we find E
mucker 'hoard up' and Ital mucchio 'heap.' The noun
mucchio remained at miche in Wedgwood2-4, but the
verb mucker did not. However, he missed G meucheln
'assassinate (treacherously),' meuchlings 'treacherously,'
and several old and newer compounds like Meuchelmord
'treacherous assassination' and failed to explain why an
English word with such strong ties elsewhere in
Germanic should be classified with borrowings from
French.
Kluge (EWDS, without references) developed
Wedgwood's etymology at meucheln but gave up the
French connection and reconstructed OE *my can 'lie in
hiding' (< Gmc *muk- 'waylay' < PIE *mwg-). The form
mug- has been attested in Old Irish, and Zimmer
706
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1879:210-11) linked OIr rumúgsat 'they have hidden,'

formúichdetu 'concealment,' and a few others to such
Old High German forms as mühhon 'waylay' and müheo
'thief.'
In choosing the glosses 'lie in hiding, waylay,' Kluge
projected the meaning of G meucheln to Germanic and
Proto-Indo-European. He also thought that G mucken
'mutter' and munkeln 'speak secretly' are akin to G
meucheln and E mitch, for both have connotations of
indistinctness and secrecy. Reference to Zimmer appears
for the first time in EWDS6; Götze (EWDS11) removed it,
and it has never been reinstated. The most important
works on the family of meucheln are Birlinger (1870:149
and 1872). Words with the root much- ~ mauch-
invariably refer to underhand dealings. See also Weigand
(meucheln) for examples and discussion.
The same root (muh-) seems to occur in OHG
muhheimo 'cricket' (= 'hidden house spirit'; ModG
Heimchen has lost the first component). This etymology
of muhheimo is old (see Schade and Schwenck). Kluge
preferred to equate muh- with Go muka(modei)*
'gentleness, meekness' but supplied his derivation with a
question mark. Götze deleted the question mark, and
the explanation of muhheimo as 'soft- (chirping) spirit'
has prevailed. Seebold (KS) admits the possibility of a
different semantic interpretation of Heimchen but does
not elaborate. However, several Old High German animal
707
Adz(e) Adz(e)

names have the component muh- (Birlinger [1872:317-

18]), and in none of them would 'gentle' make sense.
'Hidden house spirit' is preferable to Schwabe's '[secret]
gnawer' (1917:223); he related heim- to the root *sk(h)ei
'sever, separate, cut' (see L scio in WH), the association
with 'house' being due to folk etymology. See also
HENBANE, sec 2.
Kluge's *mycan (with y) as the protoform of miche ~
mi(t)ch appears in W (1890), in which OE (properly, ME)
*michen is compared with OHG muhhen (= muhhon). But
English etymologists did not come to terms with the
origin of mooch ~ miche, for it remained unclear whether
OF musser (or any of its multiple variants) played a role
in the history of the English words. W1 is noncommittal
as to whether miche is ultimately of Romance or Ger-
manic origin. Although W2 traces this verb to OF muchier
~ musser 'conceal, lurk,' from Celtic, it mentions OE
*mycan as a possible etymon. W3 does not list mich(e),
states that micher is akin to meecher from Old French,
and derives mooch from F reg muchier 'hide, lurk.' Both
the French and the German verbs appear in the entry
meucheln in Walshe, a student's dictionary that was the
main source of German etymologies in Partridge (1958;
mooch).
OED follows J. Payne (see his suggestion in
anonymous [1872:310]) and considers only OF muchier),
though Bradley, in MED(B), müchen, repeats Kluge.
708
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Skeat4 (mich) no longer mentions OF muc(i)er, cites G

meuchlings, and reconstructs OE *myccan, while CD
(miche) remains true to Skeat's earlier etymology. UED
gives mooch and mouch different pronunciations and
derives them from OF muchier 'slink, skulk,' but miching
(there is no entry miche) is said to be etymologically
doubtful, possibly from OF muchier 'hide.' Wyld glossed
the same verb differently in different entries (or rather
he broke one gloss into two), and it comes as a surprise
that the origin of mooch is certain, whereas that of
miching is doubtful. Was Wyld not sure that mooch and
miche are related? Or is the discrepancy the result of an
editorial oversight? RHD and AHD (mooch) took their
etymologies from OED.
Diensberg (1985b:172-73) contests Zettersten's
derivation of miche from *mycan (1965:231), but his real
opponent is Kluge. In Diensberg's opinion, it is easier to
explain the vocalic variations (miche, mooch, and so on)
if we take the Old French verb as the etymon of miche.
However, OE *my can could easily develop into ME
*meken, *mouken (ou = [u:]), and *mtken. The absence
of the Old English verb in the extant monuments may be
due to the fact that no appropriate context existed for it,
especially if it referred only to furtive behavior rather
than murder, as in Old High German, and lacked the
stylistic dignity of OHG muhhon.

709
Adz(e) Adz(e)

3. One can neither derive E mooch from OF mucier

and simply "compare" it with OHG muhhon nor leave it
in its Germanic nest in disregard of the French verb. The
supposition of a root common to Celtic and Germanic
goes back to Zimmer
(1879:210-11; see above) and Stokes (1894:219).
They are the authorities for such reconstructed roots
as Celt *mu c-, the putative etymon of several Romance
words (Körting 6327), and Gaulish *mu kya re (ML 5723),
which the latest English dictionaries copied, or *muciare
(EWFS). Weekley (1921) traced mooch to Old French,
whose root appears "in both Celt[ic] and Teut[onic]."
Hirt (1921:108) included G meuchel- in his list of the
Germanic-Celtic stock. E. Zupitza (1896:216) compared L
muger 'a cheat at dice' with the Old Irish words, and
according to Uhlenbeck (KEWAS, 228), Skt mühyati 'is
bewildered, mistaken' is a cognate of muger.
Charpentier (1912:134), WH (muger), and KEWA (662)
rejected his idea, so that it will be safer to do without
the Sanskrit verb.
Regardless of whether OE *mycan or *myccan
existed, we obtain an old word for cheating and
concealment current in several Indo-European
languages. The French verb may have been borrowed
from Gaulish but may have been a loan from Germanic.
If it originated in Germanic, nothing prevented its return
home. For example, the second component of G
710
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Duckmäuser 'sleazy individual, creep' continues MHG

mûsen 'behave secretively like a thief' (KM), which
seems to be a reborrowing of a German verb from
French, but E mooch need not be of Romance origin.
French etymologists do not agree on the origin of
mucier despite the now prevalent reference to a Celtic
root in etymological dictionaries. Diez (645) believed
that OF mucier was connected in some way with MHG
mûzen 'change, exchange' (not to be confused with MHG
mûsen) and cited Ital smuc-ciare 'slip away, escape'
among its cognates. Meyer-Lübke initially followed W.
Meyer (1888:256-57) and gravitated toward a Germanic
etymon of mucier (so in the 1911 edition of his dic-
tionary, at that time ML 5722), but Brüch's consid-
erations on the phonetic shape and spread of this verb
(1919:208) made him change his opinion in favor of
Gaulish *mukyare. FW VI:193 gives a Gaulish form as the
etymon of F musser; in BW musser is absent. Gamillscheg
(1927:295) saw no reason to doubt the Gaulish origin of
musser despite Sai-néan's statement (1925-30, II:202,
284; III:170) that the etymology of that verb (which he
preferred to treat as native) is unknown. Scheler
compared musser with G meuchlings.
Scaliger's derivation of musser from the future
infinitive of Gk μυέω 'initiate, teach,' which Ménage
dismissed but NC accepted, has long since been
abandoned (Scheler1 seems to be the last to mention it).
711
Adz(e) Adz(e)

EWFS rejects the connection of Gk μυχός 'the innermost

part of a house, the remotest part' with musser, but,
according to Frisk, μυχός is akin to OI smuga 'narrow
cleft, hole,' which in turn is related to OI smjuga and OE
smugan 'creep'; all of them resemble mooch and musser.
Since μυέω is probably an onomatopoeic word like E
mum and G mucks, genetic ties between it and other
similar Indo-European and non-Indo-European verbs are
hard to establish. However, no serious objections exist
to deriving musser from Germanic rather than Gaulish.
According to Arcamone (1982; 1983:768-70), the
Italian regional verbs with and without s-, traceable to
the etymon she gives as *mucciare, are of Germanic
(Langobardian) origin. They have the following principal
meanings: 'flee, escape,' 'steal,' 'command silence,' and
'strike gently.' Closely related are the verbs meaning
'cast a sidelong glance' (Arcamone [1983:770-73]). Those
facts can be used as circumstantial evidence to support
the hypothesis that OF mucier is of
Germanic origin. Finally, we have F mouchard 'police
informer, stoolie' (1589) and F mouche 'spy' going back
to the 16th century (BW). Wedgwood's suggestion
(1856:14) that mouchard belongs with hugger-mugger
and smuggle looks plausible (see sec 4). Birlinger
(1872:320) proposed the same origin for mouchard.
Judging by Körting (6330 and 6398), ML, and BW,
Romance linguists are unaware of that etymology. The
712
Adz(e) Adz(e)

idea that mouchard goes back to a proper name seems

also to be given up. Wyld (UED, mooch) gave F moucheur
'plainclothes detective' as akin to mooch and miching,
but he traced the English words to French (see above).
If L muger is related to OHG mühhön and OIr
rumúgstat, we obtain a rare example of ancient common
European slang that has existed for at least two
millennia (muger already occurs in Fes-tus). WP II:255
and WH (muger) share this opinion, though they do not
use the term slang. The entry in WH is especially detailed
and includes OHG müh-heimo 'cricket' (among other
German words), E miche < OE [sic] mycan, and ME
micher. It follows FT (smug I) and draws E smuggle into
this circle; see a comparable list in Gray (1930:193).
The many words with the root (s)mug- that qualify as
cognates of mooch pose the problem of the final
consonant, for OHG mühhön goes back to *muk-. In such
cases, an ancient voiced ~ voiceless alternation is usually
pressed into service, but it is better not to refer an
attested alternation in a slang word to an asterisked
etymon. Apparently, a number of low class verbs (and
even nouns, as muger shows) with the roots *mUg- and
*mU k-circulated in Europe. (However, Russ muchit' 'tor-
ment' [v] does not belong here.) For a similar situation,
see NUDGE.
As already pointed out, Kluge's gloss 'waylay' for
Gmc *mycan is too specific. The verb's meaning must
713
Adz(e) Adz(e)

have been something like *'surreptitious act, underhand

dealings, conceal(ment),' going all the way from
'invidious deed,' like assassination by a hired killer, to
'cheating at dice (cards)' and 'playing truant.' Unless this
group emerged as an onomatopoeic formation
designating silence (keeping mum), the main sense of
*mug- and *muk- may have been 'darkness' or
something similar (see Russ mgla 'darkness' and its
cognates). Wachter, who compared G meucheln and Gk
μύχιος 'deep, inner' and ομίχλη 'mist, impenetrable
darkness,' was not too far from the truth, whereas
Kaltschmidt's hypothesis that traced meucheln to a
mythical root *μ-χ 'move' is fanciful. *Muhen 'move in a
desultory way, wander about' may be related to the
mooch group (see what is said above about OI smuga),
but the evidence is weak. Stürmer (1929:339, note 5)
reconstructed PIE *(s)me-'crawl, creep across'
(darüberhinstreichen), which led him to 'crawl (away)'
(sich verkriechen) and to criminal activities, as in G
meucheln, but root etymology is of little help in tracing
the history of mooch and its kin.
4. Several words mentioned in connection with
miche ~ mooch seem to have been correctly identified as
related to it. One of them is -mugger in hugger-mugger
(1529). Whiter III:197 noted the structural similarity of
such reduplicating compounds with initial h- as hugger-
mugger, hocus-pocus (1655), hodge-podge (1622), and
714
Adz(e) Adz(e)

higgledy-piggledy (1598) ~ huddledy-puddledy (his

spelling is hygledy-piggledy). Smithers (1954:86) points
out that in id-eophones "one voiced stop is naturally
substituted for another ... since all three have the same
type of expressive quality." However, for etymological
purposes it is not irrelevant whether the original form
was hudder-mudder (1461) or hugger-mugger (see both
in OED, which proposes different etymons for each of
those two words). Hucker-mucker and hucker-mocker
also existed.
Skinner thought that he could detect the roots of OE
*hogan 'observe' (the correct forms would be either
hogian 'think; intend' or its synonyms hyc-gan) and of
some word like murk (he cites a Danish form) in the
English compound ('observation in the dark'; the same in
N. Bailey [1721; 1730]). Johnson understood hugger-
mugger as 'hug or embrace in the dark.' Stoddart
(1845:120-21) gives a survey of the early attempts to
explain the origin of hugger-mugger and calls Skinner's
etymology "alike improbable and inappropriate." He has
the following to say about Johnson's idea that hugger-
mugger is corrupted perhaps from hug er morcker: "... in
what language hug er morcker has this signification he
[Johnson] does not mention, nor does any phrase
correspondent to the English hugger-mugger appear to
have ever become proverbial in any other language."
"The Spanish," he goes on, "affords the nearest
715
Adz(e) Adz(e)

approach, to the separate parts of this expression; for

hogar is a chimmey corner, and mujer is a woman; and if
we could suppose hugger mugger to be taken from that
language it might refer to the notion of a woman
cowering in the chimmey corner; but as nothing can be
more delusive than to be guided in etymology by mere
similarity of sound, we may safely reject this derivation
of the phrase in question."
Unfortunately, Stoddart does not say who proposed
the Dutch etymon of hugger-mugger, which he discusses
in detail. "The last etymology that we shall mention is
from the Dutch title Hoog Moogende, (His Mightiness)
given to the State General, and much ridiculed by some
of our English writers, as in Hudibras—But I have sent
him for a token / To your Low-country Hogen-Mogen. It
has been supposed that hugger-mugger, corrupted from
Hogen-Mogen, was meant in derision of the secret
transactions of their mightiness; but it is probable that
the former word was known in English before the latter."
Radcliffe (1853) was aware of the Hoog Moogende
etymology but did not refer to the source either. The
publisher of Notes and Queries quoted a few lines from
Stoddart's article in a postscript to Radcliffe's letter.
However ridiculous the derivation of hugger-mugger
from Hoog Moogende may be, Ker's 'Dutch' etymology
(1837:146) is even more fanciful: "Heugh er maergher; q.
e. a place where there is little hope; a cheerless position;
716
Adz(e) Adz(e)

a situation of poor comfort; there where little

expectation can be indulged in; a dismal cheerless
abode. Er, there, the place or situation alluded to.
Heughe, hoghe, hope, expectation, future prospect: joy,
delight, pleasure: mind, shallow, poor. So that the
phrase refers to the consequent state of mind of him
who is confined against his will, not to secrecy. And
Johnson's notion that the expression is hugger-morcker
as a hug in the dark, is something below even a whim.
Heugh er maegher sounds hugger-mugger."
Ker, who used to invent Dutch words and phrases
and pass them off as the etymons of English words and
who never missed a chance to attack Johnson, did,
however, quote the relevant places from Samuel Butler's
Hudibras. Yet hugger-mugger must have been known by
the 1660's from Hamlet, if not as a pre-Shakespearean
colloquialism, and Butler's use of the word could not be
viewed as a novelty. Hogen-Mogen occurs in Hudibras
twice. Bohn (1859: 318, note 3) explains verses 1439-
1442 ("But I have sent him for a token / To your low-
country Hogen-Mogen, / To whose infernal shores I hope
/ He'll hang like skippers in a rope"): "...the infernal
Hogen-Mogen (from the Dutch Hoog mogende, high and
mighty, or the devil"). Butler did not associate hugger-
mugger with Hogen-Mogen, but couldn't Ker's idea that
hugger-mugger goes back to Dutch and his quotation
from Hudibras inspire someone to connect those links
717
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(Hudibras, hugger-mugger, and Hoogen-Mogen)? No

serious student of Dutch loanwords in English mentions
hugger-mugger.
The next passage from Stoddard has another 'epic'
reference to the source of information: "Some persons
supposed hugger-mugger to be derived from the old
English word hoker; because Sir Thomas More, it is said,
uses the word hoker-moker; but it is not very clear that
he meant by it what we mean by hugger-mugger; and if
he did, no great stress is to be laid on a casual variation
of orthography in that age, when spelling had nothing
like fixed rules. The word hoker, had no reference in
point of meaning, to the idea conveyed by the word
hugger-mugger; for it signified peevish, fro-ward..." He
concludes his argument so: "...upon the whole it seems
most probable that hugger is a mere intensive form of
hug, and that mugger is a reduplication of sound with a
slight variation... " It remains unexplained what "a mere
intensive form" means.
Richardson does not list the opinions of his
predecessors and says only: "Hugger-mugger. This is the
common way of writing this word from Udal [sic] to the
present time. Sir Thomas More is said to have written it
hoker-moker; others write hucker-mucker, and Ascham,
hudder-mother. No probable etymology has yet been
given... The reading of Ascham (though single) suggests
the conjecture, that these words, however written, are
718
Adz(e) Adz(e)

formed from hood or hud, and mud; q. d. hud-mud, the

diminutives huddle-muddle, hudder-mudder, hugger-
mugger." He cites Jamieson's hudge mudge and huggrie
muggrie. ODEE proposes the derivation of hugger-
mugger from reg mucker (< ME mok-ere) and ME hoder
'huddle, wrap up' ("ult[imate] origin unkn[own]").
However, it is unlikely that the components of hugger-
mugger are traceable to different sources and later
influenced each other, though this is what OED suggests
(the entry in ODEE is an abbreviated version of the entry
in
OED).
Most probably, -mucker is a variant of -mugger, and
Wedgwood's comparison of -mugger with Sc
hudgemudge 'a side talk in a low tone, a suppressed
talking' (Jamieson) is unobjectionable. Both he and Kluge
cited G muck in connection with G meucheln and E
hugger-mugger, and Wedgwood's mention of F musser
and Dan i smug 'secretly, privately' anticipated FT (smug
I; hugger-mugger turns up in this entry too). Skeat
(according to anonymous [1877b]) shared Wedgwood's
opinion.
Guesses about the relatedness of -mugger and
smuggle go back to a rather early day (L [1853:391]).
Two etymologists invoked Sc hugger-muggans 'stockings
with the feet worn away' in the discussion of hugger-
mugger (anonymous [1822b:617] and
719
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Mayhew [1912:323-24]), but the origin of the Scots

word is unknown. Since hugger-muggans are gaiters,
a shoeless person walking in them makes no noise. That
fact may have contributed to the form of hugger-
muggans, but it sheds no light on the etymon of hugger-
mugger. In all likelihood, -mugger is part of the mugger
—mooch—meucheln family. The statement that
"mugger, meaningless itself, merely repeats the idea of
hugger" (Van Draat [1940:165]) should not be taken on
trust. Krog-mann (1952:29) cites several compounds of
the schurimuri type (German) and believes that in all of
them, including hugger-mugger, the second element
reproduces the first, with h- substituting for any initial
consonant. His generalization is too broad, and his
opinion does not hold for hugger-mugger. In English,
words like hubble-bubble and pitter-patter, in which the
'basic' element is the second, are numerous.
5. The suggestion that -mudgeon in curmudgeon
(1577) is related to mooch seems to be correct.
Numerous fanciful etymologies of curmudgeon exist: 1)
From F cœur méchant 'evil heart' (proposed to Johnson
by one of his correspondents). Todd told the story of
John Ash's misunderstanding of this phrase and it has
often been repeated. To some extent, Weekley (1915)
supported Johnson. The 14th-century personal name
Boselinus Curmegen that he unearthed would then mean
'a wicked man known as evil heart' (compare G base
720
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'wicked, evil; angry'). Groth (1922) must have been

unaware of Weekley's discovery, for he offered the same
facts. ODEE mentions Boselinus Curmegen, calls it re-
markable, but offers no comments. Here is what
Weekley says in his dictionary (1921): "... the spelling
curmegient is found (1626), and ... Curmegan, occurring
as a medieval nickname or surname (Ramsey Cartulary),
is not impossibly F. cœur méchant." It follows that the
name or nickname almos t i dentical with curmudgeon
turned up long before the common name (a usual
situation: see BOY and LAD, though the case of Ladda ~ lad
is unclear) and that folk etymology interpreted cur-
mudgeon as a French phrase. Similarly, bonfire was
taken for 'good fire.' The popular misconception does
not make curmudgeon less opaque.
2) From the alleged OE *ceorlmodigan 'churlish-
minded' (Brewer [1873] and in his dictionary; Rule
[1873]) or from 'chary-minded': OE cearg + mod (Mitchell
[1908:216]). 3) From ML corimedis ~ cur-medus
'dependant who is liable to heriot' (see cur-media in Du
Cange); Todd in Johnson-Todd added: "Some may
perhaps think the word allied to a snarling cur." 4) From
'cur in the manger' (Richardson).
Whiter III:412-13 examined many words allegedly
connected with mucus and mentioned L muger as a term
of contempt. This was the first time (long before Zupitza)
muger turned up in the discussion of the extended
721
Adz(e) Adz(e)

mooch family. Mackay (1877), whose Gaelic etymologies

of English words are usually insupportable, suggested a
derivation of curmudgeon that, by pure chance, as will
be shown, is probably almost correct: from Gael cearr
'wrong, wrong-headed, perverse' and muig 'a scowl, a
frown, a discontented expression of the face'; muigean
'a churlish, disagreeable person,' hence cearr-muigean.
Much has been made of cornmudgeon 'hoarder of
corn' (1600). Wedgwood reconstructed corn-merchant as
the original form of curmudgeon (the same in W [1864],
Mueller, and Skeat1), but "Hollands's corn-mudgin is an
alteration for the nonce by assim[ilation] to corn to
render L. frumentarius corn-dealer" (ODEE). At present,
curmudgeon is considered to be a word of unknown
origin, though, according to OED, the idea that cur- in
curmudgeon should be equated with cur 'dog' "is worthy
of note" (no longer in ODEE), and Skeat4 has 'grumbling
cur' as a possible gloss of curmudgeon.
Partridge (1958) says that curmudgeon is perhaps
akin to the echoic Sc curmurring, a low rumbling or
murmuring (cur-mur), a source of grumbling; he gives as
a possible parallel the Shetland and Orkney adjective
curmullyit 'dark, ill-favored fellow' (EDD). A similar idea
must have occurred to Todd, who after mentioning a
snarling dog cited OE murcnung 'complaint.' OE
murc(nian) 'complain,' G murren 'grumble,' and L
murmura re 'murmur' are onomatopoeic verbs. Sc
722
Adz(e) Adz(e)

curmurring is reminiscent of curmudgeon, and curmullyit

is almost a doublet of E cormullion 'miser' (1596: OED
has one citation).
The cœur méchant derivation suggested the French
origin of E -mudgeon. Skeat1 relates -mudgeon to mooch,
which at that time he thought to be a borrowing from
Old French. More recently, Spitzer (1942a) pointed to a
possible French etymon of curmudgeon and cited OF
chamorge 'glandered (horse)' (the glanders is a
contagious disease in horses, marked by swellings
beneath the jaws and discharge of mucous matter from
the nostrils). Spitzer reconstructed "a simile suggested
by the intermittent, dribbling, 'niggardly' discharge of
excretions." Besides this, the glanders is attended with
choking, and money "chokes" the miser (see F argot
râleur 'one who gasps, rattles in his throat' > 'miser').
According to Spitzer, the development of curmudgeon
from a general term of abuse to 'miser' is impossible. He
explained -on as a French suffix "used in Romance to
indicate a person afflicted with a certain malady or
defect." The entire process looks as follows: *carmouge
'glanders' > *carmougeon 'glandered' > E curmudgeon.
His reconstruction is ingenious but far-fetched.
One of the handicaps in the search for the etymon of
curmudgeon is that only the origin of the meaning
'miser' has usually been sought. Both OED and ODEE
quote Johnson's gloss: "avaricious churlish fellow," but
723
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the 'churlish' part is seldom taken into account. Among

the British lexicographers, only Wyld (UED) gives a
nontraditional definition: "a churlish, cross-grained,
surly, ill-tempered, cantankerous fellow." Note that he
uses five synonyms for 'contentious, querulous, grouchy'
and not a single epithet for 'greedy.' Wyld's curmudgeon
is disagreeable but not stingy. The same is true of
curmudgeon in American English. Consider the following
definitions. AHD1: "1. 'A cantankerous person.' 2. Rare a
miser." RHD2: "A bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous
person." It took American lexicographers a long time to
notice the difference between British and American
usage with regard to curmudgeon. CD2 still says: "An
avaricious, churlish fellow; a miser; a niggard; a churl."
W1 and W2 agree: "An avaricious, grasping fellow; a
miser; niggard; churl," and only in W3 the definitions are:
"1. Archaic: a grasping, avaricious man: Miser. 2. a
crusty, ill-tempered, or difficult and often elderly
person." The meaning 'cantankerous person,' prevalent
in American English may be at least as old as 'miser.'
Skeat4 mentions Lowland Sc murgeon (see Ja-mieson
and EDD) 'mock, grumble' and mudgeon 'grimace.'
'Grumble' and 'grimace' fit the idea of a peevish,
disgruntled man well. Not improbably, curmudgeon was
first applied to an unpleasant, unsociable person and by
extension to someone who stays away from jovial
company for fear of being robbed or asked to help the
724
Adz(e) Adz(e)

less fortunate. One of the meanings of the Italian

regional verbs derived from the putative Langobardian
cognate of meucheln is 'cast a sidelong glance.'
EDD gives E reg motch 'eat little, slowly, quietly and
secretly; consume or waste imperceptibly' (motch is a
doublet of modge). Motching, used attributively, means
'fond of dainties, with the idea of eating in secret,' and
the verbal noun motching is defined as 'slow, quiet
eating, with the idea of fondness for good living;
imperceptible use, with the notion of thriftlessness.' A
*motcher would then be someone enjoying his riches in
secret. One of the secretive actions designated by the
*mug- ~ *muk- verbs must have been *'look stealthily or
askance'; hence the attested senses 'grimace, scowl, air
of discontent' and the connotation 'churlish,
cantankerous' in curmudgeon.
Spitzer erred in refusing to posit the development
from a broad pejorative term to 'miser.' The
reconstructed change in curmudgeon from 'churl,
grumbler' to 'miser' would not be without analogues.
Consider (obsolete) G Kalmauser, first 'brooding recluse,'
then 'skinflint.' (The origin of this word is unknown, and
it is irrelevant in the present context. See some early
conjectures in K. Krause [1888]; Lenz [1898:35] must
have been the only one to compare Kalmauser and
curmudgeon.) Another example is Russ skared 'penny
pincher,' which meant 'abominable' in Old Russian. Its
725
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Slavic cognates are now glossed 'excrement, dung'

(Vasmer III:633-34).
Cur- in curmudgeon cannot be cur 'dog,' for nothing
would explain the Romance word order *cur mudgin(g)
in an English phrase, and a late ba-huvrihi *dogscowl
'churl' is most unlikely. Wood (1910-11:191) equated cur-
with ca- in cahoots. Since cahoots is a word of obscure
origin, it would be more expedient to refer to E kerfuffle
or curfuffle 'disorder, flurry' (sb and v, 1583). OED
features ker- in the chiefly American echoic and
onomatopoeic words of the kerslash type but does not
suggest any etymology. However, in the entry curfuf-fle
(v), OED says that "the first syllable is perh. Gaelic car
twist, bend, turn about, used in combination in car-
fhocal quibble, prevarication, car-shuil rolling eye, car-
tuaitheal wrong turn: cf. the Lowland Sc. curcuddoch,
curdoo, curgloff, curjute, curmur-ring, curnoited, in which
the prefix seems to have the sense of L. dis-." Tuffle
(1536) is a synonym, nearly a doublet, of curfuffle.
The source of the American ker- verbs is probably
Dutch, for in that language words with reinforcing ka- ~
ker- are common (see De Bont [1948:28], Dutch; Coetzee
[1995], Afrikaans). Whatever the genetic relation
between Du ker- and Gael cur-, since -mudgeon is of
Gaelic origin, cur- in curmudgeon can hardly be from
Dutch. This means that, for a change, Mackay guessed
well. Curmudgeon is, most likely, 'extraordinary churl,' if
726
Adz(e) Adz(e)

-mudgeon = muigean 'disagreeable person,' with cur-

added for emphasis.
6. Sc mud(e)geon may likewise be the etymon or a
cognate of mug 'face,' as in mug shot. Mudgeon coexists
with Sc murgeon 'face.' If murgeon goes back to F
morgue, whose original meaning was 'grimace; grave
and serious countenance,' and if mudgeon is related to
the mooch group, their phonetic near identity is due to
chance and they became interchangeable synonyms only
after their paths crossed. But nothing supports the idea
that mug is a "corruption" of F morgue, as suggested in
anonymous (1859:578) and Smythe Palmer (1883). The
origin of F morgue is unknown.
The tinkers of the south of Scotland were known as
muggers. Their language, formerly referred to as cant,
contains many Romani words
(MacRitchie [1911:547-48]), so that mug was be-
lieved to be of Romanic origin. CD mentions that
derivation, and so does Cohen in his comments on Gore
(Gore [1993:6]), but a more convincing etymology of
mug is needed.
An anonymous reviewer of Atkinson's dictionary
(anonymous [1868a:836]) believed that mug 'face' is a
humorous extension of mug 'drinking vessel' because
grotesque faces were the chief adornment of ale
pitchers. Whoever was the first to offer this etymology,
which does not appear in any early dictionary consulted,
727
Adz(e) Adz(e)

it gained the cautious support of OED. Wedgwood

related mug to mock < F moquer (compare Sp mueca
'wry face, grin, mocking grimace') and Gael smuig 'snout,
face in ridicule' and added E muzzle to his list of
cognates. OF mocquer 'mock' and musel 'snout' (ModF
museau) are words of unknown origin, and it is unclear
whether they belong to the mooch group, but E mug
'face' seems to be akin to Sc mudgeon and,
consequently, to mooch, miche, meucheln, and the rest.
The verb mug is almost an exact gloss of G meucheln,
and their closeness need not be a coincidence.
Delatte (1935) points out that E mug 'face' "may be
compared with similar words in Dutch dialects: smikkel
and smoel (a possible contraction of *smogel), which are
also vulgar expressions for 'mouth.' There is no difficulty
in finding a common base for these various forms:
(s)m...g, or, with unvoiced guttural, (s)m...k, the addition
of s being a common phenomenon." That is a reasonable
comparison.
The German verb mogeln 'cheat' has been discussed
in detail (Birnbaum [1935], WeiCbrodt
[1935], Birnbaum [1955], M. Fraenkel [1960:19;
1966:87], Wolf [1962:184], and see it in all the editions
of EWDS, Wolf [1956], WDU-1963, and WDU-1970).
Despite the guarded conclusions of most dictionary
makers, Birnbaum's arguments against the Yiddish origin
of mogeln are irrefutable. Mogeln is, more likely, related
728
Adz(e) Adz(e)

to mooch and its congeners. By the same token, E

smouch 'pilfer' (1826), a doublet of smooch 'mooch,' is
probably not a borrowing from Yiddish, regardless of the
origin of smouch 'derogatory name for a Jew.' Russian
borrowed the verb mukhlevat 'cheat' (stress on the last
syllable) from German (Vasmer III:19). Vasmer
followed EWDS11 and supported the Yiddish derivation of
G mogeln. In Dutch studies, Weijnen (1998:157-58/26)
shares the same misconception. Smouch 'kiss,' insofar as
it goes back to the meaning 'mouth,' may be related to
mooch.
7. As always, when proposing a common origin for a
motley group of words of similar structure and meaning,
one wonders where to stop. Verbs and nouns with the
root *muk— *mug- designated secret (and,
consequently, sometimes illegal) actions for millennia.
They may be traceable to onomatopoeia (*muk 'keep
mum'; this was Braune's suggestion [1897:220, note 4])
or to an ancient word for 'mist' (things done under the
cover of darkness). They occurred in Latin, Old Irish, and
Germanic. In Romance, they are either from Celtic or
from Germanic, the latter being a more probable source.
The English words mooch, miche, as well as smouch (v),
smuggle, hugger-mugger, (cur)mudgeon, mug 'face' and
mug (v), G meucheln, mogeln, mucks, and -mäuser in
Duckmäuser, F musser, and L muger, are members of this
group, each with its individual history. E mock and
729
Adz(e) Adz(e)

muzzle, both from French, may be related. Several verbs

meaning 'crawl' should probably be kept apart from
mooch and its more certain cognates. If such is the
history of mooch, it provides a rare glimpse into the
spread of ancient European slang.
NUDGE (1675)
Nudge was first recorded in 1675, even though its
uninterrupted history starts only in 1838. Nud 'boss with
the head' and nuddle 'push, squeeze,' both regional,
surfaced at the same time. The affricate in nudge
suggests that despite this verb's late attestation and its
seeming isolation in and outside English it was not
borrowed from Scandinavian or Low German. Nud and
nudge do not look like cognates, because in the history of
English, d yields an affricate only before the yod.
Regardless of a possible historical bond between nudge
and nud, it is likely that nudge had been known in some
dialects long before it entered the Standard. Word initial
and word final /ckf sometimes appear unexpectedly (for
example, smudge and jog have doublets smutch ~ smut
and shog) and seems to be endowed with sound symbolic
value. The barrier between nud and nudge is perhaps not
as impassable as it seems.
The initial consonant of nudge poses additional prob-
lems. Nudge may at one time have begun with gn-, kn-,
or hn- and belonged with verbs like OE cnocian, cnucian,
gna-gan, and hnappian (ModE knock, gnaw, and nap).
730
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The gn- ~ kn- ~ hn- words form a loosely connected group

whose underlying meaning is hard to reconstruct (it is
usually given as 'compress'), but despite disagreement
over details belief in such a meaning is widespread. The
phonetic shape of such words is inconstant: all short
(checked) vowels occur in them, and any stop and an
occasional fricative may follow the vowel. Etymologists
interested in the remote origin of the gn- ~ kn-~ hn-
group posit a root (PIE *gen- or *gen-, Gmc *ken- or
*kns-) from which the recorded forms have allegedly
been produced with the help of enlargements. The great
antiquity and the ancient kinship of the gn- ~ kn- ~ hn-
words, to which sn- should be added, is doubtful, but the
existence of several subsets united by a common
meaning is indubitable. Nudge belongs with the verbs
designating light, sometimes repetitive, regular
movements (gnaw, nibble, nod, knock, and the like).
Two plausible etymologies of nudge have been
proposed. One connects nudge with OE hnygelan
'clippings,' the other derives it from OE cnucian 'knock.' A
form like *hnycgelan or *cnyccan probably existed.
Nudge may also have arisen as an expressive variant of
nud, a form closely related to nod, but such coinages are
sporadic, and their history cannot be traced with
confidence.
The sections are devoted to 1) the status of the final
affricate in nudge and in some other English words, 2)
731
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the semantics of the gn— kn— hn- group, and 3) the

proposed etymologies of nudge and the borders of the
gn- ~ kn- ~ hn-group, with emphasis laid on the words
that may not belong to
it.
1. A colloquial English word, first recorded in 1675
and seemingly isolated in and outside English, looks like
a borrowing. However, the final /cC/ of nudge points to
a high degree of domestication: a word taken over from
Scandinavian or Low German in the 17th century would
have had -/g/. Although, as the first citation in OED
shows, nudge was known in 1675, it had to wait for a
century and a half until it found its way into respectable
prose. OED gives no examples of the verb between 1675
and 1838, when Dickens, with his ear always attuned to
street slang, used it in Nicholas Nickleby. Two years
earlier, the noun nudge turned
up.
Nudge surfaced almost simultaneously with nud
'boss with the head' (one citation in 1688; in 1887 it was
recorded in a Cheshire glossary) and with the
frequentative (iterative) verb nuddle 'push; beat; press;
squeeze' (1650; now regional). For nuddle further
records are also absent until the 19th century. OED does
not connect nudge with nud and nuddle, because /d/
does not yield an affricate unless it is followed by /j/, as
in verdure, education, and did you; the form *nudjan has
732
Adz(e) Adz(e)

not been recorded. However, in some way they must

belong together. Nud and nuddle never made it to the
Standard, whereas nudge reached London and stayed
there.
Final /c^/ has several sources in English. It occurs in
many words of French origin, such as lodge and rage. In
Greenwich and the like, / c / is the continuation of the
voiceless affricate /tj/, but the variation /tj/ ~ /1C5/ has
been recorded not only in disyllables. One of the variants
of mooch is modge (see MOOCH). Hodgepodge and
splodge are doublets of hotchpotch (altered from
hotchpot) and splotch. Smudge coexists with its synonym
smutch. Nudge is related to nud as smutch is to smut,
but, although smut has easily recognizable cognates (see
Schmutz in KM and KS), -/t/ and -/tj/ share the fate of
the pair -/d/ and -/ c /: no phonetic law governs their
relationship.
In native words, / c / is the reflex of Old English /gg/
(palatalized), as in bridge. Nudge is hardly a borrowing
from French (no similar words have been found in any
Romance language), which leaves the possibility of / c /
from /tj/, from OE /cc/ or /gg/. All the words rhyming
with nudge, except judge (from French), are of obscure
etymology. Budge (1890) and grudge (1461) (< grutch;
1225) are believed to be borrowings from French
(another doublet of grudge is grouch), but their ultimate
origin is unknown. Drudge (1494) is perhaps related to
733
Adz(e) Adz(e)

ME drugge 'drag or pull heavily'; its / c / remains

unexplained. Dredge, first recorded in 1471, seems to be
akin to early Sc dreg and poses the same problem. Fudge
(v, 1674) has a doublet fadge (1592), and sludge (1649) is
almost indistinguishable from its synonyms slutch (1669)
and slush (1641); their origin has not been clarified
either. Trudge (1547), tredge, and tridge form an equally
opaque set. It is tempting to relate tredge to tread, but /
c / stands like a wall between them. Squeege surfaced in
1782 as a "strengthened form of squeeze" (1601; OED), a
verb of questionable antecedents.
The verb nidge 'dress stone with a sharp-pointed
hammer' deserves mention here. Its appearance in print
does not antedate 1842, but a presumably native
technical term of masonry could hardly be of such recent
coinage. Nothing is known about its origin, and the
existence of the equally impenetrable words nidge
'shake' (1802) and nidget 'triangular horseshoe used in
Kent and Sussex' (1769) are of no immediate use in
reconstructing its past. Wedgwood and Skeat compare
dodge (1631) with Sc dod(d) 'jog' and dodder 'shake'.
OED notes that their etymology fails to address the
difference between the final consonants. Stodge 'fill
quite full' (1674) may be, according to OED, a blend of
stuff and podge 'short, fat person.' Blending in past
epochs is usually impossible to trace.

734
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The examples listed above show that nudge forms

part of a group of (Early) Modern English words whose
etymology would become clearer if their final /CC /
could be shown to derive from /d/.
OED and ODEE often resort to the phrases phoneti-
cally symbolic (see OED: stodge) and symbolically
expressive formation (ODEE: slush, slutch, and sludge).
Such formations need not always obey so-called sound
laws. Verbs like budge, grudge, nudge, smudge, trudge,
dodge, and stodge are to a certain degree expressive,
and a few of them may have started as slang. Final /CC /,
at first perhaps coinci-dentally, marked them as
colloquial variants of stylistically neutral verbs. The same
might hold for nouns and adjectives: smug had a parallel
form smudge (OED), like sludge with its doublet slush.
The symbolic value of final / C / is less obvious than
that of initial gl- and sl-, for example, and a persuasive
etymology cannot rest on it, but examples like smug ~
smudge show that /cC/ in nudge is not necessarily an
impassable barrier between this verb and, for example,
nud. Verbs denoting all kinds of movement, from a
gentle push to a tight squeeze, often begin with / C /
and, likewise, have no established etymology.
References to sound symbolism prevail in discussion of
their origin. See jab (and its synonym job), jag 'stab,
prick' (reg), jam, jaunt, jerk, jib 'stop and refuse to go

735
Adz(e) Adz(e)

on,' jink, jitter, jog (a doublet of shog: Skeat), jolt,

jounce, jumble, and jump in etymological dictionaries.
2. The original onset of the verb nudge is no less
problematic than its coda. OED compares, though with
some hesitation, nudge and N reg nugga ~ nuggja 'push,
rub.' ODEE does the same, but at niggard it cites Sw
njugg 'scarce; miserly' and its regional variants Sw reg
nugg and Sw reg nygg, traceable to OI hn0ggr 'stingy' (in
the text, the Norwegian and the Icelandic forms are mis-
spelled). N reg nugga 'push' and Sw reg nugg 'stingy' are
almost homonyms, so that a bond emerges between
nudge (despite its -/ C /) and nigg-ard. Since hneggr
begins with hn-, nudge, too, may have n- from hn-.
English spelling retains initial kn- and gn- but disallows
hn-. Therefore, if we did not know that nap 'short sleep'
and neck go back to OE hnappian and hnecca respec-
tively, we would not be able to reconstruct hn- in them.
Nudge surfaced late, and its earlier form, in English or in
the lending language (if it is a borrowing), is unknown. In
light of the nugga ~ nugg ~ hn0ggr connection, we may
suppose that it began with hn-.
Boutkan and Kossman (1998:9) contend that until we
have clarified the relationship between initial *kn- and
*hn- in Early Germanic, nothing definite can be said
about the origin of the words beginning with those
groups. But the desired clarification should come as a
reward for successful etymologizing rather than be a
736
Adz(e) Adz(e)

prerequisite for it. We face the coexistence of Du klomp

and (be)knibbelen with E lump and nibble. Some such
words (like E lump) have been recorded only in this form,
others, like OI kringr and hringr (both nouns mean 'ring')
are doublets. Projecting them to asterisked anti-quity is
a self-defeating procedure.
Gallee (1885) compiled a long list of words that, in
his opinion, avoided the First Consonant Shift. Sw klippa
and Du plat mean the same as E cliff and flat, but f in
them is believed to go back to *p, while p in the first pair
looks like a fossilized reflex of PIE *p. Likewise, Dutch has
knijpen 'pinch, squeeze' (with k-), as opposed to OI
hnippa (with h-). E nip and snip are probably related to
them, but the first has been known from texts only since
the 14th and the second since the 16th century,
respectively, and they may not be native.
Confronted with several hundred words (so-called
Restformen) that allegedly proved immune to the First
Consonant Shift, we must discover the causes of their
invulnerability. Gallee did not go so far. Recourse to the
substrate or dialect mixture is here ineffective. It may at
best elucidate the history of one or two words but not of
the entire group. OI gn- and kn- were later weakened to
hn-(cf Modi hnifur 'knife' and hneggja 'neigh'), while in
English g and k before n disappeared altogether. Perhaps
at the periods known as Old English, Old High German,
Middle Dutch, and so on, the change of gn-, kn- and hn-
737
Adz(e) Adz(e)

to n was underway, with both forms competing as

stylistic variants. This trivial conjecture leaves the causes
of the sound change open, but for etymology they are
irrelevant.
The history of Germanic words like gnaw, knock, and
nap shows that they form a loosely connected semantic
group despite the wide range of postvocalic consonants
(all stops and an occasional fricative) and the workings of
secondary ablaut. Words with initial gn-, kn-, and hn-
designate the following objects, actions, and properties.
Nouns: peg, nail, summit, knot, knob, knuckle (and
'bone' in general), lump; point, hook; the nape of the
head, fist; knife, clippings. Verbs: turn, bend, pinch,
compress, push; gnaw, chew, rub; shake, tremble; crawl;
(onomatopoeic) scratch, bang, sneeze, neigh. Adjectives:
quick, sharp, smart; blunt, having short hair, bald,
sparse. This is an abridged version of the list in J. de Vries
(1956b:139) that also includes many animal names.
Similar lists have been compiled in the past. W.
Barnes (1862:173-74) set up numerous roots and dealt
with them as did his other contemporaries and later
linguists. Most of the words he assigned to his roots
have nothing to do with one another, but something in
the n-g group makes different people arrive at similar
conclusions. W. Barnes united nog 'slice,' nog 'ale,'
nugget, nag 'sharp taste,' snag, nudge, nick, nook, and

738
Adz(e) Adz(e)

notch (among others), all of which, in his opinion,

conveyed the idea of cutting and gripping.
Hilmer (1914:237-69) wrote a book about
sound imitation, which he almost ruined by ascribing
the onomatopoeic function to many words devoid of it,
but his material should not be disregarded. He discussed
the sound complexes knap, knop, knup, knub, knep, knip,
knat, knot, knut, knet, knack, knock, knuck, and knick. He
usually glossed the words from OED and dialectal
dictionaries as 'strike, break, crack, nibble; protuberance,
knot, lump.' Hilmer did not say that they are related; his
goal was to point to their origin as so-called sound
gestures.
H. Schroder's starting point (1910:21-26) was the
concept 'short stick, peg,' and he cited several hundred
German and Scandinavian words that have or once had
that meaning. His list sometimes overlaps with Hilmer's,
but his English examples are few (knob, chump 'log of
wood,' knop, and knave). It will be seen that W. Barnes,
H. Schröder, Braune, Hilmer, and J. de Vries, although
they approached their examples from different
directions, did not disagree over matters of principle.
Several attempts have been made to find a unifying
meaning for all the gn- ~ kn- ~ hn-words. Van Helten
(1873:32-37) reconstructed it as 'move(ment) back and
forth.' That is how he explained nap in take a nap (=
'doze off and wake up') and some verbs of chewing like
739
Adz(e) Adz(e)

nibble. According to Torp (1909:48-51), the basic

meaning underlying most of the gn— kn— hn- words is
'squeeze, compress.' Persson (1912:88-94), WP I:580-83,
and IEW, 370-73, accepted this view. See also Nielsen
(1964:196-99) and AHD1 (1516: "gen- '[t]o compress into
a ball.' Hypothetical Indo-European base of a range of
Germanic words referring to compact, knobby bodies
and projections, sharp blows, etc.").
Johansson (1889:340-43) explained the origin of
several gn- ~ kn- ~ hn- words and derived their meaning
from the participles designating 'shorn, scraped, cut' and
from their active counterparts 'shearing, scraping,
cutting.' However, it was Braune (1912:15-28) who
undertook the most detailed analysis of the group in
question. He started from the meaning 'something
gnarled, bony, knotted.' His result did not differ from
Torp's, but Braune rejected 'compress into a ball' as the
unifying feature of the group and believed that verbs
designating actions like gnaw and nibble and ono-
matopoeic words like knock imitiate by their consonants
the sound one gets when dealing with bone. OI knefi ~
hnefi 'fist' (cf E reg neif, from Scandinavian) turned out to
be a ball (made) of bone; hence the verbs of pushing.
Braune did not mention nudge, but he cited E reg nubble
and knobble (related to G knuffen) that combine the
form of nibble and the meaning of nudge. Seebold (KS,
Knalle) says that words beginning with kn- designate
740
Adz(e) Adz(e)

thick objects and that a connection with words for 'com-

press' is possible. See also Knauf and Knochen in KS and
Zubaty (1898:173; Zubaty's article was inspired by
Johansson [1889]).
To discover the etymology of nudge, it is not
necessary to decide whether all the words constituting
the kn— gn— hn- group belong together. Torp, Walde,
and Pokorny did not only look for a semantic common
denominator: they posited an ancient root (the same in
Froehde [1886:299]). Thus, for Germanic Torp gave the
root the form *kna-, the reduction or the zero grade of
PIE *gen-. With the help of a series of enlargements
*kna- was supposed to produce the recorded forms.
Since the reflexes of PIE *g and *g merged in Germanic,
PIE *gen- is another possible source of knock, knob, knot,
and so on. Guntert (1928:124-29) and Schuwer (1977)
favored *gen- over *gen-, though they offered
conflicting interpretations of the etymon: Guntert
suggested the initial meaning 'bend, curvature,' whereas
Schuwer followed Trier and believed that the original
meaning of the *gen- words must be sought in people's
contacts with the underbrush (Niederwald).
The idea that the zero grade of an Indo-European
root gave rise to several dozen heterogeneous verbs,
nouns, and adjectives, some of which may have been
coined late, is suspect. However, within the gn— kn—
hn- group, several words belong together—a fact
741
Adz(e) Adz(e)

recognized long ago. See Knochen, Knoten, and Knopf in

DW 5, which appeared in 1873. The author of the entries
was Hildebrand, and Schuwer begins his survey with a
quick look at them. FT (see especially knude) and other
etymological dictionaries develop Hildebrand's idea. In
the present context, rather than trying to define the
alleged basic meaning of the entire gn— kn— hn- group,
it would be more expedient to isolate the subset of
which nudge is a probable member.
3. Nudge belongs with the verbs designating quick,
partly repetitive, regular movements that usually do not
require a strong effort. Among them are E gnaw (< OE
gnagan), nag, knock, nibble, reg knubble, and nod.
Knuckle, nugget, noggin, knob, nub, and knot, that is, all
kinds of small objects (lumps) may have developed from
similar original meanings. In regional words, final
consonants vary even more than in the Standard. For
example, nug can mean 'knot' and also 'nod; nudge'
(verbs), while nub is a variant of nudge (EDD). Among
many words for 'lump,' we find nudgel. Across language
borders, the picture is similar: for example, the Middle
Low German for nod is nucken (see it in Wood's list
below).
Vowels change by secondary (false) ablaut in this
group. In some dialects, the humorous word noddle
'head' occurs, in others, the corresponding forms are
naddle and nuddle (EDD). Many words are expressive
742
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and refer to a push, a pull, a careless manner, and so

forth, as do nud and nug. Some, like niggle 'work in a
trifling way' (a cognate of niggard), have been known for
several centuries (OED) and seem to have been
borrowed from Scandinavian; others may have
originated in English.
It follows that nudge, whether native or not, should,
as already suggested, be traced to a verb beginning with
gn- or kn- (hn- is, from the historical point of view, their
weakened reflex). The problem of final consonants
remains partly unsolved. If we refuse to treat nub, nud,
nug, and the rest as reflexes of *kn\- with various
enlargements, their relatedness to one another becomes
questionable. (See BEACON, FUCK, MOOCH, and TOAD, which
pose a similar problem.) Countless vaguely synonymous
words in the modern languages have common parts (the
stubs that remain after the 'subtraction' of postvocalic
consonants), but the remainders need not be equated
with ancient roots, the bearers of basic meanings. The
kinship of nug, nub, and nud is probable, but its nature
needs elucidation. Nigg(ard), nudge, and nod may be
cognates despite the fact that no phonetic change con-
nects -/d/ and -/g/ in Old and Middle English and that
/d/ yielded only before /j/. By the same token, nibble
and knock are their cognates, a fact that will remain
even if no use is made of Pers-son's enlargements.

743
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Two good etymologies of nudge have been

proposed. Wood (1907-08:272-74/30) listed OI hnuka 'sit
cowering,' MHG nucken ~ nucken 'nod; stop suddenly,
shy (said about horses); nod off, take a nap,' MLG nucken
'shake one's head in disagreement,' nugen 'bend,' ModI
hnykkja 'pull violently; clinch, rivet,' and OE *hnygela
'shred, clipping' (recorded as hnygelan and hnigelan
'clippings,' pl). He gave ModE nudge in his list without
comments and did not reconstruct OE *hnycgelan,
whose modern continuation would have been nudge.
(Wood returned to the kn- words several more times but
did not mention nudge again.)
O. Ritter (1910:478-79) set up *knudge as a side form
of *knutch < *hnucchen < *cnyccan 'push,' related to OE
cnocian ~ cnucian 'knock.' He viewed Sc gnidge 'rub;
squeeze' (verbs); 'squeeze; nudge' (nouns) as a variant of
nudge. The vowel y in *cnyccan would have developed
as it did in clutch and the like (see a list of similar words
at STUBBORN). The etymon of nudge can thus be recon-
structed with a high degree of probability as OE
*hnycgan or *cnyccan. This verb was colloquial (as it still
is), perhaps even slang, and, like niggle, nud-dle, and
knubble, it had no currency outside a narrow regional
area. But nudge may be an expressive variant of nud.
The problem with such an etymology is not its
implausibility; it is rather the absence of a regular

744
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pattern that makes the barrier between nud and nudge

hard to overcome.
ODEE says the following about nudge: "[O]f
unkn[own] origin; perh[aps] in much earlier use and
rel[ated] ult[imately] to Norw. dial. nugga, nygja push,
rub." OED is more optimistic and calls nudge a word of
obscure origin; however, it does not suggest "much
earlier use" (ODEE offers no arguments in support of its
statement). ODEE replaced OED's "perh[aps] related"
with "ult[imately] related." The phrase ultimately
related is of little value here. All the words, brought
together by Torp, Persson, Walde, Pokorny, and others
may be "ultimately related," but each has its own
history.
If MLG and MHG nucken is part of the afore-
mentioned group, E nick 'notch' may be too. But ODEE
echoes OED ("of unknown origin") and denies its ties
with Du nikken and LG nicken 'nod.' OED, likewise,
dismissed nod as a word of obscure origin and called its
connection with MHG notten 'move about' doubtful.
ODEE suggests a Low German etymon for nod and gives
notten as the nearest corresponding form but offers no
'ultimate' etymology. Both dictionaries recognize nugget
as a diminutive of reg nug 'lump,' whose origin is again
unknown. Nag 'small riding horse' appears to be another
word of unknown or obscure origin despite the reference
to early MDu negghe 'dwarf horse.' Bjorkman's
745
Adz(e) Adz(e)

examples (1912:266) make it clear that the original

meaning of the Norwegian,
Dutch, and Low German nouns corresponding to nag
is 'stump' and that all the animals called neg, nag, and
nagge are small. Nag is akin to niggle, niggard, and so
forth, all of which carry the idea of smallness. Thus nag
and niggle are 'ultimately related' to nugget, nudge, nod,
nick, and probably noggin. The same holds for numerous
sn- words, from snip to snug. See Schrijnen (1904:93-98;
a detailed list of sn - ~ gn- ~ kn- ~ hn- words), Siebs
(1904:315; on nip—snip—snipe), Stapelkamp
(1950b:100; on E nib and its cognates), and Frankis
(1960:384; on nick—snick and nip—snip—gnip—knip).
The question about the volume of any multitude has
two sides: what to include and what to leave out. Some
English words, cited above, have a short recorded history
and no known cognates. Others, like nod, have one
cognate in Low German, so that the source of borrowing
remains unclear (see Jellinghaus [1898b:31] on nig 'small
piece' and niggling). Still others, like the noun nag,
resemble many words in Low German and Scandinavian.
Occasionally putative cognates in Lithuanian turn up
(see, for example, LEW, gniauzti 'press, compress'), and,
as usual, several promising look-alikes have been found
in Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Greek (Lemon, nudge; Davies
[1855:253, nod, and 261, knock]). Presumably, none of
them began with gn-or kn-. Yet Frisk (νύσσω, νύττω
746
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'push, strike, jostle') mentions G nucken as a possible

cognate of the Greek verb. See also WP II:323, IEW, 767,
and the etymology of E nut and L nux in old and new dic-
tionaries. The entries in our reference works do not
reflect the progress made since the days of Murray,
Bradley, and Skeat in the study of each of those nouns
and verbs, including nod (on which see Verdam
[1897:165-70] and Krogmann
[1933:382]).
In a search like the present one, we constantly run
the risk of including extra words whose similarity with
nudge is misleading, for we are facing forms merging
with one another ("Wohl zusammengehörige Gruppe
von Wörtern mit einer schwer abgrenzenden
Verwandtschaft" [Probably a group of related words
whose affinity is hard to determine], Seebold [KS, Nock]
and see MOOCH, sec 7). For example, notch seems to be
an ideal 'partner' of nick and nudge, and this impression
may be
correct, but both Skeat (1901: 198-99) and Weekley
(1910:312-14) insist that notch is of French origin and
that the synonyms F oche and E nock were associated in
Anglo-French (AF noche). Likewise, knife is regularly
mentioned with nock, nick, and the rest, and if at one
time knife designated a stabbing tool or weapon, a kind
of bayonet, its name will

747
Adz(e) Adz(e)

align itself effortlessly with the other kn- words (with

respect to -f, see neif 'fist' above). Yet Vennemann
(1997) believes that knife is a borrowing from Basque.
No record of niblick exists before 1862. The comment in
OED is "of unknown formation." Of the other
dictionaries only RHD ventures a guess: from nibble + ick,
a variant of -ock. Such a late word must presumably have
been coined by a golfer or a sport journalist. Nib means
'point,' and a niblick is a golf club having a small round
heavy ball. Another lump is called knub. A nib would be
a small knub. Perhaps, someone made up the word
niblick from the elements nib and -lick, as in frolic or
garlic, with a facetious reference to the verb lick, quasi
nib-lick. People often name a stick after the part that
comes into contact with the object it strikes. Such is, for
instance, cudgel, whose root is reminiscent of cog and G
Kugel 'bullet' (KS, Keule). EDD cites nudgel not only for
'lump' but also for 'cudgel.' A bird's eye view of the
entire gn— kn— hn— (sn-) multitude cannot replace a
meticulous analysis of every word.
The origin of nudge is certainly not unknown, even
though the contours of the group to which it belongs are
blurred. An Old English etymon of nudge—*hnycgan or
its cognate *knyccan—seems to have existed. When this
verb emerged from its regional obscurity, it became part
of the budge-grudge—trudge set, a circumstance that
reinforced its expressive, slangy character.
748
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OAT (700)
Contrary to what is said in most English dictionaries,
oat (OE ate) is not an isolated word in Germanic. It has
cognates in Frisian and in several Dutch dialects. In Old
English, ate designated only wild oats (avena fatua), but
the extant occurrences are few, and our knowledge of
the use of oats before the Conquest is limited. OE ate
coexisted with ate and atih. In some situations, all three
words seem to have been synonymous. It remains a
riddle why English lacked the common Germanic name of
oats akin to G Hafer.
In several languages, the word for 'oats' and 'goat'
are strikingly similar; in German, Haber means both.
However, E oat and goat are not related. Some
etymologists tried to relate OE ate and etan 'eat.'
Attempts in that direction are of no value, because OE a
and e belong to different ablaut series. A few other
fanciful derivations of oat have not advanced the search
for its history. It is now customary to call oat a word of
unknown origin. Yet Skeat proposed a good etymology
of oat and Binz improved it. Most German, Dutch, and
Scandinavian scholars accepted it, but OED rejected it
and later English philologists passed it by. According to
Skeat and Binz, OE ate is related to Icel eitill 'nodule,
kernel, gland' and MHG eiz 'swelling.' The original
meaning of the root *aitmust have been 'grain.' Binz
discovered the same root in OHG araweizi 'pea' (ModG
749
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Erbse), literally 'pea grain.' Go atisk 'grain field' looks like

another good cognate of OE ate, but Gmc *ai and *a are
as incompatible as OE a and e.
The sections are devoted to 1) the form and meaning
of the Old English words for 'oats,' 2) oats and goats, 3)
the improbable etymologies of oat from Minsheu's days
to the present, 4) the etymology by Skeat and Binz, and
5) the relationship between OE ate and Go atisk.
1. Oat occurs for the first time in the gloss 'lo-lium
atae,' and the meaning 'wild oat(s)' (avena fatua) is the
usual one for ate in Old English, though the recorded
examples are few: most references occur in the parable
of the enemy who sowed tares in a grain field; see BWA
I:7 and III:5. In Middle English, otes refers to the
cultivated variety, that is, to avena sativa (Bremmer
[1993:24]). The plural forms (atan, etc) predominate in
Old and Middle English. Today, oat is familiar only from
compounds and phrases like oatcake, oatmeal, and oat
grass; otherwise, oats is used. OED compares oats with
such plurals as beans and potatoes and infers "that
primarily oat was not the plant or the produce in the
mass, but denoted an individual grain; cf. groat with its
collective pl. groats. This may point to oats being eaten
originally in the grains, not like wheat and barley, in the
form of meal or flour...but the scanty early evidence is
not sufficient to show this." Since OE a te had the side
form Site, it may have been declined as both an -on and
750
Adz(e) Adz(e)

a -jon stem (like hruse 'earth'), a circumstance passed

over in the standard grammars of Old English.
According to OED, a te, an isolated word in Indo-
European, is of obscure origin. ODEE, following its style
sheet, substitutes unknown for obscure and says
"peculiar to Eng[lish] and of unkn[own] origin." Its
verdict is all the more surprising as Bosworth (1838)
cited Fr oat and Toller
retained it. It also appears in W (1864; 1890).
Probably under the influence of OED, W1 expunged
Fr oat, and it did not return to W2,3. CD,
Partridge (1958), CEDEL, and RHD give no cognates of
oat, while Weekley asserts that none are known.
However, Bosworth's source of information was fully
reliable (Bremmer [1993:25]; E. Stanley [1990, esp p.
436]) and should not have been ignored. Several Dutch
regional forms are also akin to E oat: Fl ate ~ ote and
Zeelandic dote (Bul-
bring [1900a:110, note], Vercoullie [1920], Heeroma
[1942:86], Weijnen [1965:393], Bremmer [1993:2428];
NEW, oot).
Besides a te and S te, Old English had a tih 'weeds'
(continued in northern E reg oatty 'oats of very short
stalks' and 'mixed with wild oat'), a collective noun of
the type not uncommon in naming plants (-ig in OE ifig
has the same origin; see IVY and O. Ritter [1922:60]). A
parallel formation is Russ ovës 'oats' ~ ovsiug 'wild oats'
751
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(both words are stressed on the last syllable). The names

of weeds and cultivated plants often sound alike (a
typical example is Du tarwe 'wheat' and E tare) because
several species of grain arise from weeds growing in
sown fields or because they resemble one another.
It is not known when and from what area oats
migrated to the Germanic-speaking world (Classen
[1931:256]), where they must have been used both as
fodder and for human consumption. However, the
literary evidence on this subject, as already pointed out,
is too scarce for drawing definite conclusions. Grube
(1934:142) summarized the solution as follows: "The
limited occurrence of O.E. ate indicates that oats were
not very prominent among the grains as human food.
This is further suggested by the glossing of ate with Latin
lolium and zizania, 'weeds,' 'tares,' in several glosses....
Ziza-nia, in Matthew 13, 38, which is translated weod by
the Rushworth MS and coccel by the Corpus and Hatton
MSS, is glossed ata, sifeda, unwxstm by the Lindisfarne
MS. Essentially the same distinction is made in Matthew
13, 27, again in verse 30 of the same chapter. In the
latter instance, the Lindis-farne version speaks of wilde
ata, which would suggest that oats were cultivated,
although the association of oats with tares would lead us
to suppose that the grain was discredited as a food for
humans. Use in the medical recipes is largely confined to
poultices (e.g., Cockayne, III, 8). However, oatmeal,
752
Adz(e) Adz(e)

xtena mela, is mentioned in the Leech Book (Cockayne,

II, 84), and a fragment containing some charms and
recipes in a Twelfth century hand
gives the following (Cockayne, III, 292). The
direction is to eat these ingredients, including the
groats of oats and the powdered oat-bran, etriman dust,
with the substance of the oats, the pith. The passage
presents several difficulties (one of them: what is 'oak
drink'?), and is here presented merely as a record of the
terms associated with 'oats.'"
2. The oldest Germanic name of oat has been
preserved in G Hafer (OHG habaro), Du haver (OS
habero), and Dan, N, Sw havre (OI hafri, recorded a
single time in poetry). Its etymology is debatable, and
the existing hypotheses are of little help in tracing the
origin of oat. Only one circumstance is worthy of
mention. G Hafer is a Low German variant of Haber and
thus a homonym of Haber 'billy goat.' J. Grimm (1848:
66-67 = 1868:47) assumed that Haber 'oat(s)' was called
this because it had been used as fodder for goats and
sheep. He referred to several similar pairs, for example,
Russ oves ~ L avena and Russ ovtsa 'sheep' ~ L ovis, and
to Gk odyilcoy 'wild oats,' but had doubts about coupling
OE a te with some animal name.
Heyne, who wrote the entry Haber in DW and
Schrader, in his notes to Hehn (Hehn [1894:539]),

753
Adz(e) Adz(e)

called into question Grimm's derivation of oves ~

avena. Opinions on G Haber are divided. FT (havre) and
EWDS, including the latest editions, endorse Grimm's
idea. Some etymologists remain noncommittal (see E.
Zupitza and Lochner-Hüttenbach [1967:52]). If Haber
'billy goat' and Haber 'oats' have different cognates
outside Germanic (see Uhlenbeck [1894:330/5] and
Stalmaczczyk and Witczak [1991-92], among others), the
two words may have nothing to do with each other.
Solmsen
(1904:6), Petersson (1918:19), WP I:24, EWNT2, and
J. de Vries (AEW, hafri; NEW, haver) follow Peder-sen
(1895:42-43) and look on the kinship between Haber1
and Haber2 as nearly or absolutely improbable. Russ oves
and ovtsa have been dissociated in the modern
etymological dictionaries. The same holds for their
cognates in the other Slavic languages. In odyilcoy, the
second component (-Axoy) is opaque (Frisk, Chantraine);
this word also designated a variety of oak. Contrary to
odyilcoy, oayilcoj seems to have meant only 'wild oats.'
E oat poses a problem of its own (as was clear to
Grimm), because g- in goat cannot be explained away.
However, Makovskii (1985:49) sees no difficulty here. In
the eighties he developed so-called combinatorial
etymology and made the following statement:
"Contamination of OE hxfer 'billy goat' and hxfer 'oat'
resulted in that OE gat 'goat,' a synonym of hxfer 'goat,'
754
Adz(e) Adz(e)

acquired the fictitious meaning 'oat' (OE at 'oat' < *gat;

with regard to the elision of the initial consonant, cf Russ
koza 'nanny goat' versus Lith ozys)." The origin of Russ
koza is obscure (see more about it at HEIFER), and OE
hxfer 'oats' did not exist (in the 14th century, haver 'oats'
surfaced in northern English dialects, and it is still
current in Scots, but this word is universally believed to
be a borrowing from Scandinavian).
3. An old etymology connected oat with OE etan
'eat,' "because every where it is forage for horses and in
some places of men" (Skinner, as translated by
Richardson; similarly in Gazophy-lacium: "for it is forage
for horses in all places; and in some, provision for men").
The first to derive a te from etan was Minsheu, who
offered the same reason. Johnson's definition of oats
(inspired by Robert Burton? [G. Thompson 1887]) 'a
grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but
in Scotland supports the people' made Skinner's
formulation offensive. Pictet (1859, I:259), J. Meyer
(1880:15), Wedgwood, and Mueller (hesitatingly)
supported Minsheu's etymology (without references).
Words for 'oats' and 'food' sound alike not only in
English. We are facing an analogue of the oat ~ goat
type, but here the most important evidence comes from
Icelandic rather than German: OI at and dta mean
'eating' and 'food' respectively. However, the Old English
cognate of dt is predictably St. OE Ste 'oats' must have
755
Adz(e) Adz(e)

been a later form than a te, coined either to denote

fodder or, more likely, as a -jon doublet of ate, because a
could not develop from S, and the narrowing of meaning
from 'food' to 'oats' is less likely than the broadening
from 'cereal' to 'food' (cf E barley and its Slavic cognates
meaning 'food'). Schrader (1901:321; the same in SN,
428) considered OE a te to be an isolated form and
abandoned his old idea, offered
tentatively in Hehn (1894:539), that a te is related to
Gk etScxp 'food.' Etymological dictionaries of Greek
never mention oat under etScxp. (In Schrader's works,
OE a te appears as a ta; SN corrected the mistake.) In
Curtius (2329), oat does turn up but only in connection
with the words for 'eat' (tentatively).
Contrary to other cereals, oats have panicles that
sway in the gentlest wind. That circumstance gave rise to
the comparison between G Hafer and Skt kdmpate
'trembles' and capaldh 'moving, shaking unsteadily' (see
Hafer in DW). Modern etymological dictionaries of
German and Dutch do not discuss this comparison (see
KEWA I:160, 374), but Wood (1919-20:568) reasoned in a
similar way. He compared Hafer with OE hsf 'sea' and E
heave: "The sea was naturally described as 'that which
heaves, rises and falls,' and haven as a 'roadstead,' i.e.,
where ships ride at anchor." He interpreted OHG habaro
as 'swelling, tuft.' The feature uniting them would thus
be the swelling of the tuft and the swell of waves.
756
Adz(e) Adz(e)

An idea close to the one in DW found an indirect

reflection in Tucker (aedes), who explained Hafer "'oats,'
from their shaking" and analyzed ate into OE *ei+ *d:
"the primitive notion of this *ei+ is that of expansive,
restless, shaking, flickering or shivering." As a parallel to
oats 'shivering grass' Tucker cited totter bells (totter
grass is 'quaking grass,' according to CD and OED).
Minsheu, though for different reasons, considered but
gave up the parallel E oats ~ Gk ©Zw 'burn,' a cognate of
L aedes 'temple' (originally 'hearth').
Attempts have been made to reconstruct a single
etymon for G Hafer and L avena. Kaltschmidt (Hafer) set
up the root %-m that absorbed the most various words,
ave na and Hafer among them. A. Noreen (1894:149)
considered the possibility of reconstructing *havena for
L avena— an ingenious but unacceptable protoform
because it severs the ties between the Latin and the
Balto-Slavic words. However, early English etymologists
seem to have thought that oats rather than Hafer was
related to Russ ov'es, which would make it a cognate of
ave na: see Minsheu, Hickes, and W (1828; expunged in
1864). It remains unclear what common features
Minsheu and others detected in the two words, for even
the vowels in them do not match. Equally
incomprehensible is Partridge's statement (1958) that
"one is tempted to compare [oat with] Lettish [= Latvian]
duza and O[ld] S[lavic] ovisu, which would bring us to L
757
Adz(e) Adz(e)

auena." The nature of the inducement is even more

obscure than the word under discussion.
After producing a t- from ga t, Makovskii had two
more ideas: 1) He said that Go hlaifs 'bread' was a
cognate of Hitt harpai- 'begin(ning),' and E bread a
cognate of Sw borja 'begin.' Likewise, OE at- is allegedly
akin to Gmc *andjas 'beginning-end' and OE ent 'giant'
(Makovskii [1996:123 and continuation of footnote 9 on
page 124). 2) Cereals have been objects of worship since
antiquity (cf E reg ait 'custom, habit'); hence the affinity
between E oat and all kinds of words meaning 'shield'
and 'move.' He explains that when a grain falls into the
ground, struggle begins (cf OI at 'struggle'): the grain first
dies (cf OI eyda 'destroy, waste') and then comes alive
(cf PIE *aid- 'swell') (Makovsii
[1999a, oat]). Evidently, E oat, E end, OE ent, OI at
from etja 'incite, egg on,' OI eyda, and the rest are
all related. W. Barnes (1862:320) traced oat to one
of his inscrutable roots, this time *ng, and explained
oat as 'sharp-eared plant.'
4. Since almost the only source of OE a is Gmc *ai, it
is reasonable to try to derive OE aat-from *ait-. Skeat1
did exactly that and compared OE a te with Icel eitill
'nodule in stone,' a word (which also means 'nodule in
wood') first recorded in the 17th century (ABM). Eitill has
cognates in Faroese, Nynorsk, and in Swedish dialects;
see eitel in FT and Torp. Other cognates include MHG eiz
758
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'abscess,' presumably Russ iadro 'kernel' (stress on the

last syllable; Vasmer IV:547-48 rejects that cor-
respondence, and ESSI VI:65-66 does not even mention
Germanic forms, but IEW, 774 repeats the information
from WP I:166-67 and treats the Proto-Slavic form as a
nasalized variant of PIE *oid-), Gk oiSoj 'swelling' and the
words, collected in WP and
IEW at *oid. OE attor 'poison' is one of them. Ac-
cording to this theory, oat originally meant 'kernel,
nodule' or simply 'grain.' One might expect a more
concrete etymon, but OE atan designated 'darnel, cockle,
tares (lolium, zizania)' and may in prehistorical times
have been applied to several kinds of weeds. If so, the
name need not have been specific.
OED ignored Skeat's etymology, and later lexi-
cographers classified oat with words of unknown origin.
However, Skeat remained true to his idea. The entry in
ODEE, which follows OED, contains no remarks on Skeat,
whereas the criticism by Scott
(CD) and Wyld (UED) misses the point. CD cites
the suggestions that oat is related to eitill or to eat
and concludes "... but why oats should be singled out, as
'that which has a rounded shape' or 'that which is eaten,'
from other grains of which the same is equally or more
true, is not clear." However, 'kernel' = 'grain' should be
given precedence to 'that which has a rounded shape.'

759
Adz(e) Adz(e)

UED lays special emphasis on oiSoj 'swelling,' which

is "prob[ably] cogn[ate]" with OE attor 'poison' ("a
connexion has been suggested w[ith] O.H.G. eitar,
'poison' ...") and says: "This is not convincing because
oats are among the last of the cereals to suggest the idea
of swelling." 'Swelling' is a derivative of 'gland.' It is not
necessary to detect the meaning of the reconstructed
root in every attested form in all languages. Wyld must
have been misled by the end of Skeat's early statement:
"If this [proposed derivation of oats] be right, the
original meaning of oat was grain, corn, kernel, with
reference to the manner of its growth, the grains being
of bullet-like form; and it is derived from VID, to swell,"
not from vAD, to eat. Growth here means 'shape' rather
than 'process of growing.' Skeat4 replaced VOID with
VEID.
Skeat's etymology is acceptable even on its own
terms, but it received confirmation from German. Binz
(1906:371) endorsed the comparison OE at-e ~ Icel eit-ill,
added Alemannic aisse 'abscess,' a reflex of MHG eiz,
and suggested that OHG araweiz 'pea' (ModG Erbse) be
divided araw-eiz, with ar(a)w- being akin to OE earban
(an oblique case of earfe 'tare'; again 'tare'!) and L ervum
'wild pea,' and eiz meaning what Skeat reconstructed as
the original sense of ate. He pointed out that un-
derstanding oat as 'kernel, nodule, etc' tallies with the
pronouncement in OED: "...primarily oat was not the
760
Adz(e) Adz(e)

plant or the produce in the mass, but denoted an

individual grain."
Kluge accepted this etymology. The entry Erbse in
EWDS7-10 (from 1910 to Kluge's death) contains Binz's
explanation and a reference to his article. Götze
(EWDS11) removed the reference but left the etymology
unchanged, and it is still present in EWDS (with respect
to the latest edition see See-bold [1967:127/10]). Hirt
(1921:135) viewed araweiz, ervum, and two Greek words
as belonging together but unrelated (consequently, as
borrowed from an unknown source), and Duden 7
(Erbse) shares his opinion. Ipsen (1924:231) found the re-
constructed Germanic forms *arawaita- and *arawita
incompatible with *aita- because of the alternation
-ai i-. It matters little whether all those forms
are true cognates or local variants of some migratory
words. Such words always exist in several variants (see
Debrunner [1918:445]). Skt aravinda (a plant name) is
too obscure (see KEWAS 12, Porzig [1927:268-69], Van
Windekens [1957], and KEWA I:48; III:632) to provide
any help in solving the etymology of oat. WP I:166, with
reference to Binz, and IEW, 774, without a reference,
concur with Kluge.
In the Netherlands, Vercoullie (1920:936) had no
objections to equating OE at- and Icel eit-; neither did
Van Wijk (EWNT2, erwt), who followed Kluge's example.
The same holds for Weijnen (1965:393). In Scandinavian
761
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dictionaries, oats appears with the disclaimer "some

people compare..." So, for example, SEO (ärt). Torp
(eitel) refers to eiter 'poison' but passes over E oat. BjL
(ert) continue Torp's tradition. J. de Vries sided with Hirt.
In AEW (ertr), he asserts that Binz was wrong, because -
eiz in araweiz is a suffix, as in Go aglaitei*
'licentiousness' (an idea going back to
Bugge [1899:439] and Wiedemann [1904:46]), and
that ervum, Erbse, and ertr reached Germanic
speakers from some unknown language. In NEW (erwt),
he did not mention Binz's etymology. Reference to
aglaitei* should have been left out. Feist points out that
the origin and the type of formation of the Gothic word
are obscure (likewise, FeistLehmann).
Even if araweiz is a borrowing from an unidentifiable
language, it does not follow that the element -eiz is
hopelessly obscure. L ervum, OE earfe, and OHG araw-
probably go back to a non-Indo European substrate, but -
eiz may be of Germanic origin. If a borrowed plant name
could end in a native suffix, it could equally well be
coupled with a transparent word (-eiz) that would have
made its meaning more precise and its shape less
foreign. The conclusion in EWA (310) that Binz's
etymology is "totally ungrounded" is needlessly severe.
ABM cites E oats at eitill as its unquestionable cognate,
but at erta 'pea' he defers to J. de
Oat
762
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Vries and wonders whether -eiz in OHG araweiz is

not a suffix. IsEW, 982, expresses no such doubts.
Despite the fact that Binz's article contains the word
oats in the title, English philologists overlooked it, and of
course no one writing on E oats would think of
consulting the entry Erbse, erwt, or ertr. (However, oats
turns up in the indexes to WP and IEW and could be
'reclaimed.') Skeat died in 1910 and may not have seen
the German article published in 1906. Even Weekley was
ignorant of it, and Binz's irritation at being
disregarded
(1927:181-82) is easy to understand. Wood
(1914b:500/4) cites many words cognate with eitill,
including MHG eiz, but does not discuss G Erbse, whereas
Wood (1919-20:568) once again presents OE a tan
against the background of words for 'swelling' and
glosses it as 'tuft, panicle' (see above).
Binz's etymology makes it clear that the impulse for
calling avena fatua a te could come from OE a ttor (OI
eitr) 'poison.' The view of oats as a degenerate culture is
old and stems from the confusion of avena sativa and
avena fatua (this was Pliny's opinion; see the quotation
and discussion in Hoops [1905:409]), but the meaning
'poison' in a ttor must have developed from 'matter
inside a swelling,' while at— eit- designated any nodule
or gland. Binz touches on this subject too. At present,
763
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Skeat and Binz's conjecture is probably the best.

Occasional references to the substrate origin of oat, as,
for instance, in Claiborne (1989:179 "... more likely
borrowed from some aboriginal people in northwestern
Europe, where the grain probably originated") lack
foundation. It would have been strange for the Anglo-
Saxons to borrow an exotic (migratory?) word and apply
it to a common weed.
5. Several words sounding like Old English a te refer
to plants, parks, and so forth. The most conspicuous of
them is Gothic atisk 'grain field,' with cognates in
German and Dutch (ModDu es, in the old orthography
esch, 'cultivated fields of a village'). Another one is OE
edisc 'enclosed pasture,' whose -d- makes its kinship
with OHG ezzesc(a) ~ MHG ezzich 'sown grain field'
suspect. To complicate matters, e in OE edisc may be the
product of umlaut and ModE eddish 'aftergrowth,
stubble,' known from texts only since the 15 th century,
need not be the continuation of OE edisc. Then there is L
ador 'spelt,' presumably akin to Gk ccQfp 'ear of grain.'
For atisk, as for OE ate, affinity with the verb 'eat' has
been proposed and rejected (see Feist3,4). See an
exhaustive analysis of OHG ezzesca and its cognates in
EWA (the head word there is ezzisca).
If OE a te were isolated or had only Frisian and
Pimp

764
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Dutch cognates, it might be possible to suggest that

its a does not go back to *ai but is the result of emphatic
lengthening or some such process (see the suggestion on
the origin of OE a in tade at TOAD), but the existence of
MHG eiz and Icel eitill rules out this possibility. To relate
Go atisk to OE ate, the familiar *ai ~ *a barrier has to be
overcome (see HEATHER and KEY). H. Kuhn (1954) conjures
up the ghost of an ancient fashion for a, which allegedly
set in when the Indo-Europeans were learning ag-
riculture. 'Common sense' suggested to him that oak <
*aik- and acorn < *akarn- are related (p. 147). Likewise,
he refused to separate *aito(n) 'oats' from atisk 'grain
field' (pp. 144 and 147).
According to GI (1984:665 = 1995:I, 564, sec 4.2.2.1),
Go atisk contains the most ancient Indo-European name
of 'grain,' but they do not mention a te or refer to Kuhn
in their compendium. 'Common sense' tells us that OI
hafri and hagri* (both mean 'oats'), Go atisk and OE
edisc, as well as *aik-and *akarn- are related pairwise. In
similar fashion, an association between oats and goats in
one language after another, between atisk and *aito(-n),
and between heath and heather cannot, as it seems, be
fortuitous. Yet if we break the rules of the game, we
cannot win it: the game will stop.
Given the present state of our knowledge, Gmc *ai
and a are incompatible. Although a fashion for a may
have existed, to connect *ait- and *at-, we need a 'law'
765
Adz(e) Adz(e)

rather than a feeling that it would be a good thing to do

so or special dispensation. In the absence of such a law
Go atisk and OE a te will remain unrelated in our books.
Kuhn would have probably taken this conclusion in
stride, for, as he says (p. 159), his goal was to stimulate
research rather than convince.
PIMP (1607)
Despite its initial p-, pimp seems to be a cognate of G
Pimpf 'little boy' (Pimpf for *Pfimpf). Pimp 'helper in
mines' and pimp 'servant in logging camps' have
comparable meanings. The development was probably
from *'despised weakling' to 'despised go-between' ~
'procurer of sex.' The Germanic root *pimp - *pamp -
*pump means 'swell. G Pimpf was someone unable to
give a big Pumpf 'fart'; E pimp must have had the same
meaning. Pimp 'bundle of firewood' is also 'small swollen
object.' Since pimp 'pander' is not the original meaning
of this word, Middle French pimper 'dress up smartly,' F
pimpant 'spruce,' and other similar Romance words
provide no clue to its origin.
The sections are devoted to 1) the relationship
between E pimp and G Pimpf and the proposed
connection between pimp and some word for 'penis,' 2)
pimp among other pimp-words, 3) pimp and a few other
similar-sounding words out-
Pimp

766
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Pimp

side English, and 4) pimp 'procurer of sex' and

'bundle of wood. '
1. In addition to 'provider of prostitutes,' pimp
means 'boy who does menial jobs at a logging camp, boy
who carries water, washes dishes, or the like' (R.
Chapman). The paper collar stiff's cigarette was known
among loggers as pimp stick (Stevens [1925:138], R.
Adams), for lumberjacks despised those who smoked
such cigarettes. A helper in northern Idaho mines was
also called a
pimp (Lehman [1922], Pethtel [1965:283]). OED
treats pimp 'small bundle of chopped wood used for
lighting fires' (1742; the word is still in use in Kent and
Sussex; see Schur [1994:497-98]) as a homonym of pimp
'provider of prostitutes,' but the two words seem to
have the same etymon.
A rather obvious cognate of pimp is G Pimpf 'little
(inexperienced) boy.' Under the Nazis, Pimpf meant
'member of a patriotic youth organization, wolf cub.'
Before the Nazi era, it was current mainly in Austria, and
this must be the reason pimp and Pimpf have never been
compared. Pimpf appeared in German dictionaries late:
it does not
occur in DW (vol 13, 1889), WH (1909-10), or Paul1,

767
Adz(e) Adz(e)

and it was added to EWDS only by Mitzka. The

authors of the most widely read works on English
etymology published since roughly 1860 must have been
unaware of this word. Mitzka's earliest
citation is dated "before 1868" (KM). At that time,
Pimpf was still a street word, and even Mueller (a
native German) may not have heard it. Pimpf, once
missed, remained in its isolation. German etymologists,
for their part, overlooked pimp because they had no
need to go outside German.
Unlike pimp, Pimpf poses no problem for an
etymologist. It was originally a contemptuous
designation for a youngster too weak to produce a big
Pumpf, that is, a big fart. Pimp had similar connotations,
going from 'ninny, raw novice' (Hib-bard [1977]), *'weak
boy; weakling; person considered worthless' to 'servant
at the lowest level of the social hierarchy' and 'pander.' E
boy 'servant,' F garçon 'waiter,' and Sp muchacho
'servant' developed in the same way (see BOY for more
details).
Folk etymology seems to have connected pimp and
pimpernel, which was understood as a flower lacking the
power of resistance. E reg (Dorset) pimpersheen means
'one who is not good at enduring hardships' (anonymous
[1935:178]). Spitzer (1951:216-17) considered pimp to be
a clipped form of pimpernel, but this is an unattractive
hypothesis. An association between pimp and some
768
Adz(e) Adz(e)

slang name for 'penis' may have suggested the meaning

'procurer of sex.' Pimp 'penis' has not been attested in
Germanic (Arnoldson [1915:16570], Baskett [1920:106-
11]), but in northern German
the vulgar verb pimpern means 'have sexual inter-
course'; according to Duden, it can be a "side form" of LG
pumpern 'grind with a pestle in a mortar.' Pimmel 'penis'
is allegedly of similar origin (KS). Pimmel (? < *Pimpel) is
phonetically close to E pintle (< OE pintel), Du pint, and
Modi pintill 'penis' (the latter could also mean 'pestle':
ABM).
2. Indo-European and Germanic have many
words formed from the root pimp - pamp - pump (a
baby word, according to Oehl [1933a:44]), includ-
ing the strong verb *pimpan 'swell.' Those having i
tend to designate small objects (such as pimp and
pimple), those with u and a are more often tied to
big things, for example, pamper, originally 'over-
feed' (opposed to obsolete E pimper 'coddle, pam-
per') and G pampig 'arrogant.' Initial p- often alter-
nates with b-.
If pimp is related to G Pimpf, it is unclear why the
German form is not *Pfimpf. Perhaps such a short word
with the affricate pf in initial and final position was hard
to pronounce. Pfropf 'cork' is a deliberate reshaping of a
Low German noun according to the High German
phonetic norm. Pfropfen (v) 'graft' is an equally
769
Adz(e) Adz(e)

deliberate attempt to render a Latin word in High

German. Pimpf may also have originated in the north,
later spread south, and retained traces of its Low
German origin. But since its recorded 'home' is Austria,
this hypothesis can hardly be entertained. A similar
difficulty confronts us in the history of HG foppen 'tease,'
with its unshifted p.
OED was close to guessing the origin of pimp. At
pimping (adj) 'small, trifling, peddling, paltry, petty,
mean; in poor health or condition, sickly' (first recorded
in 1687), it says, "Of uncertain origin; dialectally pimpy is
found in same sense. Cf pimp sb2 [that is, 'bundle of
firewood'] and Cornish dialect. pimpey 'weak watery
cider'; also Du. pimpel 'weak little man,' G pimpelig
'effeminate, sickly, puling,' which imply a stem pimp."
(Pimpey is not in Williams.) If the editors had not missed
E pimp 'servant' and G Pimpf, they would have realized
that pimp was originally 'weak little man,' rather than
'one who provides opportunities for sexual intercourse.'
But even Spitzer missed them.
3. Pimp resembles Middle French pimper
'dress up smartly' and F pimpreneau ~ pimperneau
'kind of eel; knave' (a slippery or shifty creature
and individual). Skeat derived E pimp from some
such word or from F pimpant 'smart, spruce; chic
and attractive.' Littre believed that the root of
pimpant was a nasalized form of pip-. Under Lit-
770
Adz(e) Adz(e)

tre's influence Skeat explained pimp as a 'piper who

ensnares women.' Weekley regarded pimp as a
shortened form of the Latinized word pimpinio. Spitzer
(1951:216) assumed the existence of OF *pimpre (=
pimprenele) 'rascal,' later 'pander.' Skinner and Lemon
derived pimp from Gr πέμπω 'I send'; προπομπός
'accompanying person' gave them the necessary
meaning 'provider.' Skinner compared pimp with Ital
pinco, F pinge, and L penis. His etymology appears in all
the editions of Johnson's dictionary and in Kenrick.
Finally, Mackay (1877), who looked on most English
words as rebuses with a key in Gaelic, presented pimp as
Gael pighe(pi') 'bird' + uimpe 'around her' = 'decoy.' All
those etymologies, whether fanciful or reasonable,
assume the initial meaning to have been 'smart fellow,
rascal, pander.' R. Chapman posited the influence of imp
on pimp. Nothing supports this conjecture.
4. Pimp 'bundle of wood' accords well with *pimp
'swell.' A similar case would be Ital (Piemont) bafra 'full
belly,' bafre 'swell,' F bafrer 'gorge oneself with food,'
and OF baffe 'bundle of sticks'; baffe is believed to be the
etymon of E bavin, with the same meaning (Körting,
1152); see also Garcia de Diego (156-59, baf). A distant
etymology for a word whose recorded history begins in
1742 is risky, but both pimp 'boy' and pimp 'bundle of
sticks' are probably old. If they go back to the root *pimp
- *pamp - *pump and remained in regional use for
771
Adz(e) Adz(e)

centuries, their coexistence may have been supported by

the syncretism 'peg'/'child' and 'child'/'wood.' Compare
E chit 'young of a beast, very young person' and 'potato
shoot,' related to OE cip 'shoot, sprout, seed, mote in the
eye'; G Kind 'child' and OS kidlek 'tax on bundles of
wood.' OI hris means 'brushwood' and 'branches cut off
from a tree,' while hrisi means 'illegitimate child (boy).'
Its feminine counterpart is hrisa. The traditional
explanation that a hrisi is 'a child begotten in the woods'
is "too ingenious," to quote a phrase Partridge used on a
different occasion. Trier's explanation (1963:183-84) that
hrisi is simply a side branch is more persuasive.
In such cases, the association may have been from
'offshoot' to 'offspring, child,' as in imp, scion, stripling,
slip (of a girl), and many others, possibly including OE
hyse 'boy,' all of which meant 'offshoot' (Ekwall
[1928:205-06], Bäck [1934:176-79], Trier [1952:55, 60-
61]), or it may have been from 'chip off an old block,' or
from 'stub, stump' (something formless, 'swollen') to
'child.' Johansson
(1900:373-78, 381-82) and Much (1909) cite Ger-
manic words for 'boy,' 'girl,' and 'child' that can be
etymologized as 'stump, piece of wood, etc.' See also H.
Logeman (1906:279, note 2) and a more general
discussion of 'men and trees' in Smythe Palmer (1876,
chapter 7), Pauli (1919:284-85), Trier (1952; 1963), Ader
(1958:32-33), and Weber (1993). Perhaps Vidarr, the
772
Adz(e) Adz(e)

name of OBinn's son, belongs here too (if it is a cognate

of OI vidir 'willow').
Fag(got) and the obscure English word bung provide
other parallels. Besides bung 'stopper,' there are also
bung 'nickname for the master's assistant who
superintends the serving of the grog' (nautical), as well
as bung 'bundle of hemp stalks' and (in pottery) 'pile of
clay cases in which fine stoneware is baked.' OED seems
to treat bung 'assistant' as a humorous extension of
bung 'stopper.' This is not unthinkable. For instance,
Modi spons (from Danish) 'bung' and 'child' is a word
traceable to the same Latin etymon as are E bung and G
Stbpsel 'bung' and 'child,' but OED suggests that bung
'pile' is "perhaps not the same word." In light of the
history of pimp and fag(g)ot, bung 'assistant' (that is,
'servant') and bung 'pile' need not be separated (see
FAGGOT). Pimp means 'small bundle of wood' and 'servant
at a logging camp,' presumably because for a logger an
association between the two would not be far-fetched.
In searching for the origin of the syncretism
'child'/'bundle of wood,' we should turn to the
experience of those in whose life the forest played a
decisive role. Such people would naturally animate trees,
brushwood, and stumps, and even bestow names on
them: compare the Dorset word nickie 'a tiny faggot
made to light fires' (anonymous [1935:179]), cited at

773
Adz(e) Adz(e)

FAGGOT. See more on the 'child'/'wood' syncretism at CUB

(Liberman [1992a:71-80, 86-87]).
RABBIT (?1398)
Outside English, only Walloon robett 'rabbit' is in
some way connected with rabbit. However, the English
word need not be a borrowing from a Romance
language. It is rather one of many Germanic animal
names having the structure r + vowel + b (such as G
Robbe 'seal' and Icel robbi 'sheep, ram') and a French
suffix. This etymon is not traceable to E rub, OE reofan
'break,' or G reiben 'rub.' Many similar-sounding words
that have been compared with rabbit are not related.
Among them are G Raupe 'caterpillar,' Russ ryba 'fish,'
and several Eurasian names of the fox (Sp raposa, OI refr,
and others). F râble 'back and loin of the rabbit,' F
rabouillère 'rabbit hole,' and Sp rabo 'tail' are not viable
etymons of rabbit. The derivation of rabbit from the
proper name Robert is also unlikely.
The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest
conjectures on the origin of rabbit, 2) rabbit and similar
words, especially in French; Germanic animal names
having the structure r + vowel + b, 3) r-b words outside
Germanic, 4) rabbit and Robert ~ Rabbet, and 5)
(d)rabbit and Welsh rabbit.
1. According to OED, the earliest example of rabbit in
Middle English goes back to 1398, but Skeat (1903-
06:256) cites two examples that antedate the first
774
Adz(e) Adz(e)

quotation in OED by approximately a decade. Another

English name of this rodent is con(e)y. Its traditional
pronunciation [IkAni] gave rise to an obscene pun,
believed to be the reason cony was replaced with rabbit
(see, for example, G. Hughes [1988:48]). The ousting of
OF connin by lapin has been attributed to a similar cause.
Since cony occurs in the Authorised Version of the Bible,
the pronunciation [kouni] was introduced "for solemn
reading."
The closest cognates of rabbit first appeared in
Minsheu, who cited Fl ('Belgian') robbe, robbeken
'rabbit.' Less successful was the early search for the
distant origin of rabbit. Minsheu suggested Hebr Π21
(rabah) 'copulate' as the word's etymon, on account of
the animal's fecundity. Surprisingly, he missed Gk λαγώς
'hare' and λάγνος 'lascivious.' Had he known more
languages, he might have noticed the pair Russ zaiats
'hare' (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic) and Lith zaisti
'play, jump; copulate.' Mitchell repeated or reinvented
Minsheu's Hebrew etymology (1908:85). Skinner traced
rabbit to L rapidus 'swift,' while Junius derived it from
the compound roughfet 'rough foot,' as in the Greek
compound δασύπούς 'hare' (δασύς 'hairy, furry' + πούς
'foot'), and supported his idea with the alleged
derivation of E hare from hair and of Wel ceinach 'hare'
from cedenog 'hairy.' This etymology also enjoyed some

775
Adz(e) Adz(e)

prestige at the beginning of the 20th century (Lydekker

[1907:248]).
Cleland (1766:39) decomposed rabbit into er 'earth'
+ abit and glossed the whole as 'digging into the earth,
to form its burrow.' Whiter II:1233, a scholar who
believed that all words were derived from the concept of
the earth, arrived at a similar result from a different
direction: he connected rabbit ~ robbe ~ robbeken with
the phrase rib land 'give it half plowing.' Likewise,
Balliolensis (1853) looked for a tie between rabbit and Ir
rap 'creature that digs and burrows in the ground.'
Bingham (1862) referred to the West-country
pronunciation of rabbit as herpet and cited Gk έρπετόν
'creeper.' Keightley (1862a and b) traced rabbit and F
lapin to Gk δασύπού ς (he probably did not know
Junius), citing alternations between d, l, and r (his
etymology was subjected to scathing criticism by Chance
[1862], who, it appears, also missed Junius), while A. Hall
(1890) compared rabbit and rat, and Hop-kinson
(1890:123) looked for the origin of rabbit in E rub and G
reiben (rabbit = scraper, burrower). Carnoy derived
rabbit from rub as a matter of course (1955:121). Drake
(1907:64, note 67n), inspired by Biblical Hebr Tib 2 "1 a
(ar(e)nebet) 'hare, rabbit,' which he transliterated as
har(e)nebet), treated both E hare and rabbit as possible
cognates of this word. According to CEDHL (56), the root
of nb?"ia may be a verb meaning 'jump.' No evidence
776
Adz(e) Adz(e)

points to the fact that the Semitic name for 'hare' and
'rabbit' has spread to Western Europe. Skeat 4 mentioned
Nynorsk rabbla 'snap' as a possible cognate of rabbit.
Makovskii (1992b:121) etymologized rabbit as 'moving
fast' and compared it with L rabies 'madness' and
robustus 'oaken; firm, strong,' allegedly going back to the
root 'bend; cut.' Santangelo (1953:10-11) offered a few
other equally contrived etymologies.
2. The discovery of Walloon robett 'rabbit'
(Wedgwood) posed the question of the Romance origin
of the English word. According to OED, the path was
from Flemish to Walloon and from northern France to
England. A few other Romance words resemble rabbit.
Chance (1862) cited F râble 'back and loins of certain
quadrupeds ... especially used of the rabbit and the hare'
and rabouillère 'rabbit hole.' He tentatively compared
râble with L rapidus (see Skinner, above), E rasp, and G
raffen 'pile, heap' (v), so that rabbit emerged as a swift
'scraping (scratching)' animal (see Bal-liolensis, above).
Smythe Palmer (1876) mentionsed Sp rabo 'tail,'
rabadilla 'scut,' and rabôn, which he glossed 'curtal' (that
is, 'horse with its tail cut short or docked'), and cited as a
parallel E bunny from Gael bun 'tail.' He overlooked a
case that could have reinforced his etymology, namely
the history of E coward cognate with OF coart (the name
of the hare in Roman de Renart), allegedly from a word

777
Adz(e) Adz(e)

for 'tail' (L cauda). OED and ODEE reject the derivation of

bunny from bun.
The main part of Smythe Palmer's etymology is also
weak. The Iberian word for 'tail' could not have become
the basis of a late Middle English (14 th century)
designation of a common rodent. Unlike L cunIculus,
probably a word of Iberian origin (the Romans learned
about rabbits from the Spaniards) that developed into Sp
conejo, with cognates elsewhere in Romance, and was
later borrowed into Germanic (E coney ~ cony, Du conijn,
G Kaninchen), Sp rabo 'tail,' Sp, Port raposa 'fox,' and so
on had no channels for spreading to English. Yet Skeat
gives Sp rabo 'tail, hind quarters' and rabear 'wag the
tail' with a question mark, along with MDu robbe, as the
possibile etymons of rabbit.
The origin of Sp rabo, Sp raposa, and F râble is
unknown, but F râble could have yielded E rabbit only if
French had a corresponding well-known animal name.
Despite the circumstantial evidence of F rabot
'carpenter's plane' (allegedly called this because it looks
like a rabbit lying on the ground) and rabouillère 'rabbit
burrow,' such a name does not seem to have existed.
Rabouillère (1534), also used as the name for a hole in
which shrimp are kept, has, according to most
dictionaries, the prefix ra-, while F reg rabotte 'rabbit' is
probably an extension of rabot 'plane.' If so, then the
rabbit looks like the tool, not the tool like the rabbit.
778
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(Can it be that the root of F rabot, a word of disputed

etymology, is a reshaping of LG rûbank 'big plane'? Russ
ruba-nok 'plane' came from Low German and among the
Romance names of tools F hache 'hatchet' is another
word of Germanic origin, from Franconian *happia.) Nor
does F lapereau 'young rabbit' testify to the existence of
*rabbereau (suggested in EWFS and rejected by ML,
4905). Guntert (1932:19-20) thought a connection
between rabouillère (his rab-bouilère is probably a
misprint) and rabbit possible. F reg rabote 'toad' (? <
*rainebot, see especially Sai-néan [1907:127]) has no
connection with the words under discussion despite
Makovskii's assurance to
the contrary (1992a:121).
No one doubts that Walloon robett is a borrowing
from Flemish, but the problem is to show how this word
reached England. Whatever the origin of central French
rabotte, the etymon of E rabbit, if it is a Romance word,
could have been only a northern French form.
Gamillscheg (1926:247) recognized the difficulty of
tracing E rabbit, with its a in the root, to robette and
referred to the rule of vocalic dissimilation that allegedly
produced rabotte from *robotte. However, that rule
applies only to central French. Judging by the examples
in OED, the earliest meaning of ME rabet(t) was 'small
rabbit,' a word mainly associated with French cuisine.
The association makes the presence of a Romance
779
Adz(e) Adz(e)

diminutive suffix in rabbit natural, but it does not furnish

sufficient proof that the entire noun is French.
The etymon of Walloon robett is not an isolated
word in Flemish. (Most of the facts surveyed below were
known to Gamillscheg, loc cit.) Germanic makes wide use
of the root r-b in naming animals. Fr, MDu, Fl, and G
robbe ~ Robbe mean 'seal, phoca,, but Kilianus knew
only robbe 'rabbit'; the Low German for 'seal' is rubbe
(one of the variants). De Bo (robbe) gives rabbe and
robbe 'rabbit' and comments that when rabbits are
called, people say: "Ribbe, ribbe!"; see also W. de Vries
(1919:297-
98) on this subject. In Groningen, rob and rlbe are
words used in addressing little children (Van Lessen
[1928: 93, note]). A considerable number of instances
when the same word designates a child and an animal
have been recorded. Perhaps the best-known example is
OI kind (f) 'child' ~ ModI kind 'sheep.' The playful nature
of the r-b words is especially obvious in Dutch.
Robbeknot turns up as a name in Bredero (1585-1616)
(Van Lessen [1928:93]), and Hexham gives robbenknol 'a
little person with a great belly' (as Charnock [1889]
noted). The first element of Du robbedoes 'romping
child, hoyden, bumpkin' is more probably derived from
robbe 'seal' than from robben 'romp.' Does poses its own
problems (NEW), but its connection with the cognates of

780
Adz(e) Adz(e)

E dizzy (on which see DWARF) is probable (Van der

Meulen [1917:5]). ModI robbi
means 'sheep, ram' (see further at ROBIN).
Dutch and German etymologists have long treated
Du and G robbe ~ Robbe and E rabbit as related (see
Mueller, VV, Franck, Vercoullie, KL, and NEW, among
others), but the best English dictionaries remain
noncommittal and only list the Walloon and Flemish
words (Skeat4) or say "etymology uncertain" (UED) or
"etymology unknown" (Weekley). French forms appear
and disappear in the entries for no apparent reason. W 1
does not cite them. W2 derives rabbit from OF rabot
'carpenter's plane,' but in W3 the reference to the Old
French word is gone. EW mentions Walloon robett (< Fl
robbe) in the first edition. The second edition adds OF
rabot 'plane, *rabbit' to robett, and the third edition
leaves only the Old French word. According to ODEE, late
ME rabet(te) is perhaps an adaptation of an Old French
form reproduced by F reg rabotte, rabouillet 'young
rabbit,' and rabouillere 'rabbit burrow,' possibly of 'Low
Dutch' origin.
CEDEL finds the French and the Middle Dutch
origin of rabbit equally possible. Derocquigny
(1904:75), Plate (1934:29), and De Schutter (1996:53)
present the hypothesis that rabbit reached England
from France as fact.

781
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Since the northern French etymon of rabbit has not

been found and since even in central French dialects
rabotte is not a common word, the idea that E rabbit
goes back to French looks unattractive. It is more likely
that a French suffix attached itself to the Middle English
root rab-. According to OED and ODEE, -et became an
English formative in the 16th century, but a few examples
are earlier. Especially characteristic is strumpet, 1327
(see STRUMPET). An Anglo-French hybrid (Gmc rab- + F -et)
is probable. Given this reconstruction, E rabbit will
appear as an Anglo-French formation similar to the
Walloon word rather than a borrowing from an
unidentifiable dialect of Old French. Robin bears out the
existence of the Middle English root rab- ~ rob- (see
ROBIN). If rabbit was coined in England, the problem of a
~ o in this word (from robbet to rabbit) loses its
poignancy. The alternation a ~ o after r is not rare
(Middle English for 'rat' was ratte, but rotte occurred
once too; Low German had the alteration rat ~ ratte ~
rot; see also the Scandinavian examples, above, and at
HEIFER, sec 4); therefore, it is not necessary to set up ME
*robett or compare rabbit and ME rabbet ~ rabit
'Arabian horse' (Skeat4) to account for a from o.
The root r-b is sometimes said to be akin to LG
rubben 'rub' (the supposed etymon of E rub, ModI rubla
'rub,' Sw rubba 'move, shift,' Dan and N rubbe 'scrape,
scratch'), EFr rubben 'rough,' and LG rubbe-lig ~ rubberig
782
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'uneven, rugged' (FT, rubbe; Carnoy [1955:121, kun-iko]),

as well as OE reofan ~ OI rjufa 'reave, break.' EWDS11
asserts that G Robbe 'seal' is related to Raupe
'caterpillar,' both allegedly from *rub 'bristly' (so
beginning with the eleventh edition, Kluge-Gotze). NEW
(rups) expresses doubts about the connection between
Robbe ~ Raupe and points out that not all caterpillars are
hairy. Van Lessen (1928:93) finds it incredible that a seal,
an animal with especially smooth hair, should have been
called bristly (the same is true of rabbits and sheep).
An older etymology of Raupe emphasized its
similarity with Russ ryba 'fish' (nearly the same form in
the other Slavic languages), definitely not a hairy or
bristly creature, the end result of this etymology being
the reconstruction of the protomean-ing *'worm.' Wood
(1920:238/98) gives Raupe, Robbe, and ryba under one
heading. Du rups 'caterpillar,' with its variants risp(e) and
rips, is even more obscure than G Raupe (see W. de Vries
[1919:299-300] and NEW, among others). Boutkan
and Kossmann (1998) offer the most detailed dis-
cussion of Raupe ~ rups (with the conclusion that it is a
substrate word). De Vaan (2000) rejects their conclusion
and traces both words to a verb meaning 'pick, pluck,
strip' (Go raupjan and its cognates). Seebold (KS)
retained Gotze's etymology but noted that the word for
'bristles,' presumably represented by Robbe 'seal' and

783
Adz(e) Adz(e)

robbe(ken) 'rabbit,' had been postulated on the evidence

of Raupe rather than attested.
Van Lessen (1928:93) tried to explain rob 'seal' from
robben (v), a late doublet of ravotten 'romp,' but that
verb cannot account for the existence of r-b words
outside Dutch. Van Wijk (EWNT2, rob) does not support
the idea that rob is a 'romper,' yet
NEW looks on it as worthy of consideration. Ties
between G Raupe, Du rups, LG rubben, E rub, Du rubbelig
and the root r-b do not go far enough to assign the
meaning 'hairy,' let alone 'bristly,' to it. Raupe and
possibly rups had a long vowel in the older periods and
cannot be related to G Robbe, Russ ryba, or E rabbit. The
root before us lacks a remote etymology, and all its
semantic depth is on the surface. It does not, in
principle, differ from G reg boppi 'fat dog,' N reg tobba
'mare' (Wood [1920/91 and 176], OFr bobba-, ME babi
'baby,' and a host of others of the same type.
3. The Germanic words having the structure r-b
resemble many Eurasian names of the fox, such as Sp
and Port raposa. Etymological dictionaries give them due
attention (see also Huss [1935:20407] and Reinisch's
daring comparison of Skt lopasdh with the root of lynx in
Indo-European and African languages [1873:151]). Of
apparently the same origin is Finn repo, with cognates in
the other Finno-Ugric languages (see refr in AEW and
Redei [1986:46/18]). In Germanic, only Scandinavian has
784
Adz(e) Adz(e)

such a word: OI refr (Dan rsv, Sw rav, N rev); the

expressive variants of ModI refur are rebbi and rebbali
(ABM). Whether they go back to the color
name 'red' (Much [1901-02:285], Frisk [1931:99])
cannot be decided. Brandal (1929:10-11, 13, 27)
looked for the etymon of this migratory word in some
Sarmatian languages. However, when people begin to
call animals kobbi, robbei, tobbai, boppi and call the flea
and the spider coppe or loppe, or noppe (see EFr -LG?-
noppe in Holthausen [1924: 115]; it is not in Ten
Doornkaat Koolman), coincidences are bound to arise in
languages that have never been in contact. Skt lopasdh,
Sp raposa, Finn repo, OI refr, and others may go back to
different etymons and their similarity may be due to
chance. If a migratory word that originated somewhere
in ancient Iranian had reached Germanic, it would hardly
have survived only in Scandinavian.
OIr robb 'body,' recorded in the forms rop and rap,
has no accepted etymology (related to L rupe 'fat man;
slab'? LE). In Modern Irish, rap is 'any creature that
draws its food towards it' (O'Reilly's gloss). Only
Balliolensis compared Ir rap and E rabbit (see robb, rop
'animal' and robb 'body' in CDIL). LE (robb) admits the
possibility of an expressive formation. WP II:354-55
derives MI robb from *reub-, as in E rip; IEW (869) gives
that etymology with a question mark.

785
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Essays on the origin of the rabbit's name in the Baltic

and Romance languages (see especially
Guntert [1932:12-13] and Hubschmid [1943]) show
that the feature people choose for naming this
animal is almost unpredictable. The 77 names invented
for a hare in a 13th-century English poem (they are all
terms of abuse: A. Ross [1932]) bear additional
testimony to human resourcefulness in this area. Rabbits
were well known in the British Isles by the year 1200, but
the word rabbit surfaced two centuries later. Most likely,
speakers of English coined many words for the new
animal. They are all lost, while rabbit has survived. The
sound complex r-b in the name of the rabbit has no
parallels outside Germanic.
4. A popular etymology traces rabbit to the name
Robert. This is how CD explains not only rabbit but also
the entire Germanic group (G Robbe and the rest); it also
compares rabbit and robin. Such a hypothesis fails even
for robin, but it would be a minor miracle if speakers of
Dutch, Flemish, English, German, and Icelandic chose the
same proper name for deriving the name of the seal, the
rabbit, and the sheep. The etymology from CD turns up
in W2, UED, Partridge (1958), CEDEL, and in books and
articles for the general reader (for
example, L. Smith [1926:214] and Espy [1978:199,
201]). Weekley, who derives rabbit from Robert,
cites the last name Rabbetts and the custom of calling
786
Adz(e) Adz(e)

rabbits Robert in Devon. Neither fact makes his idea

convincing. Rabbetts itself needs an etymology, and the
tie between rabbit and Robert in Devon is secondary
(compare the form of Russ petukh 'rooster,' stress on the
second syllable, from pet' 'sing,' which induced that bird
to be called Petia, diminutive of Petr, in Russian
folklore). Weekley (1933:130) does not repeat his old
derivation. The last name Rabbett (Rabet, Rabbitt,
Rabut) may perhaps go back to rabbit. Someone called
Mr. Rabbit, regardless of the spelling, would look less
conspicuous than Mr. Heifer, Hound, Panther, and even
Mr. Cattle, Kine, and Oxen (Lower [1875:I, 187]; H.
Harrison).
The association of Rabbet with the animal name may
be old (Ewen [1931:332]), but other possibilities also
exist: from *radbod ~ *rxdbod, which H. Harrison glosses
as 'swift messenger' (he means OE *rxdboda), from OE
*rxdbodo 'counsel messenger' (RW, ra dbodo, but ra
dbodo may have meant only 'travel messenger'), or from
Robert (E. Smith
[1969:289]; Cottle). Charnock's rat-brecht 'distin-
guished for counsel' (= rxd-breht?) (1868) resembles
*hrxdboda ~ rxdbodo; however, it enabled him to
explain Rabbett, Radbod, Redpath, Ratpet, and Rat-perth
in one fell swoop. E. Smith (1969:289) mentions (Little)
Rab, a hypocoristic form of raven (OE hrxfn). Some of
those conjectures, with their recurring references to
787
Adz(e) Adz(e)

"Old German," are guesswork by people without

sufficient schooling in the history of English. Weekley
(1937) preferred not to discuss the etymology of the last
name Rabbett.
5. The old vulgarism (d)rabbit 'darn it' (for example,
rabbit the child! drabbit the girl!) was first traced to F
rabattre 'beat down' (Addis [1868], F.C.H. [1868]; Skeat
[1868] = Skeat [1896/39]). Its variant rat it!, drat it (Tew
[1868]) may have been due to rat substituted for rabbit,
but Skeat (loc cit) and J. C. M. (1868) derived drat it from
drot it < *'od rot it 'God rot it.' OED denies (d)rabbit an
etymology of its own and explains it as a possible
fanciful alternation of drat. Cohen's conjecture (1987:4)
that drat became drabbit for euphemistic reasons or be-
cause of "the seaman's superstition that rabbits bring
bad luck" needs further substantiation.
OED compares Welsh rabbit (1725) 'dish of toasted
cheese' with Scotch rabbit (1743; the same meaning?)
and capon, a name humorously applied to various fish,
for instance, capon = dried haddock. Such names are not
uncommon. Among them are Irish lemons or Irish
apricots 'potatoes,' Essex lion
'calf' and locally 'veal dish' (Tylor [1874:505]; T. R.
[1945]), Arkansas chicken 'salt pork,' Cape Cod
turkey 'salt codfish' (J. Carr [1907:183]), Kansas City fish
= Arkansas chicken (Babcock [1950:139]), Gourock hens
or Norfolk capons 'red herrings,' and Gravesend
788
Adz(e) Adz(e)

sweetmeats 'shrimps.' B. Chapman (1947:258) says: "The

Welsh were supposed to be so poverty-stricken they
could not afford even rabbit meat but had to substitute
cheese for it." This sounds like an ad hoc explanation.
The joke resolves itself into giving something cheap
and unappetizing the name of an expensive dainty.
However, Welsh rabbit does not duplicate the usual
juxtaposition of two types of meat ~ fish ~ fowl (pork ~
chicken, fish ~ turkey ~ game ~ cheese). EB (rabbit) gives
better parallels: prarie oyster 'the yolk of an egg with
vinegar, pepper, &c added' and Scotch woodcock 'a
savory of buttered eggs on anchovy toast.' It contends
that "the alteration to Welsh rare-bit is due to a failure
to see the joke as it is." Indeed, the allusion has never
been clear. See a few more examples in anonymous
(1889a:50). Consider Rees's (1987:219) light-
hearted remark with regard to Welsh rabbit: "Well,
Bombay duck is a fish and mock-turtle soup has nothing
to do with turtle."
The use of the words hare and rabbit is not unusual
in this kind of travesty. Pennsylvania Dutch Paanhaas
(that is, 'panhare') means 'maize flour boiled in the
metzel soup, afterward fried and seasoned like a hare'
(Chamberlain [1889], with reference to Haldeman
[1872:20]), and Ashkenazic Russ
fal'shivyi zaiats (that is, 'false hare') is a dish of roast
and egg. Popular books and some dictionaries explain
789
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Welsh rabbit (1785) as folk etymology of Welsh rarebit,

but as OED states, no evidence points to the
independent existence of rarebit. In Fowler's words
(1965:651), Welsh rabbit is amusing and right, and Welsh
rarebit stupid and wrong (Liberman [1997:108-17]).
RAGAMUFFIN (1344)
Ragamuffin first appeared in texts as one of the
medieval names of the Devil. It is a compound, and the
origin of each of its parts is problematic. Etymologizing
only rag- and dismissing -amuffin as a fanciful ending
leaves this word without a reconstructed past. In all
probability, ragamuffin has a connecting element (rag-a-
muffin) and is thus an extended form like cockney from
cock-e-nei. The most convincing hypothesis traces both
rag- and -muffin to words for 'devil,' as in OF Rogomant
(though in French it may have been a borrowing from
Germanic), preserved in E Ragman and Ragman's roll (>
rigmarole), and Old Muffy, from AF maufe 'ugly; the Evil
One.' Ragamuffin is then a semantic reduplication with
an augment (-a-) in the middle, *'devil-a-devil.' An
association with rags is late and due to folk etymology.
The proposed derivation of ragamuffin finds partial
confirmation in the history of hobbledehoy. Both
ragamuffin and hobbledehoy were first names of the
Devil. The meaning of both has changed to 'ragged man'
(often 'ragged urchin') and 'hobbling (awkward) youth'

790
Adz(e) Adz(e)

respectively, and both are extended forms, though with

different augments.
The sections are devoted to 1) rag- 'devil,' 2) -muffin
as a reflex of one of the Devil's names, 3) the role of -a-
in ragamuffin and in similar words, and 4) a brief
comparison of ragamuffin and hobbledehoy.
1. It has been known for a long time that in
Langland's Piers Plowman, 1393 (c, XXI:183, Skeat's
edition, 1886, vol 1) a devil called Raga-moffin is
mentioned. OED quotes the relevant passage. According
to MED, the name Isabella Ragamoffyn occurred in 1344.
For two centuries ragamuffin (with any spelling) did not
appear in written documents. Its uninterrupted history
goes back to 1581. OED says the following about its
origin: "[P]rob[ably] from RAG sb.1 (cf. RAGGED 1c), with
fanciful ending." The second part of ragabush 'worthless
person' (now chiefly regional) is also said to contain a
fanciful ending added to rag. The concept of the fanciful
ending does not make sense when applied to sound
strings like -amuffin and -abush. Shipley (1945,
ragamuffin) adds -mudgeon in curmudgeon (on which
see MOOCH, sec 5) and -scallion in rapscallion to the list of
such misbegotten creations. Whatever the origin of raga-
muffin, its present day sense was influenced by rag, but
it does not follow that the first ragamuffin was ragged or
wore rags.

791
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The entry Ragman 'devil' in OED contains a passing

remark: "cf. RAGAMUFFIN, RAGGED, Sw[edish] ragg-en
['devil']." In the entry ragged, several examples make it
clear that the Devil was often portrayed as having a
ragged appearance. Sw raggen can be understood as 'the
shaggy (hairy) one,' a tempting interpretation in light of
the material from Middle English in OED, or as 'the evil
one' (rag is also a metathesized form of Sw arg 'evil,
wicked'). Hellquist preferred the second alternative,
while OED took the first one for granted. Spitzer
(1947:91) derived rageman (this is Lang-land's spelling)
from French. The idea that Ragemon (le bon) and
Rogomant were folk etymologized into rageman ~
Rageman carries more conviction than that raggen was
borrowed from Swedish, because Sw raggen is a word
unrecorded in the other Scandinavian languages. On
Rageman see also rigmarole in English etymological
dictionaries.
The French origin of ragman and ragamuffin was
suggested (for the first time?) by anonymous
(1822b:618), but neither Spitzer nor his predecessors
succeeded in discovering the ultimate etymon of the
French name, which may have been Germanic, especially
if an old attempt to connect E rag and Ital ragazzo 'boy,
youth' is not dismissed out of hand (then ragazzo would
come out as 'little devil,' not 'person in rags': Liberman

792
Adz(e) Adz(e)

[2006:197-98]). Probably no other word of Italian has

been discussed so often with such meager results.
The Germanic root *rag- 'fury' is probable: compare
Du reg raggen 'run around in a state of wild excitement'
(lopen en raggen has the same meaning), alternating
with Du reg rakken (Weijnen [1939-40]: detailed
discussion without a definitive etymology). Sw rag(g)la
'wobble,' and ModI ragla 'wander about' may belong
with the Dutch verb, but the chances are not so good,
because the meanings—'move in violent agitation' and
'wander aimlessly, move unsteadily'—do not match. The
nasalized forms (N rangle, and so forth), except for late
MHG ranzen 'jump violently' (FT, rangle and rage III;
ABM, ragla; KS, Range and ranzen), are synonymous
with ragla.
If such a root existed, it need not have been identical
with *arg- 'copulate' (said about animals), though their
derivatives were partly synonymous in various languages
and though one could develop from the other by
metathesis, as happened in Old Norse. (Can E rag 'scold'
be of similar origin and can G regen 'stir' be related to
this *ragen rather than G ragen 'rise, tower, jut out'?) A
pagan divinity called Rageman, someone like the Old
English Herla cyning 'King Herla,' is not unthinkable (cf
Wodan from *wod- 'fury,' as in G Wut). The same name
of the Devil seems to have been known in the Baltic
languages: Lithuanian ragana and Latvian ragana mean
793
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'witch' (another much-discussed word; see, for example,

Otkupshchikov [1977]).
2. Conjectures on the etymology of -muffin have
been inconclusive: from Sp mofar 'mock' or Ital muffo
'musty' (W 1828 and in all the editions until 1864), from
G reg muffen 'smell musty' (W 1864; the same until
1890), from Gael maoidh 'threaten' (Mackay [1877];
Mackay, who derived hundreds of words of European
languages from Gaelic, combined Gael ragair 'thief,
villain' with maoidh, so that ragamuffin turned out to be
'dangerous scoundrel'), and from E muff 'stupid, clumsy
person' (thus UED, which only "compares" -muffin with
muff).
John Ker traced numerous English words to
nonexistent Dutch phrases, and his derivations are
among the most ludicrous in the history of English
etymology. He derived ragamuffin from rag er mof-fin
'poverty shews itself in that countenance.' "Literally, the
Westphalian boor predominates in his person. Mof is
the nickname of the Westphalian
labourer The word mof is founded in the thema
mo-en, in the import of, to cut, to mow; and the
term
means strictly, a mower Moffin is the female of
this
class And I have no doubts our term muffin is

794
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the ellipsis of moffincoeck, the pastry of the muffin

who cries it, as that which she is employed to carry
about to dispose of" (Ker 1837:I, 89). His gloss of
rag er moffin 'may it show' goes back (as he says) to
the Dutch or German verb ragen 'project' in the
subjunctive and er 'there.' With Ker we are pushed to
the edge of normalcy, but in a small way he was
vindicated: the nickname mof turns up in Mueller2 and
UED (ragamuffin), and rag- may be akin to the verb
ragen, though not the one he meant.
Richardson thought of ragabash and raggabrash as
"a corruption of ragged (or perhaps rakell ['profligate'])
rubbish," but "of ragamuffin," he says, "the examples
found have afforded no clue to the true origin." Mueller 2
cites G muffen 'smell musty, moldy' and E muff 'stupid
fellow' (the same word as in Ker). He mentions
Ragamofin, the name of a demon in some of the old
mysteries, and of all English etymologists he seems to be
the only one to suggest a tie between E ragamuffin and
Ital ragazzo 'boy.' ID (1850) follows Webster but also
offers a possible derivation from rag and obsolete mof,
muff 'long sleeve.'
In Spitzer's opinion (1947:93), ragamuffin goes back
to F "*Rogom-ouf[l]e or *Ragam-ouf[l]e, which must be
a blend of Ragemon 'devil,' and such words as OF [sic]
ruffien of the fourteenth century... or F maroufle

795
Adz(e) Adz(e)

['scoundrel']; again, it could even be a coinage from the

ragemon stem formed with the OF
suffix -ouf[le], like maroufle itself The idea of
'ragged' appears in ragamuffin only as late as 1440,
and is consequently quite secondary." Spitzer adds that
ragamuffin still means a (ragged) street urchin and that
perhaps 'street urchin' was the original meaning, whence
an association with 'devil, demon, imp, heathen.'
W (1890) leaves ragamuffin without any etymology
and mentions only the name of Langland's demon. For a
long time dictionaries have followed this example. Only
Wyld (UED) risked a tentative comparison of -muffin with
muff, which he may have found independently of his
predecessors or in Mueller2 (for no one read Ker). Skeat
did not include ragamuffin in his dictionary, but in his
edition
of Piers Plowman (1886:II, 257, note on line 283) he
wrote: "Mr. Halliwell... remarks that Ragamofin is a
name of a demon in some of the old mysteries. It has
since passed into a sort of familiar slang term for any one
poorly clad. The demons, it may be observed, took the
comic parts in the old mysteries, and were therefore
sometimes fitted with odd names." However, E. Stanley
(1968:110) points out in his comment on Halliwell's
statement that there is no existence for the use of
Ragamofin in old medieval plays.

796
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Against this background, the entry in AHD 3,4 is all the

more surprising. It traces -muffin to MDu moffel ~ muff
'mitten' (is a bahuvrihi of the Redcap type meant:
Ragamuffin = ragmitten or ragged mitten?). The entry
has a supplementary word history in which we read that
the discovery of the name Isabella Ragamoffyn disproves
the current derivation of ragamuffin from a devil's name.
But ragamuffin has always been understood as a vague
continuation rather than a reflex of ragamoffyn in Piers
Plowman. Apparently, the woman in question had the
character that earned her the unusual soubriquet.
Some of the conjectures listed above can be ruled
out by definition. An English compound need not have
an element straight from Spanish, Italian, German,
Gaelic, or Middle Dutch. One
can look for English cognates of these words, but E -
muffin has not been recorded (muffin 'cake' became
known in the 18th century and has always meant what it
means now). Spitzer's etymology is learned but too
speculative. E muff, which Mueller and Wyld cite, first
occurs in Dickens in 1837, and this must have been the
time it gained currency in the streets of London. It has no
ancestors, except muff 'deprecatory term of a German or
Swiss, sometimes loosely applied to other foreigners,'
which does not occur in extant texts after 1697. Du muff
'lout' (< mof, originally the same meaning as in E muff)
and G Muffel were recorded much later than ragamuffin.
797
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Even if their history were less opaque, their late

attestation and the absence of cognates in Middle
English make a connection with ragamuffin improbable.
However, muff may have been an import from the
continent.
A seemingly correct etymology of -muffin can be
deduced from the information in an article by Smythe
Palmer. He read Prevost (1905) and noted the phrase
Auld Muffy used by the older dalesmen for the Devil. As
he observes: "The expression is now but seldom heard,
and in a few years, probably it will be as extinct as the
dodo." Muffy is AF maufé 'ugly, ill-featured,' "which was
once synonymous with the Evil One," a creature "notori-
ously hideous and deformed"; cf Satan le maufé (Smythe
Palmer [1910:545-46]; additional details on p. 546). E reg
muffy 'hermaphrodite' is said to be an alteration of
morfrodite, but if Old Muffy was known more widely in
the past, the two words may have interacted. See the
supplement to DWARF on hermaphrodites, and Prescott
(1995) on
muffy.
Both components of ragamuffin seem to mean
'devil'. Only the origin of final -n is not quite clear, but so
many nouns ended in -an, -en (like guardian, warden,
and formations of the slabberdegullion and
tatterdemal(l)ion type) that *ragamauffi could easily
have become *ragamauffi(an). Note that the earliest
798
Adz(e) Adz(e)

spelling is ragamoffyn (with o for F au?) and that

Shakespeare has rag of Muffin or rag of Muffian in
lHenry IV, IV, iii:272.
3. Words with unetymological -a- are discussed in
some detail at COCKNEY. In Middle and Modern English,
intrusive -a- has more than one source. When the
connecting schwa occurs in French words like vis-à-vis
and cap-à-pie, it is a preposition. In the native
vocabulary, -a- is a reduced form of on or of, as in twice a
day, cat-o'-nine-tails, man-o'-war, Tam o'Shanter. But
when a model establishes itself, new formations arise
and neologisms begin to be cast in the same predictable
mold. Tam o'Shanter was Tam Shanter in Burns's poems
and acquired its o' on the analogy of John o'Groats and
so forth. Fus-tianapes is an allegro form of fustian of
Naples, but jackanapes developed from Jac(k) Napes,
not *Jack on or of Naples, and Jack-a-dandy never was
*Jack of or on dandy. Will with the wisp forfeited its with
the (o' substituted for them), and in a similar way the
older form of lack-a-day, the basis of lackadaisical, was
alack the day (see these words in OED and ODEE).
The origin of many words with -a- will of necessity
remain obscure, which does not mean that they should
be given up as hopeless. ODEE states that a in
Blackamoor (< black More) is unexplained. The comment
in OED is longer: "Of the connecting a no satisfactory
explanation has been offered. The suggestion that it was
799
Adz(e) Adz(e)

a retention of the final -e of ME black-e (obs[olete] in

prose before 1400) is, in the present state of evidence, at
variance with the phonetic history of the language, and
the analogy of other black- compounds. Cf. black-a-
vised." In the entry black-a-vised 'dark-complexioned'
(first recorded in 1758, over two centuries later than
black-a-moor), we read: "... perh[aps] originally black-a-
vis or black o' vis; but this is uncertain." Black-a-top
'black-headed' (a single 1773 citation) is left without an
etymology.
ODEE says that the first element of caterwaul is
perhaps related to or borrowed from LG or Du kater
'male cat,' unless -er- "is merely an arbitrary connective
syll[able]"; we recognize here a paraphrase of "some
kind of suffix or connective merely" (OED). Neither
Murray nor Onions realized that cat-er-waul (= cat-a-
waul?) is not an isolated example. It is unprofitable to
label insertions as merely arbitrary connective syllables
or some kind of suffix. CD calls -a- in black-a-moor and
jack-a-dandy a meaningless syllable. This is true enough
but not particularly illuminating.
Cock-e-ney is the earliest certain recorded extended
form with schwa, and the 14th century must have been
approximately the time when such words arose.
Unstressed i was also drawn into the process of coining
extended -a- forms. Cock-a-leekie has a doublet cockie-
leekie, though ie in cockie is not a suffix. A similar case is
800
Adz(e) Adz(e)

piggyback 'carry on one's shoulders,' from pickaback.

According to Skeat, huckaback 'coarse durable linen'
(earlier hugaback and hag-a-bag) is the English
pronunciation of LG huckebak 'pick-a-back': at one time,
it presumably designated a pedlar's ware, but the
evidence is lacking, and OED says "origin unknown." If
Skeat guessed well, huckaback is a close analogue of
pickaback ~ piggyback. Kuck's note on the Low German
word (1905:14-15) supports Skeat's etymology.
Assuming that the reconstruction given here is
correct and ragamuffin (1344) is a tautological extended
form with the initial meaning *'devil-a-devil,' we will
obtain a word of this type whose attestation slightly
predates cockney < cockeney
(1362). It will emerge as a coinage not unlike muck-a-
muck 'person of distinction.' Some confirmation of the
proposed etymology comes from the history of
hobbledehoy, arguably another extended form of similar
structure and meaning. See HOBBLEDEHOY, SKEDADDLE (on
extended forms) and SLOWWORM (on tautological
compounds).
4. Both ragamuffin and hobbledehoy seem to have
been coined as the names of fiends (devils, sprites). Their
original meanings are now forgotten, but the negative
connotations they once possessed have survived.
Ragamuffin is a word that can be applied to a person of
any age, though perhaps more often to a youngster (see
801
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Spitzer's remarks above), as in the title of James

Greenwood's novel The True History of a Little
Ragamuffin. The definition in AHD runs as follows: '[a]
dirty or unkempt child.' RHD says: "1. a ragged,
disreputable person; tatterdemalion. 2. a child in ragged,
ill-fitting, dirty clothes." OED found it necessary to gloss
ragamuffin "a ragged, dirty, disreputable man or boy"
(italics added). King Rag(e)man, Auld Maufi, and King
Robert were full-grown devils, but the loss of status
resulted in their loss of stature. In boy, a baby word for
'brother' and a word for 'devil' have merged; its case is
reminiscent of both ragamuffin and hobbledehoy. In
Middle English, boy may have meant 'executioner,' and
ragman 'hangman's assistant' has also been recorded.
The proper name Boy(e) was current several centuries
before the common name turned up in texts for the first
time (see the details at BOY), and this is what happened
to ragamuffin and presumably to hobbledehoy. Rag-a-
muffin and hobble-de-hoy have not only had a similar
semantic history; both are extended forms, though with
different augments. (Liberman [2004b:97-100; 2006:191-
200]).
ROBIN (1549)
The common name robin is usually understood as
Robin extended to a bird, but it is possibly an animal
name with the structure r + vowel + b + diminutive suffix.

802
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The sections are devoted to 1) the alleged ties

between robin and Robert and the suffix -in, 2) robin as
one of many words with the root r-b, notably in
superstitions, and 3) the phrase round robin.
1. Robin 'Robin redbreast, Erithacus rubecula,'
originally a Scots word, has cognates in Dutch (ro-bijntje)
and Frisian (robyntsje and robynderke 'linnet'; WNT).
Several other red birds and plants are also called robin in
English. The older dictionaries, beginning with Skinner's,
derived robin from L rube-cula. This derivation cannot
explain why a borrowing from Latin appeared in English
so late and in such a changed form. E redbreast (1401) is
a compound of the same type as G Rotkelchen (literally
'little red neck') and ModI raudbrystingur. The recorded
hybrids robynet redbreast and Robyn redbreast go back
to 1425 and 1451. With time, the second part was shed,
and robin became the regular name of the bird.
Richardson may have been the first to suggest a
connection between robin and the proper name Robin,
with reference to other animals called Tom, Jack, and so
on. Wedgwood1 explained robin as a familiar use of
Robin on the analogy of magpie (< Mag + pie) and parrot
(< Pierrot). Chambers, Skeat, and OED accepted
Richardson's etymology, and most modern dictionaries,
including Lockwood's (1984), repeat it. In later
lexicography, only Char-nock traced robin to L ro bus
'red.' Those who call into question the recognized
803
Adz(e) Adz(e)

etymology offer no improvement. When wren, daw, and

pie developed the variants Jenny wren (1648), jackdaw
(1543), and magpie (1605), they did not, except in
idiosyncratic usage, become jenny, jack, and mag. The
same is true of many other animal names of the jackass
type; only robin redbreast allegedly did without the
second element.
An older name of the robin redbreast was ruddock (<
OE rudduc, 1100, a gloss on L rubisca). OE salthaga 'one
good at hopping' may have designated the same bird.
Palander (1905:126-27) suggested that robin is a folk
etymological variant of OF rubienne 'robin redbreast'
and referred to the popularity of the name Robin in
England after the conquest (William's eldest son was
called Robin). The difficulty with his suggestion is that E
robin emerged only in the 16th century. A much earlier
date could be expected if robin went back to an Old
French word.
Although Greenough and Kittredge (1901:130) say
that "[r]obin is of course a diminutive of Robert," this is
only a guess (otherwise they would not have said of
course). No evidence supports it: all we have are
ingenious arguments explaining why this particular bird
was named robin from Robin (S. Levin [1976]). Another
guess, which H. Allen (1936:919) partly anticipated, may
be worth a try. In the discussion of cub (see CUB), the
sound strings kab-, kob-, keb-, and kib- were shown to
804
Adz(e) Adz(e)

have produced a variety of animal names. Rob- ~ rab- ~

rib- follow a similar pattern. The Dutch and Frisian forms
(see them above) suggest that robin is one of such
words. Like ruddock (that is, rudd-ock), robin has a
diminutive suffix.
OED and ODEE mention the suffix -en (as in kitten,
chicken, and ME ticchen 'kid') but not -in. Yet
Robin

805
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Robin

-in is not identical with -en, and it turns up in some

words, more often in dialects. The nuthatch is called
jobbin because it is a jobbing bird (job, v, 'strike with a
sharp bill'); jobbin is either a variant of jobbing or a
formation like robin (OED cites only nutjobber, but see
Swainson [1886:35, nuthatch] and Lockwood [1984, nut
jobber]). Hoggin 'screened or sifted ground' (1861) may
be the same word as hogging (OED), but it has the
appearance of hog + in, even though the connection with
hog is unclear.
The merger of -in with -ing in regional and colloquial
use increased the number of words with -in. The history
of biffin 'variety of apple' (< beefing) is typical. In
Cheshire, buggin means 'louse' (see EDD and OED, at
bug2 'insect,' end of the etymological introduction).
Dobbin 'horse' (1596) is a diminutive of Dob. Piggin
(1554) is a small pail; it seems to be a diminutive of pig
'pot, pitcher, etc.' Pig 'vessel' without a suffix matches
hogshead 'large cask.' Noggin (1630) 'small drinking
vessel' belongs with piggin. Unlike bobbin (1530), none
of the words given above has been borrowed from
French, but a bobbin 'reel, spool' is also a small object. In
dialectal glossaries, one regularly runs into such words as
nedlins ~ netlins 'small intestines of a pig' (anonymous
[1935: 178] and Bagg [1935:208]; it is probably the same
806
Adz(e) Adz(e)

word as nudlens (< noodle) in Baskett

[1920:100/113D1]). The diminutive suffix -in was at one
time productive in dialects and competed with its near
double -en. To the extent that the first recordings reflect
the dates of words' appearance in language, robin (1549)
falls roughly into the same period as bobbin, piggin, and
noggin (1530-1630), but judging by robinet (1425), it
must have existed long before the middle of the 16 th
century.
2. At a time when the sound strings cob and cub
were used as the names of horses, whelps, fishes, and
sea-gulls, and rabb- ~ robb- ousted the old names of the
seal and the cony in Germany, England, and elsewhere,
the 'generic' syllable rob-with a diminutive suffix could
as easily have ousted ruddock. Rabbit, too, has a
diminutive suffix (see more at RABBIT). Robin ruddock can
be interpreted as a hybrid form that appeared before the
change had been completed. Finally, if robin is from
Robin, the question remains how Frisian and Dutch got
the same bird name. One would have to posit a
borrowing by all three languages from French (S. Levin
[1976:130]), but what was so attractive in the French
name? Robin, like cob, designates various fishes (the
earliest citation in OED is dated 1618; see robin and
Round Robin6). One of the north English words for
'earwig' is forkin-robin, that is, 'robin with a little fork.' E.
Adams (1858:99) glosses forkin-robin from the dialect of
807
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the Isle of Wight as straddle-bob. He is right in doubting

"whether this bob is the contraction of Robert," for bob
is a usual second component in the names of insects and
the like.
In Old French, sheep were often called Robin
(Weekley [1933:130]). The Vikings may have
brought this name to France from their historical
homes, and its origin in the Scandinavian languages is
not far to seek: ModI robbi means 'sheep, ram.' It was
recorded only in the 19th century, but it is probably old.
ABM compares it with Nynorsk robbe (m) 'bugaboo,' G
Robbe 'seal,' and so forth. NEO offers only insignificant
conjectures about Nynorsk robbe and mentions its
synonym bobbe. Another ModI robbi means 'the male of
the white partridge.' ABM thinks that it is a pet name for
rjüpkerri or rjüpkarri, or ropkarri (the same meaning),
but a tie between robbi and rjüp— rop- may be an
illusion, as is the case with OI kobbi, allegedly a pet
name for köpr (see CUB) and with robin taken to be the
same word as Robin. In medieval Scandinavia, where the
personal name Robin had no currency (Lind 1905-
15:857), the sound complex rob(b) was used as in the
rest of the Germanic speaking world.
Nynorsk robbe 'bugaboo' explains E Roblet 'goblin
leading persons astray in the dark' (obsolete and rare),
which OED connects with Robinet, once used as the
name of a goblin. Such a connection exists, but only via
808
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the meaning preserved by Nynorsk robbe, a word that

may throw a sidelight on Robin Goodfellow. This
character was especially well known in the 16th and 17th
centuries, when the word robin also gained ground in
English (good is a euphemism for evil), though Robin
Good-fellow is hard to separate from the German Knecht
Ruprecht, St. Nicholas's companion (Ruprecht < Rupert <
Ruodperht, the Old High German etymon of F Robert;
Güntert [1919:76, note, and 124]), and from hobgoblin
(or Hob Goblin = Rob Goblin) and hobbledehoy (see more
on hob ~ rob at HOBBLEDEHOY). Robin occupied a special
place in folklore (Höfler [1934:48-49] and H. Allen
[1936]). F rabouin 'devil' may belong here (Barbier [1932-
35:117-18]).
3. The phrase round robin was first recorded in
1536 (Hooper [1897]). At that time, it was applied
facetiously to a sacramental wafer and apparently
meant 'piece of bread' or 'cookie,' which corresponds to
round robin 'small pancake' (Devon). Chance (1897:131,
and note) believed that robin here is a specific use of the
name Robin, like Jack in flapjack, another provincial
name of a pancake. E.
Marshall (1897) mentions 'robin rolls' sold in Oxford
shops. Assuming that a baker named Robin was the
originator of some such dainty, we could have let round
robin join charlotte in our etymological dictionaries if the
phrase round robin 'petition with signatures arranged in
809
Adz(e) Adz(e)

circle' were not to be accounted for. F. Adams (1896 and

1897; see the reference in F. Adams [1897:177, note])
gives a 1659 example of round robin in this sense. It
appears that round robins had their origin in the navy.
James included round robin in his dictionary (at round)
with the following explanation: "[A] corruption of Ruban
rond, which signifies a round ribbon." Todd (in Johnson-
Todd) reprinted that explanation (only he substituted
riband for ribbon); Smythe Palmer (1883) and other
dictionaries copied his information. Webster had the
same explanation until 1864; Mahn (in W [1864]) left
round robin without any etymology. W (1880) restored
the old etymology ("perh[aps] fr[om] Fr[ench] rond +
ruban"), and there it stayed until it was again removed in
1961
(W3).
Since F ruban rond should have become E robin
round, some lexicographers (including Ogilvie: ID)
produced the spurious source rond ruban or resorted to
diplomatic formulations like Webster's (1880). The ruban
rond ~ rond ruban theory can be dismissed because of
the difficulties with the word order and because French
dictionaries do not cite such an expression (F. Adams
[1896:392]). If the phrase *ruband rond had any currency
among French officers at the end of the 18 th century, it
must have existed as an adaptation of E round robin
refashioned after ruban rouge, ruban bleu (ribbons for
810
Adz(e) Adz(e)

orders), and the like. F. Adams (loc cit) attempted to

connect robin in round robin and roband 'short length of
rope yarn or cord for lashing sails to yards,' formerly
called robbin or robin (see ru-band, roband, robbin,
ribband, and ribbon in OED). But *round roband (that is,
'round ribbon') 'loop' is fiction. Despite the uncertainty
(see Hooper [1897]), it is better not to separate round
robin 'pancake' (or 'cookie') from round robin 'circular
petition.' The technical senses 'hood' and so forth
(Chance [1897]) reinforce the idea that a round robin is
simply a round object. Not improbably, the local
meaning of round robin 'pancake' was first applied to the
document by natives of Devonshire, "that county having
been well represented in the
navy," as F. Adams (1896:392) put it (Liberman
[1997:117-19]).

SKEDADDLE (1861)
Attempts have been made to trace skedaddle to
Greek,
Irish, Welsh, Swedish, and Danish or to explain it as a
blend of some kind, but the word is, most likely, an
extended form of skaddle or *skeddle 'scare, frighten.'
The sections are devoted to 1) the proposed
etymologies of skedaddle, 2) skedaddle and its putative
etymons in an English dialect, and 3) skedaddle as a
Streckform (an extended form).
811
Adz(e) Adz(e)

1. The word skedaddle was first recorded in an

American newspaper in the form skidaddle
(DAE) and soon became known all over the country.
The noun skedaddle 'precipitous flight' is contemporary
with the verb (Cohen [1979:5; 1985a:31]); compare The
Great Skedaddle 'flight to the north and toward the
mountains in Pennsylvania' (Brumbaugh [1965]).
Skedaddler surfaced in 1866 (Thornton, and cf
Skedaddlers Ridge in New Brunswick, noted as a
Canadianism; see McDavid
[1967:57]). E.B. (1877:514) noted that in England,
skedaddle "had firmly established itself. .among
light and humorous writers it has made itself a pet. It is
often met with in Blackwood." The conjectures on the
origin of skedaddle are of at least four types.
1) Skedaddle is either a cognate of Gk OKESdwojU
'disperse, rout (a crowd)' or a jocular distortion of the
Greek verb. That idea occurred more or less
simultaneously to several people. Writing in 1880,
Samelson noted: "When first I heard this American slang
term, some eighteen years ago, I was at once reminded
of the Homeric (and for that matter modern) skedazo,
that is, disperse, scatter." Cohen's quotations with such
statements (1979:16; 1985a:42) also go back to 1862.
In the third edition of his dictionary (1864), Hotten
expressed an opinion that skedaddle "is very fair Greek...
and it was probably set afloat by some professor at
812
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Harvard." The Greek etymology was often reinvented (or

repeated) in the seventies of the 19th century (Gardner
[1871], F.J.J. [1876:338/3], anonymous [1877a:233 and
748], and Mackay [1877]). Some people who compared
the English and the Classical Greek verbs preferred to
trace them to the same etymon, rather than classifying
skedaddle with borrowings. Among them was Skeat
(1875:372), but he left skedaddle out of his dictionary
(1882), apparently dissatisfied with the existing
hypotheses.
Not everyone agreed to speak of skedaddle and
OKeSdwouM, in one breath. Hotten's reviewers
(anonymous [1864a:558; 1864b:545]) found the
Greek derivation "more than doubtful" and "taxing
our credulity." Later, Green (1906:27-28) held it up to
ridicule. But it is still alive. Partridge (1958) did not
exclude the possiblility of "some scholarly wit's blend of
sked annunai + either 'paddle away' or 'saddle up and
depart.'" From Partridge the Greek etymology of
skedaddle may have found its way into Flexner
(1976:92); see Cohen
[1979:17, note 1; 1985a:43, note 1, cont on p. 44].
Cohen (1976:6-7; 1979:17, note 1) defended the
Greek hypothesis (his remarks are reproduced in
Cohen [1985a:44-47]) but later changed his mind
(1985a:47) and cited the argument that had been known
for more than a century: skedaddle "belongs to a rural
813
Adz(e) Adz(e)

setting... and such a setting does not seem conducive to

Greek influence, either directly or from the schoolmaster
via his students"; see also
Sleeth (1981:5).
2) Skedaddle goes back to some Celtic source.
Mackay (1888) attempted to represent skedaddle as
the sum of two Gaelic words (his usual practice), but
more often one finds mention of Wel ysgudaw 'run
about' and "OIr" sgedad-ol, allegedly occurring in the
New Testament quotation (Matt XXVI: 31, Authorized
Version): "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the
flock shall be scattered abroad." The first edition of the
New Testament in Irish (TNJC-1) appeared in 1602
(Quigley [1917:52]). In transliteration the relevant
passage is: buailfid me an tao'duire, agus
SCABFUI'D'TEAR cdoirig an treada (the verbal form in
question is given here in capitals). Scabfui d tear (the
passive) does not resemble *sgedadol, a form whose
existence in the Irish Bible or anywhere in Irish is much
in doubt. The same text appears in the 1681 edition
(TNJC-2) and in the editions published in the 19 th century;
for instance, TNJC-3 has scabfuidhtear. Scdin-, the verbal
root of ModIr sgabaim 'scatter, disperse' has no
established etymology (LE).
Bartlett (1860) dates the earliest reference to
Welsh 1877, and Cohen (1979:14-15; 1985a:39-40)

814
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dug up only one sympathetic response to *sgedadol

as the etymon of skedaddle (Clapin). However, Hamp (in
a letter to Cohen: see Cohen et al
[1979:20-22]; Cohen [1985a:41], and Sleeth's favor-
able comment [1981:7]) found some virtue in the Irish
hypothesis. He mentions Sc Gael sgad 'loss, mischance,'
Ir sceinnim 'flee,' and scaoilim 'scatter, shed, let loose.'
He does not explain how any of those words could have
been transformed into E skedaddle with stress on the
second syllable. Attempts to trace skedaddle to other
similar-sounding Irish words like sceatrac 'vomit, spawn'
and also 'anything of scattered or untidy make,' sceideal
'excitement, anxiety' (the glosses are from Dinneen) are
unprofitable.
3) According to Mahn in W (1864), skedaddle
"is said to be of Swedish and Danish origin, and
to have been in common use for several years
throughout the Northwest, in the vicinity of immigrants
from these nations." Cohen's remark
(1979:10, note 1; 1985a:37, note 1) that OED incor-
rectly cites W (1864) is based on a misunderstanding: the
entry in W (1864) appears where OED says it does.
Mahn's derivation has little value, for he mentions no
Swedish or Danish words. However, Scandinavian words
vaguely reminiscent of skedaddle exist, as Keyworth
(1880) notes: Dan skynde [sg0ns] 'hurry, rush' (transitive
and intransitive).
815
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Cohen (1979:10; 1985a:37) refers to ES's glib criticism

of Mahn's idea (p. 290).
4) Skedaddle has stress on the second syllable, which
suggested to some researchers that the word is a blend:
skid + daddle 'walk unsteadily' (J.C.R. [1880]), sket
'quickly' + daddle (Barrere-Leland), or skee(t) 'squirt;
spread, distribute, scatter; hasten, move quickly' +
daddle (Wood [191011:176, note 44). SND tentatively
derives skedaddle from skiddle 'spill' + skail 'scatter,
disperse,' whereas Wescott (1977a:13) decomposed the
verb into s- (as in smash) + ke (as in boom ~ kaboom) +
pal-indromic -dad- (approximately as in dodder) + fre-
quentative -le (see also Cohen [1979:4, 15; 1985a:30],
who received further comments from the author). Green
(1906:27-28) mentions someone's derivation of
skedaddle from sky + Daedalus; see also Partridge's
Greek-English blend (above).
Cohen (1979:21-24; 1985a:48-52) now defends the
etymology skedaddle = skiddle 'spill' + jabble 'spill'
assimilated to *skidabble > skedaddle. Some of the
derivations listed above are not improbable, but, like
most conjectures relying on blends, they are guesswork
by definition.
In his comments on Bartlett3, the reviewer mentions
skedaddle, "of which the etymology is laboriously but
fruitlessly discussed" by the author
(anonymous 1878:171). W (1890) marks skedaddle
816
Adz(e) Adz(e)

as a word of unknown origin. OED labels it a fanciful

formation. Giles W. Shurteleff was believed to have
coined skedaddle, and Weekley shared the view that
skedaddle belonged to the same type as its artificial
synonyms vamo(o)se and absquatulate. Schele de Vere
(1872:284-86), Bartlett (1860), Thornton (1912-39), and
Mencken (1945:239: supplement
to the 1936 ed) give surveys of early scholarship. See
a sober assessment of various conjectures in
Russell (1893:530). Green (1906:27-28) provided a
sarcastic survey, and in recent years Cohen has
explored the history of skedaddle in detail. Popular-izers
(see Brewer [1882], E. Edwards, and Har-grave) usually
found it difficult to choose the best etymology and cited
several as equally probable.
2. The only reliable clue to the origin of skedaddle
comes from the verb skedaddle 'spill milk.' Mackay knew
it from Dumfriesshire. His source may have been the
often-cited letter to the Times, October 13, 1862, from
Dumfriesshire (see its
text in ES (291) and in Cohen (1979:8-9; 1985a:35-
36). The writer of the letter says that one can ske-
daddle not only milk but also "coals, potatoes, or apples,
and other substances falling from a cart in travelling
from one place to another." Anonymous (1877a:234)
says the same. Correspondents from the north of
England, too, were familiar with this verb.
817
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Of some interest is a letter in Manchester City News

from R.D.S. Since it has never surfaced in linguistic
literature, it is reproduced here in full
(R.D.S. [1880a]): "I believe 'skedaddle' is taken
from the word 'skeindaddle,' a term used in the
north to express running over or spilling milk or water
when carried in pails by the yoke or skein across the
shoulders. In order to travel with the pails nearly full it
was usual to put into each pail a thin slice of wood,
called a daddle; and if any of the milk or water was
spilled it was usual for the bearer to be scolded for
allowing it to skeindad-
dle." In 1880b, R.D.S. added that as he had heard,
"the word [skeindaddle] was much in use in both
Glasgow and Edinburgh fifty years since, and also in
North Yorkshire" and that his wife "frequently heard it
when a young girl." A compound consisting of two nouns
(skein 'yoke' + daddle 'slice of wood') could not have
yielded a verb, especially one meaning 'spill.'
Skeindaddle is a folk etymological variant of skedaddle,
rather than its etymon, and it testifies to the widespread
use of skedaddle, which is a late word in Scots (Cohen
[1979:9, note 3; 1985a:36, note 2], with reference to A.J.
Aitken).
Skedaddle 'spill' and skedaddle 'retreat hastily' may
be parallel formations (Mencken [1945:239]). Green
(1906:27-28) cites Lancashire and North-umbr skedaddle
818
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'spill' and 'disperse,' and so does Wright (EDD). However,

Wright's quotation from Northumberland ("The
American war familiarized this term in 1862; but it has
been commonly used on Tyneside long before;" the
source is not indicated) suggests that the meaning
'disperse in flight, retreat precipitously' (Wright's gloss)
is an American import. See Sleeth (1981:5), who also
treats long before in EDD as wholly without merit. Given
the meaning 'spill potatoes, coals, apples, and other
substances falling from a moving cart,' one can imagine
the facetious extension 'scatter like potatoes; put to
flight,' but the change to the intransitive use 'flee'
remains undocumented.
3. The verb skedaddle is probably not a blend. It is
rather an augmented, or extended form (Streckform, to
use Schroder's term). In German, nearly all such forms
are of regional origin. They have an expressive meaning
and contain three syllables with stress on the middle
one. The inserted syllables are ab, eb, ap, af, am, aw, ag,
ak, ad, at, ar, al, as, and so so. Here are some German
verbs with the meaning 'run fast, run about aimlessly'
(the inserted syllables are given in parentheses):
b(aj)dckern, j(ad)ackern, sl(ad)acken, sch(aw)up-pen,
kl(ad)astern, and kl(ab)astern (H. Schroder [1906/7, 15,
95, 163, 172, and 189]). See also H. Schroder (1903), in
which 53 forms are listed, and Behaghel (1923:183). The
presence of extended forms in many languages can
819
Adz(e) Adz(e)

hardly be called into question. See HOBBLEDEHOY and

RAGAMUFFIN, and in addition to Schroder and Behaghel,
Gonda (1943: numerous examples from Indonesian; pp.
393 and 394-96 on German, Dutch, and French) and
Gonda (1956; Classical Greek and Dutch).
The existence of a Streckform can be established
only if the initial form has been recorded, and indeed
bdckern, jackern, slacken, and the rest happen to be
attested verbs in the same or neighboring dialects of
German. E reg scaddle means 'scare, frighten; run off in a
fright, dare one to do something' (EDD); it is a common
verb, according to Haigh (1928). Skedaddle is its
extended form, an expressive but not a 'fanciful'
formation. In Green's opinion (1906:28), Lanc skiddle
'spill' is another form of skedaddle, "and perhaps has
given rise to it by a sort of internal reduplication." That is
almost exactly what Schroder would presumably have
said. W.D. (1868:498) suggested a similar derivation
before Green, though he traced skaddle to improbable
sources. Scots skedaddle is, most likely, an extended
form of skiddle, and its American doublet is an extended
form of scaddle or *skeddle (see below). If so, skaddle is
not a jocular abbreviation of skedaddle, as Cohen et al
(1979:21, with reference to Herman Rappaport) and
Sleeth
(1981:9) thought.

820
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The persuasiveness of the idea that skedaddle is an

extended form depends on supporting evidence. In
Modern English, such forms are few; nearly all of them
are regional frequentative verbs with stress on the
second syllable, like skedaddle. The examples below are
from EDD. Fineney 'mince, simper' is a doublet of finey.
Fandangle 'ornaments, trinkets; capers' has stress on the
first syllable; yet it looks like an extended form of fangle
in newfangled. EDD glossed fangle as 'a conceit, whim;
to trim showily, entangle; hang about, trifle, waste time.'
Fundawdle 'caress' may be from fondle, and gamawdled
'slightly intoxicated' from gaddle 'drink greedily and
hastily.' DARE and HDAS add nothing of importance to
that short list. Extended
forms with -de te- in the middle are discussed in
connection with hobbledehoy, in the entry
ragamuffin (see those entries).
Finagle may belong with the verbs mentioned above.
It surfaced in the 1920's in the United States and is not of
Jewish origin (Gold, forthcoming). W2 compares it to
fainaigue [fs'ni:g] 'revoke at cards, renege, play truant,
cheat, etc' from EDD. NED and NTCD suggest that finagle
is the respell-ing of the family name of Gregor von
Feinagle (?1765-1819), a German mesmerist and whist
expert, often ridiculed in Germany and France. AHD
defines finagle (also spelled fenagle) as 'achieve by
dubious or crafty methods; wrangle; trick or delude;
821
Adz(e) Adz(e)

deceive craftily.' Griffith (1939:292) "grew up" with the

meaning 'fuss and feather over a small matter with
fakery in it, a lackadaisical effort to sell a bargain, a small
bargain,' and it was he who derived this word from
Feinaigle. He wondered whether feinagle might go back
to Byron's usage in Don Juan but "more likely," he says,
"it is the off-spring of the lampooning, local hit slang-
inventiveness of music-hall taste; in England, 1805-1820,
the 'popular' pronunciation of the foreign lecturer's
name would have been 'Fee-na-
gle.'"
Most dictionaries prefer the first etymology, and it is
indeed hard to reconcile Feinagle's fame with the
apparently regional provenance of finagle and its late
attestation. In light of the constant interchange of -ddle
and -ggle in British English, one can assume figgle to be
an alternate pronunciation of fiddle (OED gives only one
example of figgle 'fidget about,' 1652, but this verb
exists in modern dialects [EDD]); then finagle will
emerge as fi(na)gle.
In H. Schroder's list, the intrusive syllable always
ends in a consonant (ad, al, an, and so on), while the
English augment is represented by open syllables like na,
ne, la, and du, if for the sake of argument we accept the
derivations fi(na)gle, fi(ne)ney, and the rest. But
Behaghel (1906:401-02), who despite his disagreement
with most of H. Schroder's etymologies accepted the
822
Adz(e) Adz(e)

idea of infixation in ludic forms (and only in them), cited

the German regional verbs kladatschen, strapantzen,
and tralatschen from klatschen 'clap,' strantzen 'steal,'
and tratschen 'chat,' that is, kla(da)tschen, stra(pa)ntzen,
and tra(la)tschen (Behaghel[1923:183]), with open
syllables in the middle, as in English.
The point of division in klabastern versus klastern
Schröder writes kl(ab)astern, though kla(ba)stern will
yield the same result, and it is more natural to postulate
insertion at the syllable boundary. Perhaps -ba-, -da-,
and so on should sometimes have been put in place of -
ab-, -ad-, and others. This ambiguity holds for all words
with vowel harmony, such as glockotzen 'burp' from
glotzen (glo-ko-tzen = gl-ock-otzen) (H. Schröder
1903/37). Only in words like krabutzen 'small children'
from krutzen 'little child' (ib./44), the division is
undoubtedly kr-ab-utzen. Schröder must have reasoned
that klabastern and krabutzen have identical structure.
Skedaddle is rather ske(da)ddle than sked(ad)dle,
despite the fact that the attested primary verb is
scaddle, not *skeddle. The pronunciation [e] for [as] is
widespread all over England.
Many similar-sounding words have been compared
with skedaddle: OE sceadan 'divide' (E shed), OE sceot
'quick' (anonymous 1868b:138, Skeat 1875:372), E scud
and scuttle (W.D. [1868]), and Du schudden 'shake, jolt'
(Stormonth) among them. Scuttle (the same as reg
823
Adz(e) Adz(e)

scuddle), defined as 'run with quick hurried steps' but

also used transitively (scuttle an effort, scuttle a meeting
= 'bring to a speedy end'), is a variant of skiddle and
scaddle ~ *skeddle by secondary (false) ablaut. The verbs
listed above were often recorded late, and it is not
necessary to trace them to a common source. Their
origin is of no consequence for the etymology of
skedaddle. Once skedaddle struck root in the language, it
joined the words beginning with sk- and implying quick,
brisk movement: scour, skip, scuttle, scuddle, scud,
scutter, scoot, (helter-)skelter, and scamper (Marchand
[1969:410/7.50]). On scadoodle (probably a humorous
variant of skedaddle rather than a blend) see Cohen
(1979:24-25; 1985:53-54) and Liberman (1994b: 173-75).
SLANG (1756)
Slang, ultimately of Scandinavian origin, may have
existed in northern dialects before the 18 th century, but it
spread to the rest of the country after its meaning
'jargon,' the only one remembered today, reached the
underworld of London. Its semantic development can be
reconstructed as follows: 'a piece of land' —* 'those who
travel about this territory' (first and foremost, hawkers)
—* 'the manner of hawkers' speech' —* 'low class
jargon, argot.' Neither N reg slengjeord nor E language ~
F langue is its etymon, though slang was probably
understood as s-lang, and that circumstance may have
contributed to its rise and survival in the Standard.
824
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The sections are devoted to 1) the attestation and

the various meanings of slang, 2) the hypotheses on its
origin,
and 3) the proposed reconstruction.
1. OED lists several nouns spelled slang: 1) A species
of cannon; a serpentine or culverin (only 16 th-century
examples; the last is dated 1600) from MDu or MLG
slange 'snake'; 2) a long narrow strip of land (regional;
alternating with sling, slanget, slanket, slinget, and
slinket) of obscure origin; 3) I.a. The special vocabulary
used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable
character; language of a low and vulgar type. (Now
merged in c.) According to the comment following that
definition, the first quotation ("Thomas Throw had been
upon the town, knew the slang well") may refer to
customs or habits rather than language. But in the 1774
example, slang refers only to language; b. The special
vocabulary... of a particular profession; c. Language of a
highly colloquial type... , d. Abuse, impertinence (one
1825 citation). II. Humbug, nonsense (one 1762 citation).
III. A line of work (one 1789 citation): "How do you work
now? O, upon the old slang, and sometimes a little bully-
prigging [= stealing]." IV. A license, especially that of a
hawker (no citations before 1812). V. A traveling show
(from 1859 onward), a performance (one citation, 1861);
hence slang cove, slang cull 'showman'; VI. A short
weight or measure (one citation, 1851). 4) A watch chain,
825
Adz(e) Adz(e)

a chain of any kind, apparently, like (1), from Du slang

'snake'; pl 'fetters, leg irons'.
The noun slang used attributively, means 'having the
character of slang (language)' (1758); 'given to the use of
slang, of a fast or rakish character, impertinent' (1818);
'extravagant' (of dress) (1828; possibly obsolete); 'rakish'
(of tone) (1834); 'short, defective' (of measures; costers'
slang) (1812). The verb slang has been recorded in the
senses 'to exhibit at a fair or market' (one 1789
example); 'defraud, cheat; give short measure' (1812);
'make use of slang; abuse' (1828 and 1844 respectively).
Slang (sb ) is a word of obscure origin. "It is possible that
some of the senses may represent independent
words" (OED).
Not listed in OED is slang 'water course,' known in
some parts of the United States and Canada (H.R. [1890],
Qui Tam [1890]) but not entered in dictionaries of
Americanisms. A connection between slang 3 and slang
1-2 is probably unthinkable, though John Bee (1825:5)
tries to establish it: "Slangs are the greaves with which
the legs of convicts are fettered, having acquired that
name from the manner in which they were worn, as they
required a sling of string to keep them off the
ground The irons were the slangs; and the
slang-wearer's language was of course slanguous, as
partaking much of the slang." Zeus (1853) and

826
Adz(e) Adz(e)

E. Coleman (1900) reproduced that quotation. Ac-

cording to WFl, slang 'watch chain' (obsolete; un-
derworld use) owes its existence to rhyming slang: clock
and slang = watch and chain. More likely, slang 'watch
chain' and slang(s) 'fetter(s)' are one and the same word.
R. Chapman states that slang originally meant both 'a
kind of projectile hurling weapon' and 'the language of
thieves and vagabonds.' A projectile hurling weapon
means what OED calls 'a species of cannon.' The two
words are homonyms.
The questions to be addressed are the unity of slang
3, which OED finds debatable, and the origin of slang
'thieves' cant'. Since a search for pre-1756 records of
slang has been unsuccessful, one can assume that the
word had no currency in towns before the middle of the
18th century, but as soon as it caught the fancy of
Londoners, it spread fast.
For example, Jack Slang, the horse doctor, was one
of the company at "The Three Pigeons" whom Tony
Lumpkin is going to meet in Act I of She Stoops to
Conquer. Goldsmith's comedy was produced on March
15th, 1773, and the name may have had an allusive
meaning, as Robins (1900) remarks. His observation did
not make its way into the annotated editions of
Goldsmith's work. Since Jack Slang has no lines written
for him, we cannot form an opinion about his manner of
speaking. He was certainly not genteel and may have
827
Adz(e) Adz(e)

been a cheat. Woty says in Fugitive and Original Poems

(1786:28): "Did ever Cicero's correct harangue / Rival this
flowing eloquence of slang?" The note added to this
place ("A cant word for vulgar language") makes it clear
that the word slang had not yet become universally
known (Courtney [1900]).
The first lexicographer to recognize the present day
meaning of slang was Grose (1785). S. Johnson (1755)
may have ignored it, or it may have been too recent for
inclusion. A professional lawyer, a character in Hugh
Kelly's 1773 comedy The School for Wives, admits that he
has never heard about "a little rum language" called
slang. Rum (adj) is itself a cant word; see the discussion
in Langenauer (1957). Throughout the 19th century,
lexicographers defined slang as vulgar, low, and
inelegant (Reves [1926]). As late as 1901, Greenough and
Kittredge (1901:55) wrote: "Slang is a peculiar kind of
vagabond language, always hanging on the outskirts of
legitimate speech, but continually straying or forcing its
way into the most respectable company." Their
statement has often been quoted in linguistic works.
Nowadays, slang is understood as highly informal,
expressive vocabulary. However, slang rose to its
present day status from the lowest depths, whence the
disgust of "the most respectable company." Chaucer's,
let alone earlier, colloquialisms are hard to appreciate
today, but the literary production of Shakespeare's
828
Adz(e) Adz(e)

contemporaries and the Restoration comedy are so

unabashedly gross that the war declared on slang by
later generations can have only one explanation: slang
was at that time synonymous with cant and flash. Once
the social stigma was removed, the disgust evaporated
(see Gotti [1999:114-22]). But it is also true
that although slang (in the modern meaning of the
word) is a universal overlay on colloquial language, be it
Classical Greek, Latin, or Modern English, the vastness
and all-pervasiveness of English slang, from Canada to
Australia, is a unique phenomenon. That is why the word
slang gained popularity in many languages. Slang is
volatile. Yet some slang words may remain substandard
for centuries, while others become colorless and neutral
(Hayward, as reported in anonymous [1894]; Maurer and
High [1980]). In our understanding, slang is racy and in
some circumstances inappropriate rather than vulgar.
2. Three main approaches to the etymology of slang
have been tried: 1) The originator of the first is I. Taylor
whose ideas on the Romany origin of slang go back to
Hotten. Skeat1 (slang) reproduced most of the relevant
passage. Here it is in full: "In a wild district of Derbyshire,
between Macclesfield and Buxton, there is a village
called Flash, surrounded by uninclosed land. The squat-
ters on these commons, with their wild gypsy habits,
travelled about the neighbourhood from fair to fair,
using a slang dialect of their own. They were called the
829
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Flash men, and their dialect Flash talk; and it is not

difficult to see the stages by which the word flash has
reached its present signification. A slang is a narrow strip
of waste land by the roadside, such as those which are
chosen by gypsies for their encampments. To be 'out on
the slang,' in the lingo used by thieves and gypsies,
means to travel about the country as a hawker,
encamping by night on the roadside slangs. A travelling
show is also called a slang. It is easy to see how the term
[ slang] was transferred to the language spoken by
hawkers and itinerant showmen" (1865:450). This is a
slightly modified version of Taylor (1864:471); the same
text, with different italics, appears in Taylor (1873:308),
the edition that Skeat used.
DDEL adopted Hotten and Taylor's explanation and
said that slang is perhaps "of Gypsy origin." W (1864)
and (1890) mention it but express doubts. Taylor failed
to produce a credible Romany etymon of slang, and his
derivation of flash 'argot,' which he allegedly found in
Smiles is fanciful (nothing is said about Flash in Smiles
1861:II, 307). Skeat remarks that it is not "easy to see"
how the term slang was transferred to the language
spoken by hawkers and itinerant showmen, for "surely,
no one would dream of calling thieves' language a
travelling-show, or a camping-place. On the other hand,
it is likely that a slang (from the verb sling, to cast) may
have meant 'a cast' or 'a pitch'; for both cast and pitch
830
Adz(e) Adz(e)

were used to mean a camping-place, or a place where a

travelling-show is exhibited; and, indeed, Halliwell notes
that 'a narrow slip of ground' is also called a slinget."
Despite such objections, Platt (1903) defended
Taylor's etymology. He returned to Skeat's statement
that no one would dream of calling thieves' language a
traveling show or a camping place and noted that in
Urdu, Urdu-zaban (ODEE has zaban i urdu) means 'camp
language.' "This curtailment of the phrase rather
increases than diminishes the analogy with the English,
since Fielding and all other early users of the term have
slang patter instead of slang, which thus appears to be
an abbreviation of same nature as Urdu. We cannot...
call a language a camp, but we can call it camp patter."
Taylor and Platt's reconstruction is then as follows: slang
'a piece of land' —» 'the territory used by tramps for
their wanderings' —» 'their camps' —» 'the language
used in these camps.' The meaning 'jargon' may indeed
have been secondary, and it is unfortunate that the
above reasoning was not taken seriously; nor did Platt
know that Sampson (1898) had anticipated him; see the
end of the entry.
2) Taylor's idea did not survive the criticism of Skeat,
who supported Wedgwood's etymology. According to
Wedgwood, slang is a word of Scandinavian origin. He
referred to N reg slengja 'fling, cast,' slengja kjeften
'make insulting allusions' (literally 'sling the jaw,' as in
831
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the English verb slang = jaw), and slengjeord 'slang

words,' also 'new words taking rise from a particular
occasion without having wider foundation' (all the
definitions are his). With regard to slang 'long narrow
strip of land,' Wedgwood cited Sw slang 'stroke' and
noted that E stripe also combines the meanings 'blow,
streak or stroke' and 'long narrow portion of surface.'
Skeat repeated Wedgwood's Norwegian examples
(from Aasen), stated incorrectly that slang is derived
from the past tense of sling (he meant that slang has the
same grade of ablaut as the obsolete preterit of sling: in
his terminology, the second stem of sling; see OED and
compare G schlingen — schlang and the noun Schlange
'snake'), and noted that Icel slyngr and slunginn 'versed
in a thing, cunning' (also derived from sling-) resemble
slang 'cheat'. He could have added Sw sldngd 'versed in
something' (though neither slyngr, slunginn nor sldngd
refers to underhand dealings). All the Scandinavian
words listed above are related to sling and its Germanic
cognates, but the distance from 'throw, fling, sling, cast'
to 'cheat, humbug' is long, even though slengjeord ('a
slung word') 'nonce word, word coined on the spur of
the moment, word blurted out,' slengjenamn 'nickname,'
and slengje kjeften 'use insulting language' are transpar-
ent formations.
Wedgwood's etymology of slang found its way into
many dictionaries. Boag and Craig, who borrowed their
832
Adz(e) Adz(e)

definition of slang from W (1828: 'low, vulgar,

unmeaning language') but left out 'vulgar,' say curtly:
"old preter[it] of sling"; others cite the alleged
Norwegian etymon. Stormonth, W1, and W2 repeat
Wedgwood's etymology. Mueller and OED had serious
reservations, however. OED: "The date and early
associations of the word make it unlikely that there is
any connexion with certain Norw. forms in sleng- which
exhibit some approximation in sense." Those
reservations had little effect on Skeat, who did not
change his opinion until the end. Weekley, Wyld (UED),
Partridge
(1958), Klein (CEDEL), and WNWD1 mention sling
as a seemingly obvious cognate of slang but state
that the tie between slang- and slengje- is insecure. J. de
Vries (NEW, slang 2) sides with OED. ODEE, after
admitting the notable parallelism between the northern
regional sense of 'abusive language' and the colloquial
use of the verb slang 'abuse' on one hand and the
corresponding Norwegian regional words and
expressions on the other, resorts to its usual formula "no
immediate connexion can be made out." The etymology
of slang was written for OED by Craigie. Contrary to him,
Bradley ("Slang" in EB11) found Wedgwood's derivation
acceptable (see Bradley [1928:146], a reprint of the
article in EB), and the disagreement between the editors

833
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of OED may explain why the etymology in ODEE differs

(even if just slightly) from the one in its parent work.
Among Scandinavian lexicographers, FT gave
Wedgwood their unlimited support (slxnge, end of the
entry), whereas Hellquist (SEO, slang 2) repeated the
statement in OED. Spitzer (1952) tried to connect slang
and sling, bypassing Norwegian. He took his inspiration
from Partridge's idea that slang is 'slung language'
(1940:175). Partridge cited the expressions sling the
bat 'speak the vernacular,' sling words (or language)
'talk,' sling off at 'jeer at or taunt,' and slanging, a music
hall term of the 1880's for 'singing,' from the practice of
interpolating gags between the verses of a song. Spitzer
added mud slinging and several examples of how in
French, after it borrowed the Germanic verb, F élinguer
(< OF eslinguer) 'throw stones with a sling' developed
the meaning 'speak (rudely).' He concluded that judging
by the examples in OED, slang must originally have
meant 'banter of hawkers' rather than 'thieves' cant.'
Although Partridge presents the inconsistency of
word formation as an insignificant detail, it invalidates
the idea of 'slung language.' Slang is a late word.
Classical ablaut was not productive in the 18 th century,
and new pairs like shoot (v)—shot (sb) and ride—road
stopped appearing at least a thousand years before that
time. No model existed that would have allowed S.
Johnson's contemporaries to overcome the barrier
834
Adz(e) Adz(e)

between sling (or slung) and slang, just as it would not

occur to us today to coin slum 'poor neighborhood' from
slim 'poor' or slam 'beat.' Partridge, who was not
schooled in historical linguistics, was dimly aware of that
difficulty when he wrote (1940:175, note 1): "The fact
that slang is nowhere recorded as a past participle may
appear insuperable to many: but slang was originally a
cant word; perhaps, therefore, a deliberate perversion of
slung (recorded long before our noun slang)."
Unlike Partridge, Spitzer, an experienced ety-
mologist, knew that there was a problem but dismissed
it. "As to the phonetic form of slang," he observed, "I
suggest a secondary Ablaut from sling. Slang as a variant
of sling is also attested since 1610 by the NED in the
meaning 'a long narrow strip of land' (from sling 'bond,
rope') and, conversely, sling since 1590 as a variant of
slang in the meaning 'a serpentine or culverin' (Germ.
Schlange 'serpent')" (1952:103). Secondary ablaut, that
is, alternation of vowels in later periods responsible for
the coexistence of keb ~ cub ~ cob, tit ~ tat ~ tot (see COB,
CUB and TOAD), and other similar forms, is always limited
to the same part of speech; it never produces nouns
from verbs. The border can be crossed only between
nouns and adjectives, for nouns are regularly used
attributively. If sling ~ slang is a pair like big ~ bag or bag
~ bug (see BEACON), two possibilities present themselves.
Either sling (v) was the source of slang (v), which would
835
Adz(e) Adz(e)

mean that slang (sb) is derived from slang (v). Or slang

(sb) goes back to sling (sb), but then phrases like N
slengje kjeften, sling the bat, and mudslinging, as well as
the French analogues of sling (v), lose their relevance.
Obviously, neither alternative is acceptable. And sling
'projectile' could hardly be the etymon of slang 'abusive
language.'
The similarity between N slengjeord and E slang
words is undeniable, but Wedgwood's etymology has a
weak point. Numerous words of Scandinavian origin in
English dialects become known to linguists late because
regional words remain tied to their home unless popular
authors revive them (see CUSHAT), and researchers may
not know that they exist. However, the northern form
*sleng- if it had been current since the Vikings' times,
would have yielded *sling, as O. Ritter (1906b:41)
pointed out, because ME eng went over to ing. If an
early date is improbable, slang must be a reshaping of a
recent (18th-century?) noun. But such a conclusion is also
untenable, for no group of Norwegians could have
brought the posited regional word to England in the mid-
seventeen hundreds and made it common among
peddlers, showmen, and thieves. Thus the near identity
between N slengjeord and E slang is due to coincidence,
though, as will be shown in sec 3, they have the same
root, and their similarity is not a mere caprice of word
history. Barnhart emphasized the coincidental nature of
836
Adz(e) Adz(e)

that similarity: "...the remoteness of the borrowing is

hard to overcome," but the conclusion "so that perhaps
both English and Scandinavian are of a different common
source" is insupportable: no asterisked common source
can be reconstructed for slang and slengjeord.
3) Although coming at the end of this survey, the last
etymology of slang to be considered is the earliest in the
scholarly literature. Its originator was probably
Thomson, who derived slang 'corrupt or obsolete
language' from F langue or L lingua and compared it with
E lingo. A.G. (1850) notes that "... in the word slang, the
s, which is there prefixed to language, at once destroys
the better word, and degrades its meaning." According
to Skeat1, Wedgwood's hypothesis "is far preferable to
the wholly improbable and unauthorized connection of
slang with E. lingo and F. langue, without an attempt to
explain the initial s, which has been put forward by
some, but only as a guess." Despite his harsh verdict, s is
easy to explain, and "the wholly improbable and
unauthorized connection" is little more than a display of
eloquence.
Mahn (W [1864]) wrote: "Said to be of Gypsy origin"
and added: "But cf. lingo." Reference to lingo
disappeared only in W (1890), which favors Wedgwood's
etymology. Chambers repeated
Thomson, while Mueller1 noted that Wedgwood's
explanation was not better than the old ones—from
837
Adz(e) Adz(e)

lingua and of Romany. Among the authors of modern

etymological dictionaries Holthausen (EW1-3) considered
the derivation of slang from F langue not improbable.
However, outside lexicographical circles, that derivation
had at least three distinguished advocates. O. Ritter
(1906b) suggested that slang is the result of so-called
attraction (its other name is metanalysis), the
misdivision responsible for the emergence of n-uncle, t-
awdry, and so forth. He traced slang to phrases like beg-
gars' lang, thieves' lang, and the like, and lang to a
clipped form of language. According to his hypothesis,
lang 'language' was common in the 17th
century. Horn (1921b:142) and Klaeber (1926) sup-
ported him but J. de Vries (NEW, slang 2) disagreed.
Most of Ritter's article is devoted to s-mobile in
English (mainly in dialects), though he did not include
slang among such words as slam versus OI lemja 'thrash,
beat,' slock 'lure, entice' versus OI loccian (the same
meaning), and sclash, sclimb = clash, climb. The most
vulnerable part of Ritter's etymology is its dependence
on *lang 'language.' If such a form existed, it must have
been indistinguishable from F langue. Lang (< language)
turns up neither in writing nor in living speech. Phrases
like ^beggars' (thieves', sailors', tinkers') lang have not
been recorded. F langue as the etymon of slang is even
less convincing, for slang was not borrowed from French.
In Guiraud's opinion, the etymon of slang is F linguer ~
838
Adz(e) Adz(e)

languer 'prate, babble' from OF eslanguer 'tear off the

tongue,' whose reflexes are extant in dialects in the
sense 'chatter, speak rudely; revile, malign someone.' It
remains unclear whether Guiraud meant that slang was
borrowed from Old French (otherwise, where did s-come
from?) or that slang is F reg languer with s-added. His
conjecture appears in KS as an alternative to
Wedgwood's. Ritter asserted that slang could not be
lang with s appended to it. But if the clipped form lang
existed, s-lang would be its viable doublet. Weekley
(1921) cited N reg slengjeord as a possible etymon of
slang but observed that "[s]ome regard it as an argotic
perversion of F. langue, language (see s-)." His entry s-,
which complements Ritter's material, contains many
noteworthy facts. Those who seek the origin of slang in
language or langue need not reject the idea of a modern
version of s-mobile. See an early survey of the etymology
of slang in G. Schröder
(1893:17-19).
Several more conjectures on the etymology of slang
exist. Mackay (1877) endorsed the idea that slang was,
in principle, L lingua, "literally the language of the
gypsies," but since his goal was to discover the Gaelic
origin of all words, he translated slang, allegedly 'the
language of the vulgar,' into German, got Pdbelsprache,
and cited "Gaelic sluagh 'a multitude, a people, a host,
an army, a mob' and theanga 'tongue, speech, dialect,'
839
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pronounced teanga or theanga." A combination of those

two words, both "abbreviated and corrupted into slua
and eanga," is said to have yielded sluaenga and slang.
The Gaelic root to which Mackay referred occurs in E
slogan (< Gael sluagh-ghairm; sluagh 'host,' gairm
'shout, cry'). All etymologies in Mackay's 1877 book are
such, but few are so contrived.
W. Barnes (1862:286) derived slang, which he
defined as 'slack form of speech,' and sling from sl*ng,
one of his heavy-duty roots. A.A. (1865) wondered
whether slang might be a word of Italian origin. Since, in
Italian, s- is a negative prefix, slang would turn out to be
*slingua, some sort of 'unlan-guage.' Shipley (1945)
reproduced, without reference, John Bee's derivation:
Du slang 'snake' —» chain, fetters —» criminals —» talk.
Unfortunately for his explanation, he remarked "the
word was used to refer to language before it was used to
mean chains!" He was unacquainted with more recent
theories. WNWD1 mentions N slengjeord, suggests its
relatedness to sling, and tentatively traces slang to
*sling language, which it calls a cant clipped form. A
blend is probably meant. This hypothesis seems to
have been lifted from
FW(NCSD), though as early as 1963 FW(SCD)
called slang a word of uncertain etymology. Cohen
(1972c:1, 5) traced slang to the root *lk/lg with the
general meaning 'striking, cutting'; apparently, he
840
Adz(e) Adz(e)

derived it from sling. Mozeson (1989), the author of

multifarious fantasies, derives slang from Hebr lsn (Hebr
'language' in Genesis X:22). As he explains, "a #1—#2
letter swap allows SLAN(G) to be heard. Slander,
language, and lozenge are also said to have this root,
whereby Finnish seems to be of some help" (see Gold's
scathing criticism [1990a]; slang is mentioned on p. 111).
Another ingenious suggestion is Riley's (1857). He
thought that the starting point of the sought for
etymology is not the noun slang 'cant language' but the
verb slang 'abuse, use insulting language.' He said: "I
would suggest that, in the latter sense, it may have been
first used by our military men in the time of Queen Anne,
and that it not improbably was derived from the name of
the Dutch General, Slangenberg, who was notorious for
his vituperative language and abuse, of Marlborough in
particular; the consequences of which was, that he was
ultimately removed from the command of the Dutch
forces." Thanks to a reference in I. Taylor
(the two first editions [1864:471-72; 1865:450]; later
removed), Riley's opinion became widely known.
One of its supporters was Van Lennep (1860): "In
corroboration of his [Riley's] conjecture I may add that
the sailors of our Royal Navy still... design a soldier under
the name slang- "het is een slang," meaning "it is a
redcoat," whilst the substantive itself may very well
have been employed as a nom de guerre for the Dutch
841
Adz(e) Adz(e)

General... , and afterwards applied to all soldiers

indiscriminately." The situation Riley and Van Lennep
reconstructed is not unthinkable (consider the history of
E martinet), but the many meanings of slang make the
hypothesis that slang is going back to a proper name un-
likely (for a similar clash of incompatible suggestions see
TROT). WNT does not list slang 'soldier.'
As always in controversial cases, some dictionaries
(FW, W2, W3, SOD, RHD, and WNWD2,
among them) say "origin uncertain" or "of unknown
origin". Others say only "of cant origin."
3. The etymology of slang will become clearer if
instead of asking the only question that interests us
(namely, how this designation of 'rum language' came
into being), we look at the picture in its entirety. The
best point of departure is the Scandinavian verbs for
'walk aimlessly, stroll,' most of which also mean 'throw':
N slenge 'hang loose, sway, dangle, wobble (gd og slenge
'loaf'); throw, sling, fling, cast; wave one's arms; blurt
out words'; Dan slxnge 'throw, sling, fling, cast; wave
one's arms, swing, hang loose'; Sw sldnga means only
'throw, cast, fling' (Olson [1907: 75-76/13-16]). The
meaning 'hang loose' is not too remote from 'twine, coil,
wind around something' and 'creep, crawl,' as in G
schlingen, whence G Schlange 'snake' and its Dutch
cognate slang. Their common denominator seems to be
'move freely in any direction.' Dictionaries list several
842
Adz(e) Adz(e)

related verbs of nearly the same meaning and sound

shape but offer few comments on their semantic history.
See slxnge (FT, DEO), sldnga (SEO), and slyngja (AEW). E
sling is not native in any of its meanings.
EDD cites Sc slanger 'linger, go slowly.' Whether
slanger is related to linger is immaterial, for its kinship
with the Scandinavian verbs discussed above is not in
doubt; slanger is most probably a loanword. Verbs of
movement designating wandering have the tendency to
associate themselves with the name of the territory in
which the movement occurs. However difficult it may be
to unravel the knot consisting of E stripe 'narrow piece,'
E strip 'run' (as in outstrip), E strip 'narrow piece,' G
streifen 'roam, wander,' and G Streifen 'stripe, strip' (sb),
the concepts 'stripe' and 'roam' will end up in close
proximity. A similar development seems to have
occurred in the slang group. We have slang 'long narrow
piece of land' and slanger 'linger, go slowly,' presumably
from *slenge 'wander, loaf.' The slang must have been
the land, the territory over which one wandered. The
word slanget looks like *sleng-et, *slang-et, or *slxng-et,
a neuter noun of some Scandinavian language with a
postposed definite article, for -et cannot be a relic of a
French suffix in it. Dan slang and N sleng 'gang, band'
(that is, 'a group of strollers') are neuter; their definite
forms are slxng-et and sleng-et respectively. With regard
to semantics, OI slangi 'tramp' and slangr 'going astray'
843
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(said about sheep), versus the verb slangra 'sling' and

'stray' (said about sheep in pastures straying into
another flock) present a parallel.
A prepositional phrase containing a noun with the
definite article seems to have been borrowed from some
Scandinavian language, for instance, *pa slxnget '(out)
on the slang.' *Slxnget or *slanget must have meant the
gang's turf (cf policeman's beat). Slanket, slinget, and
slang are, in all likelihood, later modifications of slanget,
though slinget may have been a parallel formation.
Those who traveled about the country or a certain
area were thus 'on the slang' and judging by Dan slaeng
~ N sleng 'gang,' were themselves called 'slang'. The
definition of slang in OED ('a long narrow strip of land') is
insufficient. EDD adds 'a narrow piece of land running up
between other and larger divisions of ground' and notes
that slang is very common as a field name. Dodgson
(1968:124) reconstructs OE *slang 'sinuous, snakelike,
long and narrow and winding, snake-like, a snake' (he
cites OE slingan 'twist oneself, creep' and G schlingen,
the same meaning). He considers as less probable the
idea that Middle English adopted "Scandinavian and
German or Dutch loan words in districts not apparently
immediately susceptible to either, when those words do
not themselves appear in the Danelaw and South-
Eastern districts most susceptible to such loans." Dodg-
son's arguments are persuasive. However, a southern
844
Adz(e) Adz(e)

noun for 'border' from OE slingan 'twist' and a northern

one for 'piece of land' from slenge 'wander' may have
met.
The evidence of the almost certainly Scandinavian
form slanget cannot be shaken off, and it is the northern
word that is important for understanding the rise of
slang 'jargon.' We do not know how long slang 'territory
over which one strolls; gang; strollers' language' existed
in the north. That word may never have surfaced in the
Standard. For example, keld, a northern regional word
for 'well, spring, fountain,' was first recorded in writing
in 1697; billow, another loan from Scandinavian, did not
occur in texts before the middle of the 16 th century.
Slang, a local term of vagabonds' language, had almost
no chance to become part of the standard, and it is a
small miracle that it did. The sense 'narrow strip of land'
(< 'border') is that of its southern cognate. The northern
sense of slang must have been closer to 'wasteland.'
Traveling actors, too, were 'on the slang.' Slangs
were competitive, with different groups of hawkers,
strolling showmen, itinerant mendicants, and thieves
fighting for spheres of influence; hence slang 'hawker's
license,' a permit that guaranteed the person's right to
sell within a given 'precinct' (or slang). 'Humbug' is a
predictable development of peddlers' activities, for
mountebanks cannot be trusted. Hawkers use a special
vocabulary and a special intonation when advertising
845
Adz(e) Adz(e)

their wares, and many disparaging, derisive names

characterize their speech. Such is charlatan, ultimately
from Ital ciarlatano: ciarlare means 'babble, patter'
(though this derivation has been called into question:
see Menges [1948-49]). Such is also quack, the stub of
quacksalver 'one who goes "quack-quack" praising his
salves.' Compare Grose's definition of cant 'pedlars'
French.'
The earliest meaning of slang 'a kind of language'
must have been 'hawkers' patter,' rather than 'secret
language of thieves,' possibly from attributive use (see
Platt above), as in slang patter 'the patter of the slang,'
where slang designated either the area under vendors'
control or the profession of people on the slang. Those
who knew about the existence of Shelta, the secret
language of wandering tinkers (cairds), may have used
slang as its derogatory synonym. Slang 'abusive
language' and 'speak insultingly' are the result of a
negative attitude toward the language of the lowest
strata of the population or of badgers' (hucksters')
bickering with one another.
The reconstruction presented here accounts for all
the recorded meanings of slang except 'cannon,' and
'fetters.' Both are related to slang 'jargon' but are
different words. Their home, as OED states, is not in
Scandinavia. Slang has come a long way from 'hawkers'

846
Adz(e) Adz(e)

jargon' to 'informal, expressive vocabulary,' but it is still

'meaningless prattle' to the uninitiated.
Slang

847
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Slowworm

None of the derivations of slang in dictionaries and

special publications produced convincing results, but
some of them contained useful ideas. I. Taylor's attempt
to connect slang 'piece of land' with vagabonds and their
language should not have been dismissed in the
peremptory way typical of Skeat. Nor was Platt too far
from the truth. Spitzer made an astute observation that
slang had originally meant 'the language of hawkers.'
Mueller's suggestion that slang 'cant' goes back to a
word like Dan slxng 'band, gang,' if noticed, might have
stimulated a better informed search. Wedgwood rightly
pointed to the northern origin of slang. Slang is not akin
to language or F langue, but the survival of slang 'jargon'
in Standard English may be partly due to the accidental
closeness between it and langue, that is, to folk
etymology. Given the power of s-mobile in modern
dialects and unbuttoned speech, everybody sensed that
slang (slang) was some kind of language. Efforts to dis-
cover the origin of the word slang were not completely
successful, but they have not been wasted.
With the publication of the letter S in OED all the
pieces of the puzzle lay in full view, and one needed
only a careful look at the larger picture to find a slot for
each of them in the overall scheme.

848
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The difference is apparent between a lucky guess

and a reconstruction based on the wealth of material
presented in OED and supported by reputable
etymologists. But in all fairness it should be noted that
the most convincing etymology of slang was offered
more than a century ago. A correct solution appears in
BL (slang), though Barrere and Leland attempted to
combine Skeat's and Taylor's solutions. However, they
say: "It is clear that in the sense of argot it is gypsy, the
slang language originally meaning the language of the
slangs, or shows, just as 'language de l'argot' meant the
language of the brotherhood termed 'argot,' being
afterwards shortened into argot and generalised." This is
approximately the same etymology as in Platt's note. But
the author of the first consistent explanation of the
origin of slang is Sampson (1898). He did not bother to
refute the views of his predecessors and published his
observations in a local periodical called Chester Courant.
Later they were reprinted in The Cheshire Sheaf. No one
paid attention to them. Dodgson (1968) referred to an
exchange of opinions about the exact meaning of slang
'strip of land' in The Cheshire Sheaf (see Holly [1898],
E.G. [1898], James Hall [1898], and Sampson [1898]), but
he did not say that Sampson's article contained in a
nutshell everything needed for understanding the
history of slang 'informal language.' Here is the relevant
passage.
849
Adz(e) Adz(e)

"As a student of Romani, may I point out that

whatever the word 'slang' may be, it is certainly not of
Gypsy origin. It is not found in a single English or
continental Gypsy vocabulary, nor have I ever heard it
used by Gypsies, even as a loan word... Nor, again, is the
word 'slang' Shelta... As a cant word 'slang' exists; but it
is, in my belief, of too recent an origin to have given
birth to the fieldname, though, as I will attempt to shew,
the converse process may have taken place. I have heard
the word used by itinerant hawkers and other non-Gypsy
van dwellers: (1) In the common phrase slanging the
prads... lit[erally] 'fielding the horses' -that is, turning
them loose for the night in some farmer's field; (2) as a
substantive 'slang' or 'slangs' bears the meaning of 'a
hawker's license'; and (3) 'slang' now used to describe
any racy colloquialism, was formerly used as a synonym
for 'cant,' that is, the secret jargon of some vagabond or
criminal set of people.
"Now it is worthy of note that these very different
meanings may be harmonised and explained on the
simple supposition that hawkers and other vagrants,
who are often the conservators of interesting archaisms,
should have preserved in their ordinary speech a
genuine old English word 'slang' which meant 'field' or
some form of field, and which gradually acquired various
secondary meanings... Anyone familiar with the life of
the roads knows that tramps and vagrants of different
850
Adz(e) Adz(e)

degrees meet together on camping grounds and in

lodging-houses, and pick up and pass on each other's
words, often with little regard to the true or original
sense of the word borrowed... This explanation, of
course, leaves the original question of the etymology of
'slang' as a field-name still to seek. But it may prevent its
being sought in Romani where it does not exist, or in
cant, which, if my contention be correct, owes the word
to the field-name, and not vice versa." The main correc-
tion of Sampson's hypothesis concerns "a genuine old
English word 'slang.'"
SLOWWORM (900)
E slowworm (< OE slawyrm), Sw and OD (orm)sla, N
(orm)slo, N reg sleva, and G (Blind)schleiche designate
the same reptile, the lizard Anguis fragilis. The
Scandinavian compounds also occur without orm-.
Slowworm has been explained as a sloe eater, a slow
creature, a slow biter, or a slayer. All those explanations
are products of folk etymology. The second element, -
worm, meant 'snake' (not 'worm'). A connection
between sla-, etc with the Germanic word for 'slime' is
unlikely, because the slowworm is not slimy. Most
probably, the etymon of sla- is *slanho-, related to OHG
slango 'snake', with h and g alternating by Verner's Law.
If so, then slawyrm is a tautological compound, 'snake-
snake,' like OHG lintwurm 'dragon' and Dan ormeslange
'slow-worm.' Given this etymology, N sleva and G -
851
Adz(e) Adz(e)

schleiche are not related to sla— sla— slo- or each other.

The reverse order of the elements in E slowworm, as
opposed to ormsla ~ ormslo, can be accounted for by the
fact that since each part of the compound had the same
meaning, it mattered little which of them occupied the
first place. OHG slango (ModG Schlange) stands in ablaut
relation with the verb schlingen 'twist, bend' and is not
akin to slay (G schlagen 'strike'), whatever the original
meaning of Gmc *slahan may have been.
The sections are devoted to 1) the attested forms of
the English word, 2) the early conjectures about its
origin, 3) the effort by Scandinavian scholars to explain
the origin of sla- ~ slo— sla-, sleva, and -schleiche, 4)
Svanberg's attempt to connect some of those words with
*slahan 'strike', and 5) slowworm among tautological
compounds in and outside Germanic.
1. E slow(worm), Sw and OD (orm)sla, N (orm)slo, N
reg sleva, and G (Blind)schleiche designate the same
reptile, the lizard Anguis fragilis. The elements slow- (<
sla-), slo- (the Scandinavian words also occur without
orm-), sleva, and -schleiche, particularly the first three,
sound alike, but it remains a matter of debate whether
some or all of them are related and what their origins
are. Blind- in the lizard's name is not limited to German:
cf E blindworm and Sw and Dan blindorm. Although the
slowworm can see, references to its alleged blindness
have been known since antiquity. Gk xixplov and L
852
Adz(e) Adz(e)

caecilia may have influenced the modern European

forms (SN, 231: "Eidechse"). E orvet, if it goes back to L
orbus (luminis) (Svanberg [1929:255]), likewise alludes to
the deprivation of sight. A few older researchers
mention the slow-worm's large eyelids and the closing of
its eyes at death as the reason for calling it blind, but
later authorities unanimously speak of its small eyes. Sw
kopparorm and N stalorm, literally 'copper snake' and
'steel snake' (Svanberg 1929:256), show that the
'metallic' skin is the lizard's other conspicuous feature.
No citations of blindworm predate 1450 in OED. By
contrast, slowworm is old. OE slawyrm and slawerm
"rendered various Latin names of serpents and lizards"
(OED). The Old English form slaw-wyrm(e), as it appears
in Somner and Lye, turns up in several dictionaries (it
made its way even into
Karsten [1900:243, note 1], and E. Fraenkel
[1953:68]), but it is a ghost word, for the spelling
with -ww- appeared only in the 16th century.
2. The conjectures about the origin of slow-
worm in English dictionaries are not numerous.
Minsheu: "sloeworm, because it useth to creepe and
liue on sloe-trees." This etymology finds no support in
the lizard's habits. Yet Skinner, the anonymous author of
Gazophylacium (who, as usual, copied from Skinner), and
Boag repeated it. N. Bailey (1721 and 1730) assumed
that slow-worms were slow. Many lexicographers
853
Adz(e) Adz(e)

repeated his explanation. One of them was Richardson,

who wrote: "a slowe [sic] a sloth or sluggard." E. Adams
(1860-61:9) compared slowworm with slugworm and
lugworm. Those words were recorded only in 1602 and
1799 respectively (OED). The slug is indeed a sluggard,
but the noun slug, with or without s-, is not related to
slow 'tardy,' whereas the history of lug 'a large marine
worm' has not been clarified.
Wedgwood compared slow- with -schleiche (in-
dependently of Wachter, who predated him in this
respect). He also cited a few Norwegian regional words,
including sleva, which attracted the attention of
Scandinavian researchers much later. His tentative
hypothesis was that the slowworm got its name "from
its slime." Skeat (as reported in anonymous [1881:177],
and see Skeat1) traced slow-to *slaha 'smiter.' Since the
slowworm was considered to be venomous, it could
have been called a slayer. Folk etymology anticipated
Bailey (slow-worm is the same as slow worm) and Skeat
(the spelling slay-worm has been attested); the affinity
between slow- and slow ~ slay is apparent. Skeat's initial
gloss of ormsla as 'worm striker' carries little conviction,
despite the fact that the slowworm feeds on insects,
worms, and so forth, because -worm and -orm in the
compounds discussed here mean 'snake,' not 'worm'
(there is no disagreement on this point). Skeat never
gave up his treatment of slowworm but later offered a
854
Adz(e) Adz(e)

more reasonable gloss, namely 'slay-worm, the snake

that strikes,' and decided that OE sla- was borrowed
from Scandinavian (he says: Icelandic). Numerous
dictionaries copied Skeat's etymology (the same in Qui
Tam
[1890a:225] and Whitman [1907:392]). No one tried
to explain the difference in the order of elements:
slow + worm versus orm + sla ~ slo.
3. Thus we have the slowworm understood as
a sloe eater, a slow creature (a sluggard), or a
slayer. If we follow Wedgwood's lead and make
slow- akin to -schleiche, the lizard will emerge as
a creeper or a slimy animal. In dealing with slow-
worm, students of English accord the Swedish and
Norwegian forms no special treatment. Onions
(ODEE) only says that the first element of slow-
worm, which is of doubtful origin, had been assimi-
lated to slow and that it appears with or without orm in
ormsld ~ ormslo. The main progress in investigating
those words was made by Scandinavian scholars.
Johansson (1889:302, note 2) hesitatingly reconstructed
the protoform of sla- ~ slo- as *slaihwo, from *slingwan
'bend' (cf L obliquus 'bending, slanting; crooked'). He
cited Lith sliekas 'snail,' OPr slayx 'rainworm,' and Gk
OKtiolriX 'worm, larva, caterpillar' (< *'bending') among
its congeners. Wood (1903:47, 1905:124/548), von Frie-
sen (1906:11, note 1, cont on p. 12), and E. Fraenkel
855
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1953:68 and LEW) supported his derivation. But in the

next volume of PBB (1891:213) Johansson noted that sla
— slo- might perhaps go back to *slanho, of which OHG
slango 'snake' would be an alternate form by Verner's
Law. A. Kock (1916:198, note) found both hypotheses
equally plausible, whereas A. Noreen (1894:184 and
1904:sec 73.2) preferred the second one. Noreen's lists
contain no discussion.
In the meantime, Falk (1890:117-18), without
references to his predecessors, suggested that the
most important word in reconstructing the origin of sld ~
slo is E slow(worm), which he interpreted as 'slow
worm'; a reptile "whose bite is blunt" (den, hvis bid er
slbvt), in contrast to the adder. This is an unpromising
etymology, for the Old English and the Old Scandinavian
words in question meant both 'slowworm' and 'adder.'
Its sole advocate seems to have been H. Pipping
(1904:160-61, esp
note 4 on p. 160; 1905:37-38; and 1917:82-89),
though he glossed *slaiwu as 'a snake that does not
bite' (den orm, som ej biter), probably because he could
not understand Falk's odd phrase. In FT, no trace of the
blunt bite remained. The German translation repeats the
Norwegian version verbatim; the supplement contains
only bibliographical references (read there Beitr. 14, 302
for Beitr. 24, 302). Falk and Torp's starting point is
Johansson's *slaihwo. They cite the same Baltic words
856
Adz(e) Adz(e)

but give PIE *slikw the meaning 'slimy,' with sleva being
an ablaut variant of sla— slo- in the zero grade (*g < *k
by Verner's Law). PIE *slig, as allegedly in MLG slik and
MHG slich 'slime, ooze,' is called a synonym of *slei (cf N
slim 'slime,' Russ slimak 'snail,' etc). Unlike Johansson,
who glossed ormsld ~ ormslo as 'writher,' Falk and Torp's
lizard turned out to be a slimy creature. (See the most
detailed discussion of the root *slei in their entry slesk
'toady; unctuous.' Slipperiness and smoothness are
lumped together among its reflexes, whence E slick ~
sleek; cf Weekley: slowworm.) They contended that G -
schleiche, in Blindschleiche, although akin to sla— slo-,
was at an early time associated with the verb schleichen
'creep.'
Falk and Torp's derivation has the advantage of
explaining sleva as a doublet of sld— slo- (OE sla wyrm,
made so much of in Falk [1890], is not mentioned), but
assigning them to a root meaning 'slime' inspires little
confidence, because neither slawyrm nor sld— slo—
sleva designated a slimy reptile. With or without minor
variations, FT's etymology is reproduced in many
dictionaries, including WP, though German researchers,
who missed Wachter and Wedgwood's comparison of
slow-with -schleiche, paid no attention to Falk and Torp's
rediscovery of it. Nor were the Scandinavian forms
drawn into the picture.

857
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Kluge (in KL), who followed FT in his treatment of

slowworm, disregarded it in the entry Blindschleiche,
which first appeared in EWDS7. According to him,
Blindschleiche meant blinder Schleicher, but he referred
to Nehring (see SN, above), in whose opinion blind-
might have been a folk etymological alteration of late L
ablinda (the name of some reptile), an obscure Alpine
word. Only Seebold (EWDS23-24) broke with that tradition
and took
into account the scholarship on the other Germanic
names of the blindworm. He does not insist on the
original tie between -schleiche and schleichen and
remains noncommittal as to the word's descent. Lith
sliekas has intervocalic k, a stop. The OS for OHG
blint(o)slih(h)o was blindslico — apparently, not a
cognate of the Baltic word (one expects intervocalic h in
Germanic). Perhaps, Seebold says, Gmc *sleihw- became
-schleiche under the influence of the verb schleichen, or
in PIE *sloiwon/n 'worm, snake', w went over to k before
syllabic n.
The more special works surveyed above appeared
long ago. Johansson set the tone for a serious discussion
of slowworm and its congeners, and FT made the first of
his ideas well-known. The other 'thick' dictionaries
usually copy from FT or WP. 'Slimy' is the most common
etymological gloss (still so in HD1). The small changes
lexicographers introduce into the entry slowworm from
858
Adz(e) Adz(e)

one edition to another are arbitrary. For example, W 1

cites OE sle an 'slay' with a question mark, W2
and HD1 follow WP (that is, FT), while W3 and
HD3-4 give no etymology at all. Pokorny (IEW) ex-
punged sld- ~ sla- from his revision of Walde.
4. The latest important contribution to the history of
slowworm is Svanberg (1928-29). His central thesis is
that 'strike,' the meaning of schlagen and its cognates,
developed from 'make a quick movement' or 'move in a
certain direction.' He gives examples in which the verb
sld, etc mean 'turn, twist; rush, dash; fall, move back and
forth; drive, swing.' His material is abundant, but in
every sentence he cites the verb is followed by an object
or has a prefix. In all the recorded Germanic languages,
slahan, slean and sld have the same connotations as do
modern schlagen and sld. The numerous senses
Svanberg lists are, according to him, "hardly secondary"
(p. 242).
The meaning 'strike' in the languages of the world is
indeed often secondary (derivative), but the origin of
Gmc *slahan has not been ascertained. Svanberg offers a
new derivation of it, to reinforce his semantic analysis.
Slahan has more or less secure cognates only in Celtic.
According to Svan-berg, slahan is related to OE slingan ~
OI slyngva 'creep' and OHG slingan 'swing; plait, braid.'
He could cite only one allegedly similar case: PIE *svenk
~ *sveng versus *svek ~ *sveg, as in OHG swingan
859
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'swing,' G schwank 'undecided, faltering' (MHG swank

'pliant'), Nynorsk svaga 'sway, roll, lurch from side to
side,' and possibly, MLG swaken 'shake, wobble, lurch.'
In light of his etymology he examines a number of
words, including G schwach 'weak' (with /x/ from */k/),
which is related to both Nynorsk svaga and G schwank.
In the pairs slingan (< *slengwan) and svaga ~ swank,
the first one shows the loss of the labial element in *gw,
and the second is an example of the infix n.
Manuals of Old Germanic give few details on the
development of intervocalic *hw (cf the summary
exposition in SB, sec 205, note 3); only Wood (1926)
partly makes up for this deficiency. By contrast, in
Scandinavian phonetics the history of *hw is a major
topic (the main works are A. Kock
[1895], H. Pipping [1912], Lindroth [1911-12], and
Olson [1915a and 1915b]). Assuming that slahan has
cognates outside Germanic, its h must go back to *k (PIE
*slak-). OE slic 'hammer, mallet' and slecg 'hammer' (>
sledge; the latter corresponding to OI sleggja) look like
being related to slean ~ sld but have incompatible final
consonants. One wonders what role sound imitation and
sound symbolism played in the formation of those
nouns. Svanberg's parallel (*slahan : *slengwan as svaga
: swingan) has its limitations, because -g- in swingan is
not necessarily a reflex of *gw. We have only Go
afswaggjan* (the recorded form is afswaggidai, past
860
Adz(e) Adz(e)

participle, plural), tentatively glossed as 'make one

waver,' a possible causative to swingan. The reliability of
the attested form is in doubt, and the function of w (not
a regular suffix of causative verbs) is unclear. Despite
those difficulties, Svanberg's reconstruction need not be
rejected out of hand. The original meaning of slahan may
have been 'make a quick movement,' though if slingan
and slahan are related, their root emerges only after the
postradical consonants have been given the status of
enlargements. In any case, tracing slingan and slahan to
the same root is more credible than setting up a common
etymon for slihhan and slingan, as Osthoff (1910:169)
suggested (this is why he easily connected -schleiche,
slango, and the Baltic words, which are allegedly akin to
ormsld: pp. 168-69).
When Svanberg began his investigation, he was
apparently unaware of the fact that long before him
Wood had used the same arguments, listed the same
derivatives of slahan ~ slagan ~ slá, and arrived at the
same conclusions about both slahan and slowworm. A
brief reference to Wood close to the end of the article
(Svanberg [192829:260, note 4]) is added almost in an
afterthought. Wood (1903:40, 42; 1905-06:22-23) set up
the root *sele-quax and took the rest for granted. As
usual, he strung dozens of forms from various languages,
many of them of uncertain origin. Svanberg's work made
no impact on further studies. Seebold refers to it in KS,
861
Adz(e) Adz(e)

but his reference is a mere formality. Wood's etymology

of slahan and slowworm found no reflection in
etymological dictionaries either. Unlike Wood, Svanberg
tried to reveal the process by which slahan can be shown
to belong with slin-
gan.
In the final section of his article, Svanberg surveys
the various hypotheses on the origin of slow-worm ~
omsld ~ ormslo and registers some good points in every
conjecture but emphasizes the fact that the slowworm is
smooth rather than slimy and that its skin reminds one
of a metallic surface. Svanberg was the only one to have
discovered Du slaaworm 'the larva of the cockchafer' (p.
259, note 4) in the index to Nemnich. He believed that
(orm)sla is related to *slahan and that *slanho is the
sought-for link between the verb and *slengwan (p.
260). Sleva, he points out, may be a separate word (p.
259), while -schleiche refers to the lizard's 'sleek'
appearance (p. 256). Even if slahan at one time
combined the meanings 'make a quick movement'
(hence 'writhe like a snake') and 'strike', we still do not
know whether the proto-form of sla- ~ sld- ~ slo- was
*slaihwo or *shanho, and this is the main question.
A hypothesis illuminating several forms is preferable
to a series of conjectures, each of which purports to
reconstruct the past of one word. *Slaihwo allowed
Johansson to trace slo— sld- and sleva to different
862
Adz(e) Adz(e)

grades of ablaut of the same etymon. Yet he offered a

second etymology of sld— slo-, from *slanho, passed by
sleva, and connected the forms in question with slango.
As already stated, A. Kock could not decide which
etymon is more convincing. Hellquist (1891:8) felt the
same way and refused to commit himself even many
years later: in SEO, he cautiously sided with FT.
Svanberg's etymology of the lizard's name is
unsatisfactory. G -schleiche can be understood as 'sleek'
only if the word's etymon is *(s)lei- 'slime,' but then
reference to a quick movement is no longer needed.
Surprisingly, Svanberg accepted this part of FT's
etymology to account for Blindschleiche after he
implicitly rejected the rest of it for his material. If sld is
derived from slahan, it cannot also be derived from
*slengwan, even assuming that the two verbs are
cognate. Nor can the animal name sld- from slahan mean
'writher' or 'creeper' only because *slengwan means
'writhe, creep.' Tracing this noun to slahan presupposes
that at the moment of derivation slahan predominantly
meant 'turn, twist,' and so forth. *Slanho, a congener of
*slengwan in a different grade of ablaut, indeed meant
'writher.' Unlike FT, Svanberg (and here he follows
Johansson's second etymology) left N sleva without an
explanation, and perhaps he was right. Sleva may have
formed folk etymological ties with sld— slo- late,
whereas the slowworm was, in the past, taken for a
863
Adz(e) Adz(e)

snake, so that the idea of *sldnha- > slo- versus *slanho-

> slango is appealing.
5. If we disassociate slow(worm) from *slaihwo and
from the Baltic words and agree that sla-, and sla— slo-
mean 'a kind of snake,' with *slanho being the generic
term and *sldnho designating the species, the freedom
in ordering the elements of the compounds will stop
being a puzzle. Slawyrm and ormsla ~ ormslo will be-
come transparent from the point of view of word
formation: they will join other tautological compounds.
In 1901, Koeppel published a short article on such words.
His most cogent examples are Go piumagus 'servant' and
marisaiws* 'sea,' OHG gom-man 'man' and lintwurm
'dragon,' MHG diupstale (> ModG Diebstahl) 'theft,' as
well as G Salweide 'willow' (the willow tree was known
as salaha and as wida) and Sauerampfer 'sorrel' (both
OHG sur and ampfaro meant 'sour'). In English, we have
gangway with a specialized meaning (from OE gang and
weg 'path'), pathway, sledgehammer, and haphazard. Cf
also OE mxgencrxft and mxgenstrengo ~ mxgenstrengdo
'strength' (a counterpart of MHG magenkraft), holtwudu
'forest, grove,' race(n)te ag 'chain,' and wordcwide
'speech, utterance.' E henbane (each of its parts once
meant 'death': see HENBANE), courtyard, and perhaps
mealtime (one of the meanings of OE mxl was 'fixed
time'), along with G lobpreisen 'praise, glorify' (and

864
Adz(e) Adz(e)

lobhudeln 'praise excessively'), can be added to this list.

Cf also what is said about F bran de son (BRAIN).
In addition, Koeppel cited Middle English hybrids of
the love-amour, wonder-mervaile, and cite-toun type.
Such hybrids (half-native, half-Romance) enjoyed some
popularity (Kriebitzsch [1900:14-37], though his
examples are not always convincing; other examples can
be found in von Kiinfiberg [1940]). G klammheimlich
seems to be from L clam 'secret, unknown to' (the root
also occurring in E clandestine) and G heimlich; then the
adjective (students' slang, some wit's coinage?) has the
structure comparable to that of love-amour. Ko-ziol
(1937:49, sec 89) repeats Koeppel's examples, but there
must be many more such, and their existence was
noticed long ago (cf Warwick [1856]). If ragamuffin (see
RAGAMUFFIN) started as 'devil-a-devil,' it belongs here too.
Ershova and Pavlova (1984:39) point out that this
type of word formation is productive in English dialects:
cf lass-quean, lad-bairn, and sea-loch; the last one is an
analogue of Go marisaiws*. Russ put'-doroga 'way' (from
put' 'way' and doroga 'road'; cited by Ershova and
Pavlova) and gore-zloschast'e 'misfortune-mishap,' as
well as the Irish epic name Culhwych, literally 'pig-pig'
(Hamp [1986a]) show that such words are not limited to
Germanic. See Liberman (2007).
If we derive animal names slo— sla- and OHG slango
from the same etymon, ormsla ~ ormslo will emerge as
865
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'snake-snake.' Lindroth (1911:126) shared this view.

Johansson and A. Noreen must have thought so too. This
etymology helps explain why it was possible to reverse
the elements (slawyrm versus ormsla ~ ormslo): both
had the same meaning. Cf Sw regndusk and N duskregn
'drizzle': it matters little whether one says drizzle-rain or
rain-drizzle.
An ideal etymology of slowworm, (orm)lsla ~ slo,
sleva, and Blindschleiche would show all of them to be
cognates. With the facts at our disposal, such an
etymology cannot be offered, because the origin of G
Blindschleiche (unless it has always meant 'blinder
Schleicher,' so that the similarity between -schleiche and
the rest is fortuitous) is beyond reconstruction. N sleva is
incompatible with *slanho , whereas *slaihwo is not akin
to OHG slango. Consequently, each choice presupposes a
sacrifice. Sleva, a regional word, whose history is
unknown, may be a smaller one. The closest analogues
of slowworm and ormsla ~ ormslo will be OHG lintwurm
and lintdrache 'dragon' (another snake-snake) and Dan
ormeslange 'slowworm'
(Liberman [2005]).
STRUMPET (1327)
Several Germanic roots that are sometimes hard to
keep apart may have interacted or coalesced in the
production of strumpet. The first, meaning 'rough,' is
seen in LG Struwwel- 'tousle-head'; the second, meaning
866
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'stump,' underlies G Gestrüpp 'shrubbery' and MHG

strumpf 'stump' (later 'trouser leg' and 'stocking'). With
the root designating things rough and sticking out, the
original meaning of strumpet emerges as *'unpolished
woman.' Compare MHG strunze 'stump' and ModG
Strunze 'slattern.' Closely related are words for 'walk (in
an ungainly way),' such as G strunzen 'loaf,' whence the
idea of strumpet *'gadabout.' A third root unites many
German and Scandinavian words meaning 'unwieldy
receptacle' and 'unpleasant (ugly) person' (usually
'woman'): Icel strympa 'bucket; big woman.' Icel strunta
'small wooden vessel; grouchy man' is a cognate of G
Strunze. The last root may not be different from the
previous ones. English lacks the variety of forms and
meanings found in German and Icelandic, which suggests
that strumpet is probably a borrowing, more likely from
Low German than from Scandinavian. It has not always
referred to women, as follows from E reg strumpet 'fat,
hearty child,' but 'prostitute' has been its main meaning
from the start. Strumpet is not an alteration of L
stuprum 'dishonor' or OIr striapach 'prostitute'; only the
suffix -et is of French origin.
The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest
etymologies of strumpet, 2) S. Johnson's derivation of
strumpet from L stuprum, 3) strumpet and its putative
cognates in German, and 4) strumpet in a Scandinavian
context.
867
Adz(e) Adz(e)

1. OED lists the following forms of strumpet:

strumpat, strompat, strompett(e), strompyd, stroumpet,
strumpett(e), strumpytte, strompott, and strumpit. With
the exception of strompott, which probably owes its
existence to an association with pot, they seem to reflect
the pronunciation [strumpit] or [strumpat], later
[strAmpit]. In recorded texts, strumpet has always meant
'prostitute.' Older dictionaries offered several
etymologies for this word. OED treated all of them as
unprofitable speculation, and at present the origin of
strumpet is believed to be unknown.
These are the earliest conjectures about the
derivation of strumpet: from F tromper 'cheat, deceive,'
especially in the sense 'jilt' (Minsheu; often repeated
later), from the Greek noun μαστροπός 'pander'
(Casaubon in Junius), from Du stront-pot 'dung pot or
common Jakes' (N. Bailey's gloss [1730]: Jake means
'latrine,' that is, 'john'), and from Ir striopach 'prostitute'
(Lye in Junius; Webster, from 1828 to 1847; Wedgwood,
and Mackay [1877]). Tooke supported the dungpot
hypothesis but explained strumpet as a compound of
two Dutch participles. Ker (1837:II, 3) thought that
strumpet consisted of three Dutch words. His candidates
were the nouns stier ~ steur ~ stuyr (he believed that
those were Dutch words for 'tax'), ruymen (that is,
ruimen) 'make room,' and bed 'bed.' In passing, he
accused Tooke of stupidity and arrogance. Ker's
868
Adz(e) Adz(e)

derivation of strumpet constituted only a small part of

an embarrassingly vituperative entry (but Tooke was not
more courteous). Thomson derived strumpet from strum
'fornicate.' No dictionary records this meaning of strum.
In some languages, words for 'woman' begin with str-,
Skt strl 'woman, wife' and OHG stria 'witch' among them
(Mayrhofer [1952a:35-37], KEWA [522-23], Normier
[1980:44-46], with further references). Even if some of
them are related, none has anything to do with
strumpet.
2. Johnson introduced L stuprum 'disgrace, li-
centiousness, whoredom' into the discussion of strumpet
(as he pointed out, his source was Trévoux). His
etymology proved especially long-lived. Todd (in
Johnson-Todd) referred to Wach-ter, who cited strùne, a
Low Saxon word for 'prostitute' (Todd left out the
umlaut sign). Wach-ter mentions strùne in the entry on
Strunze, where we also find OE mylte streona. He
probably meant OE myltestre 'prostitute.' Speakers seem
to have understood that noun as mylte-stre, because OE
myltenhus 'brothel' also existed. OE meltan 'consume by
fire, burn up' and mieltan 'digest; purge; exhaust'
suggest that mylten-hus resembles such 15th-century
words for 'brothel' as kitchen and stew: both refer to
heat and its effect. Miltestre is usually explained as an
Anglicized reflex of L meretrix 'prostitute' (a word that
allegedly came to England with Roman soldiers), but
869
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Wachter, although he followed folk etymology, may

have been close to the truth in treating -stre as an
independent element, even if it was confused with the
productive suffix -stre (see more on myltestre in
Gusmani [1972], with references to earlier works). G
Strunze 'slattern' must be related to the verb strunzen
'gad about, loaf' (the gloss for MHG strunze is 'Stumpf,
Bengel,' that is, 'stump; boy, lad' in WHirt and 'stumpf,
lanzensplitter,' that is, 'stump; brave knight' in Lexer). In
the rare cases Strunze appears in German etymological
dictionaries, it is never connected with E strumpet. G
strunzen is a cognate of E strunt (a nasalized form of
strut).
Ogilvie (ID) repeats the supposed French derivation
of the English noun but modifies it slightly: strumpet may
be, he says, a nasalized form of OF (e)stropier 'lame,
maim' (v), in allusion to the effects of venereal diseases.
In the versions of ID that appeared under his own name,
Annandale mentions only OF st(r)upre (< stuprum).
Weekley (1924 and only in that version of his dictionary)
cites the mid-15th-century word streppet 'strumpet.'
Partridge (1958) favors a Dutch etymon; he glosses MDu
strompen as 'stride, stalk' and explains strumpet as a
stalker of men. The other dictionaries copy from one of
the above authors (most prefer the derivation from
stuprum) or say that the origin of strumpet is unknown.

870
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Skeat4 suggested the Old French etymon

*estrompette, as though from MDu strompe 'stocking,'
or a nasalized form of OF strupe, late L stru-pum
'dishonor, violation' (< L stuprum), with m
"strengthening" the form *strup-et. He admitted that the
English word might be derived directly from OF *strupee
< late L *strupata, a metathesized form of stuprata, the
past participle of stuprare (from struprum, sb). Skeat
traced Ir and Gael striopach to the same Latin word.
Alongside MDu strompe, he mentioned LG strump
'stocking,' N reg strumpen 'stumbling,' LG strumpen,
strumpeln 'stumble,' strumpeling 'staggering, tottering in
gait,' and MDu strompelen 'stagger, trip, reel.' "We
might perhaps then explain strumpet as 'one who trips,
or makes a false step,'" he says. He compared all those
words with G strampeln 'kick' and found it remarkable
that in Huntingdonshire strumpet means 'fat, hearty
child,' that is, 'little kicker' (EDD). A Germanic section
appeared in his entry on strumpet only in the fourth
edition. Earlier he considered the Romance etymons as
certain and gave the probable root as *stup 'push, strike
against' (as in Gk oxixpeliCw 'push, repulse'). G. Williams
(1994) finds the derivation of strumpet from stuprum
convincing, but his supporting example (mastrupation
for masturbation, another form with metathesis) is
nothing more than a learned folk etymology.

871
Adz(e) Adz(e)

3. Two closely related approaches to the etymology

of strumpet are worthy of discussion. Germanic had the
roots *struppan— *strubbon-'rough' and *strumpa- ~
*strunka- ~ *strunta-'stump' (Lühr [1988:163-6, 278-9]).
In some situations, they may have overlapped, for
reference was to things both rough and sticking out.
Many Germanic words beginning with str- have s-mobile,
with t inserted between s and r (Wanner [1963], with
reference to A. Noreen and Kluge). Among them are
SwiG rub ~ strub and Rubel ~ Strubel. They designate
things sticking out, truncated, or uneven. G struppig
'tousled,' Gestrüpp 'shrubbery,' Strobel, a regional word
for Struwwelpeter (or Strub-belpeter) 'touslehead,' and
sträuben 'ruffle,' belong here, as well as many words
with nasalization, for example, Strumpf 'stump' and
Rumpf 'rump.' The
Swiss noun Rubel means 1. 'touslehead,' 2. 'rude
man; bad-mannered young woman,' 3. 'stormy weather,'
especially 'blizzard,' 4. 'great noise, quarrel.' A synonym
of Rubel is Strubel (Wanner [1963:138]). Given the
etymon designating 'rough (object),' all the meanings of
Rubel are easy to explain, but they would be hard to
predict or reconstruct.
Strump(et) looks like a cognate of Strubel 'rude,
unpolished person of either sex.' In the beginning, such
words often refer to both men and women and have
relatively inoffensive meanings (see more at GIRL). Harlot
872
Adz(e) Adz(e)

started as 'vagabond, rascal, low fellow' (13 th century).

Strumpet may initially have been a term of abuse,
something like *'cantankerous, querulous, ill-mannered
person'; later this meaning may have been narrowed
down to *'bad-mannered woman' and still later to 'pros-
titute,' though such intermediate meanings have not
been attested.
Consequently, we should search for the etymon of
strumpet among words meaning 'rough, unpolished,
bad-tempered person.' Shrubs, stubs, and stumps would
turn up in this search at every step because stumps are
'stiff' (H. Schröder [1908:521-24]) or because it is hard to
walk gracefully over rough, 'stumpy' ground (Vercoullie,
struik; Lindqvist [1918:111-12]). Consider also G Strumpf
'trouser leg, stocking.' Its original meaning was 'stub,
stump' (KM, KS). The clue from Strunze should be
considered too. Although here we may be dealing with a
different etymon, the semantic spectrum is remarkable:
ModG Strunze means 'slattern,' MHG strunze means
'stump,' whereas ModG strunzen means 'loaf' (v). Du
stront is 'excrement, dung,' that is, 'droppings.' If strun-
zen is unrelated to strunze ~ Strunze, we have another
word like Strubel, but it would be strange if strunze ~
Strunze and strunzen were not cognate.
Assuming that the German words listed above are
akin to strumpet, a strumpet was either a rough (dirty,
slatternly, unpolished) woman or a strunter ('strutter').
873
Adz(e) Adz(e)

MHG trunze (drunze, drumze) 'piece of a broken spear,

splinter' and trunzen 'curtail' are usually traced to OF
trons 'fragment', tronce 'cut off' (compare E truncate,
truncheon, and possibly trounce), but OI trunsa ~ trumsa
'snub, spurn,' and N trunta 'sulk' (reg) versus Dan trunte
'tree trunk, stump,' which are probably borrowings from
Low German, suggest that trunze is a doublet of strunze
and thus a word of Germanic origin. Among the authors
of Scandinavian etymological dictionaries, Holthausen
(VEW) seems to be the closest to the truth in dealing
with those words. MHG (s)trunze
'stump,' ModG Strunze 'slattern,' and ModG strunzen
'gad about, loaf' testify to the fact that the words
denoting 'uneven (object)' and 'walk in an untidy or
clumsy manner' could be (near) homonyms and affect
one another. See a detailed analysis of the root strut in
Herbermann (1974:6-31).
4. A somewhat different approach to strumpet is
based mainly on the facts of Modern Icelandic. ABM lists
strympa (first recorded in the 17th century) 'dipper, tall or
pointed hat, bucket, building with a cone-shaped roof;
virago, big woman' (its more modern variant is strumpa).
Strympa occurs in CV, where it is compared with OI
strompr 'chimney stack.' ABM offers the same
comparison. Stromp(u)r has more or less certain
cognates in the other Scandinavian languages (the
meanings are 'narrow wooden bucket,' 'whetstone,'
874
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'barrel,' 'measuring vessel,' and 'upper part of a trouser

leg'). If 'dipper, tall hat, chimney stack,' 'stub,' and the
rest go back to the same protomeaning *'stump-like,' we
come back to the root discussed above, but the path
from strump- 'stump' to 'prostitute' would go via
'unwieldy; like a vat,' rather than via 'rough, sticking
out.'
As long as a bond between the roots with and
without n remained in the linguistic intuition, the idea of
strutting could merge with the idea of 'arrogance'
(consider ModI struns 'arrogance' borrowed from Low
German in the 18th century) and 'loafing' (ModI struns
also means 'loafing'). The 17th-century Icelandic verb
strunsa 'mock, deceive' seems to be related to strunsa
'gad about, strut' and to strunta (18th century) 'small
wooden vessel, etc; grouchy man.' G Strunze 'slattern'
corresponds to 'small wooden vessel'. It follows that the
meaning 'virago, etc' may be a descendant of the ancient
meaning of strump- 'stump' ('rough object,' with the
influence from its homonym 'gad about') or a metaphor,
from 'receptacle' ('unwieldy object') to '(unpleasant,
unattractive) person.'
The syncretism 'vessel' (especially often 'basket') /
'old, unattractive woman' is widespread in Germanic.
Consider OI skrukka 'nickname of a troll woman' (in
Modern Icelandic, 'old wrinked woman') and 'basket
made of birch bark,' Bav Krade 'basket carried on one's
875
Adz(e) Adz(e)

back' and 'ugly woman,' G Schachtel 'box' and 'hag' (alte

Schachtel 'old woman'), Sc reiskie 'beehive' and 'ungainly
woman' (A.M. [1903]; W [1903]). Magnusson ([1957:239]
and see ABM) mentions OI brydja 'pot; giantess,' ModI
drylla ~ drulla (first recorded in the 17th century) 'bucket,
vat, narrow vessel; arrogant woman,' and strylla (a 15th-
century word, perhaps from Low German) 'small pail,
vat; single rock, pyramid, etc; troll woman.' One can add
Icel bida 'vessel with a narrow neck, chimney stack' and
'fat woman' (also 'tiny tot'); OI kolla 'wooden vessel
without a handle, mug' and 'woman' (now obsolete);
Nynorsk lodda 'short woman' and 'half-stocking made of
coarse fabric' (see LAD). Words for 'cavity, opening, hole'
often become the etymons for 'woman' (Rooth [1963]
discusses an especially imaginative example), but not all
the vessels mentioned here got their names from
'opening' ('vagina').
E reg strumpet 'fat, hearty child' must originally have
meant 'ugly or intractable child,' not 'little kicker,' for all
words of this group have negative connotations. 'Fat,
hearty child' and 'grouchy man' show that strunt—
strump- did not necessarily appy to women. Partridge
(1949b) sees no problem in E molly 'fruit basket' ("if ever
you have seen women in an orchard you will know what
I mean"), but molly 'basket' ~ moll(y) 'prostitute' may be
another example of the syncretism mentioned above.
The root of E strumpet, G Strunze, and Icel strympa is
876
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Germanic; the meaning of the English and the Modern

Icelandic words may have been influenced by Low
German (the differences between the groups -nt ~ -nz
and -mp- may perhaps be due to assimilation).
Although details remain hidden, the fact that English
lacks the sound string strump- and strunt- in the names
of receptacles (vessels) seems to indicate that E strumpet
is a borrowing (more probably from Low German than
from Scandinavian), with a French suffix added to turn a
native strunze into a classy harlot. In similar fashion, trull
coexists with trollop; both are related to troll. See more
about the root strot- at TROT (sb). Ir striopach is so
unlike strump(et) that borrowing, regardless of the
direction, need not be considered. LE confirms the
antiquity of the Irish word and shares the common
opinion that striopach goes back to L stuprum, with
metathesis. As we have seen, Skeat, too, had to
introduce metathesis into his reconstruction of the
Romance form. The derivation in LE (unless it can be
shown that striopach is a bookish, churchy word) is as
unappealing as the derivation of E strumpet from stup-
rum (Liberman [1992a:87-91, 93-94]).
STUBBORN (1386)
The only cognate of stubborn, with s-mobile, is Icel
pybbin 'obstinate,' which can be explained as either
'swollen' or 'firm.' The English word is thus not a

877
Adz(e) Adz(e)

derivative of stub, and stubborn does not mean

'immovable as a stub.' The al-
ternation of the suffixes (-orn ~ -inn) remains
unexplained.
The earliest forms of stubborn are stibourne, sto-
burne, and the like. Most explanations, including the one
we find in modern dictionaries, have been of a folk
etymological nature. Minsheu derived stubborn from
strout-born, perhaps with reference to strout, a variant
of strut (sb) 'strife, contention,' unless it is a misprint for
stout-born, as N. Bailey (1721) must have thought.
However, Skinner and N. Bailey (1730) repeat strout-
born. Beginning with Lye (in Junius), stubborn has been
connected with stub, as though stubborn meant
'immovable as a stub.' Both etymologies (from stout-
born and from stub) sometimes appear as equally
probable even much later (Graham [1843:61]). Old
English had stubb and stybb, which (if stubborn is akin to
them) would explain the Middle English doublets
stoburn, pronounced with [u], and stibourne. Skeat1
derived stubborn from stybb and ignored stubb (Ekwall
[1903:64, note 5] pointed to the weakness of Skeat's
derivation). He found only one example with u < y (furze
< OE fyrs). However, words with ME u < y are common:
blush, clutch (with [u] before [J] and [tj]), church, burden
(with [u] before r), shut, shuttle, thrust, and so forth
(Luick 1964:secs 375 and 397). English dialectal
878
Adz(e) Adz(e)

dictionaries cite neither *stib nor *stibborn. OED does

not object to stub as the etymon of stubborn, and
Weekley (1921) gives a parallel from German: Storren
'stump' ~ storrisch 'obstinate, stubborn.'
The only unquestionable cognate of stubborn is Modi
pybbin 'obstinate, dogged, sturdy,' though etymological
dictionaries of English and Icelandic never mention the
connection between them. tybbin was first recorded in
the 18th century; however, pybbast 'endure, resist'
occurs in the works of GuBmundur Olafsson, 1552-95
(Arni B65varsson, personal communication; ABM dates
the verb to the 17th century). Both stubborn and pybbin
seem to be old, even though both were recorded late.
tybbin may be related to words with the reconstructed
root *teu-, *tau-, *tu- ~ *tu-, as in OI pufa 'mound,' and L
tuber 'swelling, hump.' So IsEW (431), but AEW doubts
that tuber belongs here and does not cite pybbinn in the
discussion of pufa (the same in ABM). Wood
(1919:251/16 and 271/90) reconstructs the base *tu\bh-
'make firm, strong, secure' and compares OI popta
'rower's bench' and L tabula 'board.' The first vowel of
pybbinn is umlauted u, and the geminate is probably of
expressive origin. The root of stubborn can be seen in OI
stufr and stubbr ~ stubbi (both mean 'stump').
Unlike E stubborn, Icel pybbinn has a wellattested
suffix: compare Icel feginn 'glad,' heidinn 'heathen,'
heppin 'happy,' which shows that -orn in stubborn is a
879
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Middle English development. Skeat reconstructed

*stubbor with excrescent -n, as in bittern, and cited
slattern, a word that periodically appeared in and
disappeared from his entry, and marten < martern <
marter (Skeat [1887 = 1892:372]). Nothing is known
about the history of -n in bittern, whereas slattern is
hardly from slatter + n; neither word is an adjective.
Skeat believed that stubborn had emerged through a
redistribution of morphemes in the noun: stubborn-ess <
stubbor-ness, but OED points out that -or did not exist as
a living suffix in Old English. Words with it were inherited
and formed on verb, not noun, stems. Mätzner I:431 and
Mueller mention OE clibbor 'adhesive' (a cognate of G
klebrig), which was monomorphemic in Old English.
OI pybbinn presupposes ME *stybbin or *stybben, so
that the substitution of an obscure suffix for a
transparent one remains unexplained. However, the
variation -en —ern occurs not only in stubborn. English
has golden, wooden, and woolen, whereas the German
adjectives are hölzern 'made of wood,' gläsern 'made of
glass,' and zinnern 'made of tin.' The variants with -ern in
German are late, and details of their origin are in some
cases unclear. Even less clear is the history of -ern in
German verbs like folgern 'draw the conclusion, follow'
and steigern 'raise' (Paul [1920:sec 66], Hen-zen
[1965:secs 128 and 148]). The suffix in E southern,
northern, eastern, and western is of a different origin
880
Adz(e) Adz(e)

than in hölzern and gläsern; see also the comment on

the form earthern in OED. In Middle English, the sound
string -orn existed as a borrowing from French in aborne
~ alborne 'auburn,' but -orn was at no time a productive
suffix. If stubborn, with s-mobile, is related to pybbin, it
cannot be derived from stub.
According to Spitzer (1954), stubborn is a word of
Romance origin. He discusses F reg estibourner 'fortify
the ground by stakes or palisades,' perhaps from OD
stibord 'a board that stifles, stems, stays,' corresponding
to OD stigbord 'sluice' (see EWFS, etibois). Stubborn, in
his opinion, meant 'strong, resistant as a palisade.' But
the English word cannot be separated from ModI pybbin,
whereas esti-bourner may have been derived from ME
stibourne rather than from Old Danish, unless the
similarity between the Middle English and the French
word is a coincidence. Thomson compared stubborn and
stiff but found no supporters, though the earliest
dictionaries (see N. Bailey and Junius) derived stubborn
from Gk στιβαρός 'firm, strong' (N. Bailey
[1721], but badly misspelled in N. Bailey [1730]).
Bailey's derivation recurs as late as 1847 (Talbot) and
1858 (Richardson). However, the Greek adjective
represents the zero grade of the root *steibh-, the same
as in OE stlf 'stiff' (Frisk, 782; Chantraine, 1047; WP
II:647; IEW, 1015). Curtius (1873:226) gives a different
explanation of the Greek word, but he, too, dispenses
881
Adz(e) Adz(e)

with stubborn. Stubborn is unrelated to stiff and

στιβαρός (Liberman [1986:11114]).
TOAD (1000)
Toad is the continuation of OE tadige. Beside tadige,
Old English tadde and tosca (with the metathesized
doublet tocsa), both meaning 'toad,' have been recorded.
Middle English had tade and tadde. The same root can
be found in ModE tadpole. The etymology of toad hinges
on two questions: 1) How are OE tadige and tadde
related to OE tosca ? 2) What is the relationship between
OE tosca and the Scandinavian forms: Dan tudse, Sw
tossa, and N reg tossa, all of them meaning 'toad'?
Dictionaries, with the exception of SEO, deny any links
between tadige and the Scandinavian words, because OE
a, allegedly from *ai, is incompatible with a. However,
tadige appears to be the lengthened variant of tadde
despite the common opinion that tadde has a < a before
an expressive geminate. The root of tad-de is probably
the same as in Dan tudse and OE tosca (< *tod-sca).
North Sea Germanic has numerous words with t/d +
vowel + t/d in the root designating small objects and
small movements, such as E tid(bit), tit(bit), tad, toddle,
totter, dodder, and the like. The toad must have been
thought of as a small round creature. Perhaps its warts
or manner of moving in short steps ('toddling') gave it its
name. If so, the old idea that Dan tudse is related to OHG
zuscen 'burn' should be abandoned.
882
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The sections are devoted to 1) the proposed

etymologies and the putative Scandinavian cognates of
toad, 2) the origin of a in OE tadige, 3) toad among other
words having the structure t-d, and 4) the etymology of
toadstool.
1. "The etymological jungle stretching around the
designations of the toad is almost impassable, in a wide
variety of languages. One encounters two independent
sources of complications: (a) the luxuriant growth of rival
words, not always geographically delimited; and (b) the
opacity of the overwhelming majority of the lexical items
at issue" (Malkiel [1985:242]; see the comparative
material in Wilhelm Lehmann [1907:185, note 4]).
English is no exception.
Old English had tadige and tadde. Tadpole, that is,
'toadhead,' has been recorded since the 15th century.
Both tadde and ta de turned up in Middle English. Secure
cognates of toad are absent, but a few look-alikes exist,
OE tosca 'toad' being one of them; tosca yielded tocsa by
metathesis (A. Campbell [1959:sec 359]). Similar forms
are Dan tudse (OD tudse and todze), Sw reg tossa (earlier
tadsa and tussa), N reg tossa, all meaning 'toad' (Rietz,
tossa; SEO, tossa; DEO, tudse), along with Low German
Tutz(e) ~ Tuutz and a few others like it (Claus [1956]).
Other similar words begin with p-: ME pad (continued as
E reg pad ~ paddock), OI padda 'frog, toad,' with

883
Adz(e) Adz(e)

correspondences elsewhere in West Germanic, and LG

Pogge 'toad.'
OED and ODEE call ta dige a word of unknown
etymology and unusual formation. However, it
resembles OE bodig 'body,' and the resemblance may
not be fortuitous. No direct path leads from tadde to
pad, but Dan tudse looks like a good match for tadde,
the widespread opinion to the contrary notwithstanding.
Kaluza (1906-07:1, sec 60a) lists tadige among the words
with a < *ai, but he follows a mechanical pattern,
according to which OE a can have only one source.
*Taidige and *taid- are fiction.
Toads play an outstanding role in folklore: they are
held to be loathsome and poisonous, they are associated
with witchcraft, and all kinds of diseases, from warts to
angina pectoris, are ascribed to them. Taboo is
prominent in the names of the toad, and this
circumstance may be partly responsible for the opacity
of words like L bufo, F crapaud, Ital rospo, G Krote, and
Russ zhaba. To complicate matters, the same name often
applies to the frog, the toad, and occasionally the snake
(compare G Unke 'orange-speckled toad' versus L anguis
'snake').
Inquiry into the etymology of toad has revealed few
viable possibilities. Ihre (932) compared OSw tossa and
OI tad 'dung' on account of the toad's ugliness but
preferred to derive tossa from Gk τοξικός 'poisonous'
884
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(the same as late as Charnock [1889]). The first idea

(tossa ~ tad) has some potential (see below), but the
second is devoid of value. Thomson listed both (O)I tad
(that is, tad) and Sw tossa at toad. Tosse (in this form)
occurs in Minsheu, who also lists G Tod 'death' (spelled
todt). Tudse appears in Skinner and Junius. Ettmuller
(1851:530) tentatively derived ME tade from OE *tihan
(that is, teon), which he connected with tacen 'token':
'(an animal) pointing to rain?' ('quasi pluviam indicans?').
Webster's dictionary between 1864 and 1880 gives tad,
tudse, and tossa at toad. Since words for 'frog' and 'toad'
have often been traced to verbs meaning 'swell,'
Richardson thought of toad as a derivative of OE te on
'extend, expand,' whereas Wedgwood looked on OI
tutna 'swell' as the etymon of the English word (the
same also Lynn [1881:249]). Neither Richardson
nor Wedgwood paid attention to phonetic details,
and Mueller was justified in rejecting Wedgwood's
etymology.
The search for the origin of toad resolves itself into
two questions: 1) How are OE ta dige and tadde related
to OE tosca? 2) Are tadige and tadde related to the
Scandinavian words? Skeat and OED found it impossible
to bridge OE ta dige and Dan tudse because if tadige
goes back to *taidige, ai has to be separated from u: the
zero grade of ai is i, not u. It is easy to write "toad: cf.

885
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Dan. tudse," as do Whitman (1907:386) and DEO, but the

invitation to
"compare" these forms is vacuous.
2. Practically everyone who has written about the
etymology of OE tadde has agreed that the geminate in
it is of expressive origin (see Zachris-son [1934:401] and
Coates [1982:213] among others and a list of words like
tadde, generated from von Friesen [1897], in Kauffmann
[1900]), whereas a is alleged to be the result of
shortening before dd. OED refers to Bjorkman as the
originator or a supporter of that view. FT (tudse), Torp
(1909:168),
and Torp (1919, tossa; both times with a question
mark), WP I:768 (with reference to Torp [1909]),
and IEW, 180, proposed a connection of tosca and
tudse with OHG zuscen 'burn'. FT point out that tudse is
not related to ta dige or tadde; the other dictionaries do
not mention the English word. Holthausen wondered
what fire has to do with toads (is fire the poison they
secrete?) but cited WP's etymology in AeW.
The comparison tudse ~ tossa ~ zuscen predates FT,
for it appears in BT. The reviewer of BT wrote
(anonymous [1898:96]): "Under taxe (frog or toad) it
would have been worthwhile to suggest a comparison
with the synonymous tosca, and vice versa; the two
words cannot well be etymologically connected as they
stand, but they bear a suspiciously close resemblance to
886
Adz(e) Adz(e)

each other in form. The conjecture that tosca is related

to the OHG zuscen to burn, seems decidedly unhappy."
As we now know, taxe is a ghost word (Napier
[1898:359]), but "the unhappy conjecture" is still alive.
It would be a rare coincidence if Germanic possessed
two nearly identical but unrelated forms for 'toad'
(tadige ~ tadde and tudse). They may be connected if we
assume that a in tadde is not the result of a shortened
but that a in ta dige is the result of a lengthened. No Old
Germanic language had words with the root *taid—
*taip-, *teid- ~ *teip-, and in Old English only tadige
begins with ta d-. Sequences of long vowels followed by
long consonants in the root were rare in Old English, so
that when words like xdre 'vein' and ator
'poison' (all of them had d or t before r) developed
geminates, the vowel was usually shortened (SB,
204, sec 299, and see A. Campbell [1959:sec 281]).
If tadde with an original geminate underwent
lengthening because of taboo or for emphasis, it would
become *tade, rather than *tadde, and the suffix -ig, as
in bodig 'body,' would be added to ta d-, not tadd-. LG
Pogge, OE bodig, and OE ta dige ~ tadde belong to the
same semantic field; see sec 4.
Some of the words with traces of spontaneous
lengthening may have changed their pronunciation
because of their meaning and usage. Such is OE we l
'well' (adv); fraam 'bold, strong' is another possible
887
Adz(e) Adz(e)

example of expressive lengthening. Haam 'shirt' and

goor 'dung' are hard to explain (SB, 124, sec 137/6), but
all those forms were recorded in the most ancient
glosses, so that lengthening in them has nothing to do
with early Middle English quantitative changes. If,
however, as stated above, we assume that tad(d)- was
the original form, the origin of toad will stop being a
mystery. Such a type of reverse reasoning (tadd > tad,
not tad > tadd) always meets with resistance. Consider
the puzzlement of de Saussure's contemporaries at the
idea that in Proto-Indo-European one vowel with three
unknown consonants alternated, rather than three
vowels with one unknown consonant.
3. English has a considerable number of
monosyllables beginning with t and ending in d, all of
them meaning 'small quantity.' Here are some of them
culled from OED and EDD. Tad 'child' (but also 'a
quantity, a burden' and in northern British dialects
'dung, manure,' probably from 'pieces of manure'); tid,
best known as the first component of tidbit (in dialects
also 'teat, udder,' as well as a synonym of ted 'small cock
of hay' and 'any great (!) weight, heap; bundle of hay');
tod 'fox' (a northern word) and 'load; bushy mass' (in this
meaning an earlier southern word), tod ~ toddie ~ todie
'small round cake of any kind of bread, given to children
to keep them in good humor' (cf toddle 'small cake' and

888
Adz(e) Adz(e)

toddle 'walk with short unsteady steps'); tud 'very small

person.'
Most of those words have variants or synonyms with
d in place of t. Both tottle and doddle exist, and totter is
a synonym of toddle. Tidbit is a variant of titbit. One of
the glosses of tid, as already mentioned, is 'teat.' Its
vulgar synonym (variant) is tit, and dialects have tet. In
tit for tat, both words are symbolic names for 'some
quantity.' Tit is also 'small horse' and 'girl,' and the
titmouse is a very small bird (the idea of smallness
comes from tit because the German for titmouse is
simply Meise).
Tatter is a borrowing from Scandinavian; obviously,
tatters are small rags. J. de Vries (AEW) notes at tdg
'twig, root' that Old Icelandic had surprisingly many
words beginning with t- and meaning 'fiber' and 'fray.'
His list is heterogeneous. However, he mentions toddi
'weight of wool, bit' and toturr 'rag'; see toddi also in
Kauffmann
(1900:256) and tud in FT. E tatting 'kind of knotted
lace work' was first recorded in 1842, and its origin is
obscure, but even if it is a humorous adaptation of a
foreign word, the sound string tat fits the idea of knotted
embroidery. Tittle, tattle, and tittle-tattle suggest
'smallness,' whether it be a small dot or small talk. Tot is
'anything very small; tiny child'; tut has numerous
meanings, including 'small seat made of straw.' The
889
Adz(e) Adz(e)

interjection tut-tut! looks like one of the words listed

above. The situation with t-d ~ t—t ~ d—t words is the
same in all the Germanic languages; see von Friesen
(1897:95-97) and Bjorkman (1912:269 and 273, footnote)
(neither of them mentions OE tadde or Dan tudse).
When dealing with near synonyms and near
homonyms like tottle-toddle-totter-dodder, tid-tit-teat,
and tad-tot, an etymology that would more or less fit the
entire group would be the best one, even though each
word has its own history and deserves attention. Some
of the English words listed here are borrowings from
Scandinavian and Low German or Dutch, others may be
borrowings, and still others are native. Yet a general
conclusion is possible. We are facing a large set of
Germanic nouns and verbs with the structure t/d +
vowel + t/d referring to small, often round objects. Most
of them are of northern origin.
Once a complex of this type has been discovered,
little else can be done. Apparently, tad, tod, ted, tid, and
tud are not onomatopoeic, and it is impossible to explain
how this combination of sounds acquired the meaning
preserved by North Sea Germanic. We are unable to
trace such complexes to other conventional signs, and
reconstructing a more ancient form with enlargements
will not solve any problems. So when ODEE, following
OED, says that the origin of toddle, to give a random
example, is unknown, its verdict should not be taken as
890
Adz(e) Adz(e)

final. Toddle is a frequentative verb from the base tod-

'small quantity.' Further research is unlikely to disclose a
deeper or subtler truth. Nor is setting up Gmc *tuddon of
unknown origin (so Orel [2003:411]) of much use.
Dan tudse and Sw tossa (< *todsa) probably belong
with the words discussed above. Perhaps the toad was
thought of as a small round creature. Perhaps its warts
gave it its name. Not inconceivably, the toad's manner
of moving in short steps ('toddling, tottling') provided
the sought-
for connection. Hellquist (1903-04:63) and SEO
(tossa) was the first to offer this approach to tadde
and tossa. He believed that the meaning of the 'root' tad
~ tod ~ tud is 'swollen' (and this is probable: cf ModI tudi
'young calf'), though 'small (and round)' seems to be
preferable. The line between 'swollen' and 'small and
round' is blurred, but in English the toad hardly got its
name because it can make itself swell up. Since Hellquist
did not touch on the length of a in OE ta dige and did not
destroy the connection between tudse and zuscen, his
etymology could not influence English etymologists
interested in the history of toad (assuming that they
were aware of his views).
4. At one time, a discussion arose on the origin of
toadstool (Godfrey [1939]; Strachan [1939]). Toadstool is
nothing more than toad + stool. Parallels in Dutch,

891
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Frisian, German, and Scandinavian support this

etymology (in addition to Strachan [1939], see
Bayne [1881]; E. Marshall [1881], who quotes Min-
sheu: "Toade-stoole, because the toades doe greatly
love it. Belg. Padden-stoel, pad-stoel,
bufonum sedes"; Terry [1881]; A.B.C. [1934], and
Stapelkamp [1957b:13]). Strachan had a good reason
not to look on tod 'weight of wool' as the etymon of
toad in toadstool, but he shared the common opinion
that a in ta dige is the original vowel
(Liberman [2003:381-86]).

TRAIPSE (1593, v), (1676, sb)

G traben ~ draben 'wander,' Russ drapat' 'run for
one's life,' and the like, most probably of onomatopoeic
origin, testify to the existence of a common European
migratory verb meaning 'move about.' It seems to have
spread to other languages from Low German. Traipse
(sb, a doublet of drab) is 'a woman given to traipsing;
slut.'
The verb traipse means 'walk in a trailing or untidy
way, tramp, tread' (OED). AHD glosses it 'walk about idly
or intrusively,' but the word may be devoid of negative
connotations (as in Jersey; Lee [1894:334]). According to
W2 and W3, traipse is regional or colloquial. Trape (v), a
doublet of traipse, also occurs in dialects (OED). Traipse
or trapes (sb) is "an opprobrious name for a woman or a
892
Adz(e) Adz(e)

girl slovenly in person or habits, dangling slattern"

(OED). The origin of the verb and the noun is obscure,
but the two are probably related.
Similar-sounding verbs meaning 'be on the run' turn
up in a number of European languages. Such are, for
example, G traben 'trot' (< MHG dra-ben ~ draven; OS
thrab on, MDu draven), with the variation t- ~ d-
common in German and trapsen
'tramp.' See Krogmann (1938b:188), who cites many
verbs of this type, and Arhammar (1986:2223) on the
unlikely ties between traben and the Old French etymon
of E travail ~ travel.
According to KM, G Trabant 'satellite' is a borrowing
from Czech (its original meaning was 'infantry man'), but
KS admits some connection between traben and
Trabant. KM mention almost identical nouns from
Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Rumanian, and
Hungarian. See also Trabant in Tornqvist (1960) and
Knobloch (1971:313-14; he related Trabant to G Treppe
'stair'). Russ drapat' 'flee ignominiously, run for one's
life' may belong to the same group. In most Slavic lan-
guages, the cognates of drapat' mean 'scratch, pinch,'
and a link between 'scratch' and 'flee' is possible:
compare Russ udirat' 'flee' (the same root as in dergat'
'pluck, pinch'). The Russian verb is believed to be related
to Gk δρέπω 'I cut, pluck,' OI trefr pl 'fringes,' and so on
(IEW, 211; Vasmer I:535; ESSI V:101-2; Chernykh I:267).
893
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The meaning 'flee' in drapat' has the support of Gk

δραπέτης 'fugitive' (sb and adj), possibly Skt drapayati
'causes to run' (rejected by Frisk, άπο-διδρασκω), and at
least one Iranian form (Abaev [1966:14]). The Old Frisian
cognate of traben was tro(u)wia. Dan trave, N trave ~
trave, and Sw trava are borrowings from West Germanic
(according to KM, from Frisian; according to DEO, from
Low German). E trape (reg) and trapes ~ traipse seem to
have formed part of the traben / drapat' group. See also
Ihrig (1916: 66, sec 25. 04). In all probability, traben and
its cognates are of onomatopoeic origin.
In Smythe Palmer's opinion (1883), trapes ~ traipse
go back to F tre(s)passer. He dissociated trapes 'wander
or saunter about' from trape 'trail along in an untidy
manner' and connected the noun trapes 'idle slatternly
woman' with the verb trapes. The connection is
probable, but the French as the source of the English
verb is unlikely, for trespass has always meant what it
means at present.
Skinner compared traipse and traben, and two and a
half centuries later Weekley (1924) mentioned traben in
his discussion of drab2. Both were probably right. Traipse
is not a cognate of traben (since the etymon of traben ~
draben begins with p-). Nor is Russ drapat' related to
either of them, but in soldiers' language and in popular
speech drab- ~ trap- became a migratory word
understood from Hungary to England. The verb spread in
894
Adz(e) Adz(e)

several waves, came into contact with native

homonyms, enriched their meaning, or ousted them.
Consider the dates of the earliest attestations: trape
'tramp'
(1400), G Trabant (1424), drab (sb; 1515), traipse (v;
1593), traipse (sb; 1676). Nasalized forms (like
tramp) and forms in another grade of ablaut (like trip)
were probably not felt to be related and did not
influence the development of trab- ~ drab- in the
languages of Europe.
Most likely, trapes (v) is a borrowing from German
(before the change [a:] > [ei]), an Anglicized
colloquialism, and trapes (sb) is 'woman given to
trapsing,' hence 'slut.' Johnson and Kenrick defined trape
as 'run idly and sluttishly about' and added: "It is used
only of women"; according to OED, trape is "usually said
of a woman or child." The alliterative phrase traipsing
and trollop-ing about (L. Payne [1909:384], Alabama)
confirms the connection of traipse with women, but the
18th-century meaning need not have been primary: it
may have developed under the influence of the noun.
Drab (sb) is a doublet of trapse. The spelling traipse
disguised its etymology. At present, traipse is
monosyllabic, "but many modern dialects have it as two
syllables" (OED). The same is true of some American
dialects (Lee [1894:334]). The second syllable can be an

895
Adz(e) Adz(e)

affectation or a trace of baby language (Liberman

1992a:91-92).
TROT (sb) (1352)
The closest cognate of trot 'old woman' is 18th-
century G trot (the same meaning), which seems to be
related to MHG trut(e) 'female monster' and G Drude
'sorceress; incubus.' If Drude is also related to Go trudan
'tread' (and thereby to E tread and G treten), trot may
originally have meant 'gadabout,' like drab and traipse.
Not improbably, trot is a borrowing from German.
Trot 'old woman' (usually disparaging), old beldame,
hag' appears in texts almost simultaneously with the
verb trot (1362). The earliest forms of trot are trat, trate,
and tratte. Such spellings in Middle English neither
presuppose nor exclude disyllabic pronunciation. ME
baudstrot 'bawd' provides no clue to the etymology of
trot, for the second component of baudstrot is strot
rather than -trot, probably a variant of strut, of which G
strunz- is a nasalized form; see further at STRUMPET.
According to Weekley, trot is Dame Trot of Salerno, 11 th-
century doctor and witch (given with a question mark in
1921, without it in 1924, and not
repeated in Weekley [1933]). Shipley (1984: index)
says that trot is a reflex of PIE *dra, which does not
turn up in his book. This is a worthless idea.
In 1854 trot 'toddler' and in 1895 trot 'young animal'
were first recorded in English books. OED (trot sb4) lists
896
Adz(e) Adz(e)

them among the other meanings of trot 'gait of a

quadruped,' but neither toddlers nor young animals trot.
On the other hand, children are often likened to feeble
women and animals (see GIRL). Thackeray and Skelton,
who were the first authors to use trot in those meanings,
must have known a regional or slang word most people
understood at their time. (Is this the reason why Dickens
invented the name Trotwood and why Miss Betsey
shortened David's "adopted name of Trotwood into
Trot"? Her house became a "wood" in which the "trot"
grew up. Dickens began publishing David Copperfield in
1849. Trot appears in Chapter 15. Hawes [1974:86] does
not mention any works on the origin of Trotwood.) If trot
'hag' and trot 'toddler, young animal' belong together,
Dame Trot fades out of the picture.
Trot is hardly an s-less variant of strot, for trot never
meant 'prostitute' in English. Yet when trot 'old woman'
became sufficiently well-known, it may have degraded
into a term of abuse under the influence of other
disparaging names beginning with tr- like traipse and
trollop; see more at DRAB. If an early disyllabic word
*trotte, with the variant tratte, existed, we may be
dealing with an expressive formation (the o ~ a
alternation, especially next to r, is typical of many
regional words; see them at HEIFER and RABBIT).
OED states that Gower used trote in one of his
Anglo-French works but that it has not been found in
897
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Continental French. Trot is, most likely, of Germanic

origin. It may be related to G Drude ~ Frau Trude
'sorceress, incubus' and Late MHG trut(e) 'female
monster' (Lecouteux [1987:15-17]). Drude has
Scandinavian cognates. Magnusen (FML, 971) compared
it with the valkyrie name (OI) prndr ('strength'; see OE
pryd in AEW), and J. Grimm first shared this idea, which
was vastly superior to the old etymology Drude = Celt
*druid (see the comment in Andresen [1889:229]). WHirt
and Hirt (1921:298) also give the equation Drude = prndr.
A simpler etymology derives G Trude 'foolish woman'
from the modern name Gertrude (Bey-sel [1925:116]),
but the connection between the proper and the common
name is probably secondary. Neither Reinius (1903:120)
nor Sunden (1904:134) to whom Beysel refers (and gives
wrong pages in both cases) supports his etymology.
The Grimms (DW) derived Drude from *drud
'lovable, lovely'. In their opinion, Drude may at one time
have designated a beautiful woman; they saw no
objections to treating the stem vowel in MHG trute as
long. Kluge (EWDS1-10) accepted the Grimms' etymology.
He thought that calling an incubus beautiful had been
the result of taboo and mentioned the case of Gk
Ευμενίδες 'the gracious ones' (= the Erinyes).
EWDS16 compared Drude with Go trudan 'tread'
(Drude allegedly meant 'heavy walker'), which
presupposes u in MHG trute. This etymology survived
898
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Mitzka's editorship (KM), but See-bold (KS), although he

does not reject it, considers it uncertain. However, it
may be correct. See
Knobloch (1989:284) and what is said about E trull
at the end of the entry DRAB. WFl truttelen 'loiter,
trifle' and Du reg trut 'female genitals' (Baskett
[1920:117/127 E4]) may contain the same root, and
again we get a familiar connection between walking and
women. DW2 mentions ModI drutur 'infertile egg' and
trutta 'urge a horse to move faster' and refers them to
onomatopoeia. On the face of it, the two words have
nothing to do with Drude; neither, as it seems, does
onomatopoeia.
More problematic is OIr druth 'fool,' which split into
the meanings 'feeble-minded' and 'prostitute.' G. Lane
(1933:261) believed that they were homonyms, but
Campanile (1970:36) is probably right in deriving both
'prostitute' and 'clown' from the base 'dishonest, filthy,
contemptible.' OIr druth cannot be separated from OE
trud 'actor' and OI trudr 'clown,' but it is unclear whether
the Germanic words are native or borrowed. Breeze
(1995) argues for the Celtic origin of the Old English
word. See trudr in AEW and trud in AeEW, which give
further references and discuss a possible connection of
trud ~ trudr with the root of Go trudan (OI troda).
No modern etymologist seems to have compared
MHG trute and ME trate(e) ~ ModE trot, even though the
899
Adz(e) Adz(e)

development from 'incubus' to 'old hag' is perhaps more

natural than from 'incubus' to 'sorceress.' In addition to
trotte, drutte, and drude, Wachter cites G trot 'woman;
old woman, fortune teller.' If 18th-century G trot really
meant 'old woman,' a link between E trot and G Drude
can be viewed as almost established (English borrowing
from German?) and a search for an expressive formation
of the tratte type becomes unnecessary. Only the origin
of E trot 'toddler, young animal' remains partly
unexplained.
Trot (v) may have influenced the meaning of trot (sb)
('bad women' were traditionally represented as loafers:
see above and STRUMPET). The etymology of trot (v) is
debatable. If the verb is of Germanic origin, it is related
to trot (sb), but that is exactly the point of dispute.
Junius's idea that trot is "such a one as hath trotted long
up and down," is ingenious but not supported by any
facts. Some of the cognates of E trot (sb) that one finds
in dictionaries, namely OI dros 'girl' (CV; in modern us-
age, 'whore'), prot 'destitution' (Junius), and preyta
'exhaust' (Lye in Junius), are unrelated to it. Ital
drudo 'lover' that CV give as the etymon of dros is from
Gmc *drUd, which J. Grimm believed to have been the
etymon of G Drude (Liberman [1992a:91-92]).
UNDERSTAND (888)
In the Indo-European languages, many verbs of
understanding consist of a prefix and a verbal root for
900
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'stand,' but in the Germanic family only West Germanic

has related forms and analogues of understand. All of
them developed from spatial metaphors whose idea was
that standing in a certain position allows the observer to
get to know the properties of the object. The root -
standan might but did not necessarily have a transitive
meaning. OE (West Saxon) understandan coexisted with
a synonym forstandan; its cognate won out in Frisian
(ferstean), Dutch (verstaan), and German (verstehen). Its
other synonym was undergi(e)tan. The prefix under- had
the syncretic meaning 'beneath' and 'among,' hence
'between.'
If understandan emerged relatively late, the ancient
meaning of the prefix should interest us only insofar as it
at one time determined the coining of other verbs like
undergietan, but if all of those verbs arose after the
etymological meaning of under- and for- had been
forgotten, the situation in Proto-Indo-European is of
limited value in the reconstruction of their semantic
history. Given the existence of OE forstandan and
undergi(e)tan (both meant 'understand'), understandan
may have arisen as a blend of the two. Understandan
and forstandan need not have been based on the same
metaphor, for example, one of separation; 'in front of
seems to be a likelier sense of for-. It is unclear whether
understandan, forstandan, and so forth were used in a
neutral or an elevated style. The contrast between the
901
Adz(e) Adz(e)

metaphorical forstandan ~ understandan and the fully

transparent Go frapjan and OI skilja is striking.
The sections are devoted to 1) the semantic structure
of understand and its analogues in Old West Germanic,
2) the semantic history of these verbs, especially G
verstehen, and 3) attempts to find the distant origin of
understand and its analogues. Section 4 contains a
tentative etymology of understand.
1. The inner structure of the verb understand has not
changed since the time it was first recorded (OE
understandan ~ understondan). It is the meaning of the
whole that is unexpected. Reflexes of two adverbs
merged in Germanic, namely *ndher 'under' (as in L
infra) and *nter 'between' (as in L inter 'between,
among'), with d from *t by Verner's Law. This fact was
not known before 1893 (Gneuss [1999:108], with
reference to Delbrück), but the original meaning of
under- in understand ('beneath,' 'among'?) was
discussed as early as the 18th century.
Under 'among' rarely occurs in Old English. The only
incontestable example is under him 'among them'
(Alfred's Orosius). All the other sentences yield an
equally good meaning (sometimes a better one) if under
in them is interpreted as meaning 'under.' Even the
modern phrase under the circumstances is not
unambiguous from this point of view. In contrast,
German unter 'among' is still common, whether it is a
902
Adz(e) Adz(e)

native word or the result of French influence (compare G

unter uns and F entre nous 'between ourselves').
Many Old English verbs beginning with under-occur
only in glosses. Sweet may have been right in calling
some of them unnatural words (see Gneuss [1999:114]),
but such translation loans as OE undercuman 'assist' and
underhlystan 'supply an omitted word' for L subvenlre
and subaudlre, however "contrary to the genius of the
language" (Sweet [1897:VIII], quoted by Gneuss), show
that under- was a productive prefix and that the likes of
undercuman were at least not stupid. The same is
probably true of OHG untarambahte for L subminis-trat
'serves,' and so forth. Today the dullest glossa-tor would
not suggest even as a mnemonic device such
monstrosities as undercome and underlisten despite the
productivity of under- 'insufficiently' (compare the verbs
underestimate and underappreciate), mainly in words of
Romance origin.
The meaning of the resulting sum of under + verb, to
the extent that we can trace it to the old period, is
unpredictable. G untergehen means only 'go under'
('sink, go down, decline'), while OE un-derga n meant
'undermine, ruin,' and ModE undergo has acquired the
sense 'endure, experience.' Compare also E understand
and ModG unterstehen 'come under (the jurisdiction of),
be subordinate to; dare (with sich).' Similar difficulties
arise with the cognates of -stand outside Germanic, as
903
Adz(e) Adz(e)

seen in the much-discussed L superstitio 'superstition;

excessive fear of the gods; religious rituals' and L
praestare 'stand before' and 'guarantee.'
Neither 'stand between, stand among' nor 'stand
under' leads unambiguously to the meaning of ModE
understand, but both can be interpreted in a satisfactory
way: one 'stands under' and gets to the bottom of things,
and while standing between or among things, one
acquires the power of discrimination. Understand must
originally have referred to the process of observation
and learning rather than its result. We have in it a
semantic analogue of such a preterit-present verb as Go
wait 'I know' (from seeing to knowing) and of OIr tucu 'I
understand' (originally the same as in the perfect forms
of do-biur 'I bring': Buck
1205/17.16.3, with reference to Holger Pedersen),
but today verstehen and understand designate rest, not
motion (Weisweiler [1935:55]).
OE understandan and its Old English synonym
forstandan have several analogues in West Germanic:
MLG understdn, MDu onderstaen, OFr under-stan; OHG
firstantan, OS farstandan, MDu verstaen, OFr forstan;
OFr urstan, and OHG intstantan. The Gothic for
'understand' was frapjan (akin to Go frops 'clever, wise');
its Icelandic synonym is skilja (literally 'separate'). OE
underniman, underpencan, and especially undergi(e)tan
meant nearly the same as understandan. Underpencan is
904
Adz(e) Adz(e)

usually glossed 'consider,' but when used with a reflexive

pronoun, it meant 'change one's mind, repent.' Un-
derniman was the least specialized of those verbs:
'understand,' 'blame' and 'undertake' (so in ^lfric) and in
medical texts also 'steal' (here the connotation of
secrecy present in the prefix under- comes to the fore:
underniman = 'take clandestinely'; see Newman
[2001:192]).
2. The semantic history of those verbs has been the
object of protracted debate. See a general survey of the
material in Kroesch (1911; understand, pp. 470-71). No
agreement exists even on the development of G
verstehen, a deceptively transparent word. According to
Schwenck's vague formulation, verstehen denotes the
direction of thought toward a place or object that will
become known. Kluge (EWDS1-6, Verstand) admits that
the sense development of verstehen is obscure and
compares G verstehen and Gk έπίσταμαι 'be able, be
experienced; know, consider, think.' Breal (1898:59-60)
repeated or made independently the same comparison.
In his opinion, G sich auf etwas verstehen and the Greek
verb describe the situation when one gets on top of
something and comprehends its essence. He cited
understand but did not elaborate. The Greek
counterparts of verstehen and understand occurred to
Junius and Schwenck. According to Harm (2003:117-24),
έπίσταμοα is not an exact analogue of verstehen ~
905
Adz(e) Adz(e)

understand, because it means 'put oneself on top or at

the head of something.'
Kluge (EWDS,7-9 verstehen) juxtaposed OHG fir-with
Gk περί '(a)round,' as it allegedly occurs in Go frisahts
'image,' and mentioned OHG antfriston 'interpret' with
two prefixes (ant-fri-ston). His gloss of verstehen 'place
oneself around something' (sich um etwas herumstellen)
looks odd (the same in DW and in Hirt 1921:248), and
the origin of frisahts is unclear (fri-sahts?, fris-ahts?).
OHG antfriston only seems to refer to standing: it is
antfrist-on, not ant-fri-ston (antfrist has been explained
as a calque of L interpres 'interpreter'). However, Kluge's
mention of OE wealhstod 'interpreter, mediator' (EWD10)
possibly deserves attention.
An unexpected parallel to wealhstod (a word of
unknown etymology: see AeEW, stod) is E spokesman,
originally also 'interpreter' (OED), an early 16th-century
noun with enigmatic ablaut. The ablaut relations in the
pair OE (-)standan 'understand' ~ (-)stod 'interpreter' are
the inverse of Go frops 'wise' ~ frapjan 'understand.' In
case a wealhstod merely 'stood by' in communicating
with foreigners (OE wealh 'foreigner, stranger'), the
origin and meaning of that word shed no light on the
history of forstandan and understand, but perhaps -stod
in wealhstod is the stem of some verb with the causative
meaning 'make things understood.'

906
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Götze (EWDS11-15) rewrote the entry, removed Kluge's

speculation, and explained verstehen and understand as
'stand in front or beneath something, in order to get
exact information.' Then Roland Martin wrote his
groundbreaking article (1938) in which he traced
verstehen to legal practice: from 'stand in front,'
meaning 'vouch for, guarantee,' to 'comprehend.' E
understand, he contended (p. 627, footnote), "is
apparently nothing more than the generalization of the
same basic legal meaning: I take it upon myself to speak
in this case because I have grasped all the connections."
Martin's formulation sounds more convincing in German
than in English because the German for 'take it upon
oneself' is sich unterstehen ("ich unterstehe mich, eine
Sache zu vertreten, weil ich den Zusammenhang erfaßt
habe"). The pun produces the impression that sich
unterstehen is equivalent to understand.
EWDS16-21 accepted Martin's etymology and KS
has not dismissed it (likewise, Rix [1995:240]). But
Schröpfer (1985:430), who sees in it an overzealous
application of the principles of the Wörter und Sachen
school ("when a word has an abstract meaning, try to
find a situation in which the meaning was concrete"),
seems to be closer to the truth. Harm (2003:112-13) cites
an additional argument against Martin: firstän ~
firstantan never had the meaning 'present a case in
court.' It is not necessary to look for some everyday use
907
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of 'stand in front,' in order to reconstruct the meaning

'understand.' L praestare 'guarantee, vouch for' (literally
'stand in front') also acquired a legal sense at the end,
rather than at the beginning of its semantic history
(Beikircher [1992]). Despite Martin's explanation that
the parallelism between verstehen and understand is far
from obvious, both verbs are indeed based on spatial
concepts. Germanic and comparative scholars have
recognized this fact (see Buck 1205-06/17.16, Belardi
[1976:86], and Poli
[1992:125]). Only the meaning of the prefixes con-
tinues to baffle etymologists.
ModE understand and OE understandan are dis-
similar in that understand has no synonyms in the
neutral style, whereas understandan competed with
undergi(e)tan and partly with underniman, underpen-
can (the same prefix but different roots), and for-
standan (the same root but a different prefix). Those five
verbs were not always interchangeable, their frequency
was different, and each gravitated toward a certain
locality or school. Ono (1981a and b; 1984; 1986) has
investigated the pair understan-dan (a West Saxon verb)
~ undergietan; it appears that neither monopolized the
field the way ModE understand did. OE under- was,
consequently, less 'marked' than its modern reflex. In
some examples, understandan seems to have referred to
the first step of comprehension and undergietan to the
908
Adz(e) Adz(e)

next (Ogura [1993:43]).

3. The proposal that under- in understand should be
taken to mean 'between, among' is old. It occurs in
Skinner, and Mueller observes that understand and its
counterparts bring to the fore the idea of standing in the
midst of things, withstanding, impeding, and boldly
striving. Skeat explained understand as "stand under or
among, hence to comprehend" and compared it with L
*inter-ligere 'choose between.' Intelligere is a common
gloss for the Old English verbs of understanding, and
Skinner, who wrote his dictionary in Latin, also glossed
Flemish ("Belgian") verstaen with L intelligere.
The most innovative approach to understand and
verstehen is Wood's (1899b:129-30). The subsequent
exchange (Hempl [1899], Wood [1900]) adds
only a few details to his main idea. It would be more
profitable to quote him at lenght than to retell his text,
which would amount to reproducing it almost verbatim.
Wood says the following: "A term denoting insight,
perception, understanding may primarily mean one of
several things, the most common of which are:
'sharpness, keenness, acuteness'; 'grasping,
comprehension'; 'separating, distinguishing.' The last
mentioned class is very numerous. Thus: Lat. cerno
'separate, sift : distinguish, discern,' discerno 'separate :
discern,' Gk. κρίνω 'separate : judge'; Lat. distinguo
'separate : distinguish,' intelligo ('choose between') :
909
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'perceive, comprehend,' etc. So also in Germanic. Here

the usual prefixes used in expressing separation are
Goth. fair- 'for-,' OHG. fir-, etc; OE to-, OS ti-, OHG zir-;
OS undar-, OE under-, OHG. untar- 'unter.' In the sense
'between, apart,' OHG. undar-, etc, are to be compared
with Lat. inter, which is used in the same way, and
further with Gk. evtepov, Skt. antara-m 'entrails.'... In
words expressing separation the meaning 'understand'
may develop in two ways: 1. 'separate' : 'distinguish'; 2.
'separate, take away, take in' : 'perceive.' To the first
class belong Lat. cerno, distinguo; to the second intelligo,
per-
cipio To class 2. belong: OE under-gietan ('get
apart, take to oneself,' as forgietan 'forget'-'love') :
'understand, perceive'... To these we can add OHG. fir-
stantan, MHG. ver-stan, -sten 'hinder from, intercept' :
('take to oneself') 'understand,' MHG unter-stan
'undertake, take upon oneself, seize, attain' : OE under-
standan 'take for granted, perceive, understand.' That
these words came to mean 'perceive, understand'
through 'intercept, take to oneself' admits of but little
doubt. This entirely explains their origin and use. Thus
OE. understandan 'take for granted, assume' points
plainly to this origin. A Gk. e7UOt<c|Mca in explaining
verstehen, understand is futile, since, in any case, the Gk.
word developed its meaning differently. That, if from the
root sta- 'stand,' would give 'stand over, oversee, care
910
Adz(e) Adz(e)

for, give attention to,' hence 'perceive, know,

understand.'"
Here are Hempl's amendments to Wood's re-
construction (1899:234): "German verstehen and English
understand are cases of class 1, not of class 2, and so is
Greek e7UOt<c|Mca. OE. understandan was originally
simply 'to stand between,' and so 'to keep apart,' 'to
separate,' and it, like Latin distinguo, German
unterscheiden, etc., got the figurative meaning
'distinguish,' 'make out,' 'understand,' 'know how (to)'
(and in German, unterstehen passed on to 'undertake
(to),' 'presume (to)'). But the same is true of German
verstehen, OE. forstan-dan. These originally meant 'to
stand in front of,' 'to keep off (from some one [sic] else),'
'to separate,' and hence 'to distinguish,' 'to make out,'
'to understand.' Just so, Greek emiothm1, S7UOt<c|M<ci
originally means, as still shown in emiothm1, ecpio-trpi
'to stand in front of,' 'to oppose,' 'to check,' 'to keep off.'
Hence the meaning 'to separate' and metaphorically 'to
distinguish,' 'to understand,' 'to know how,' as shown in
e7UOt<c|Mca."
In his rejoinder, Wood (1900:15-16) offers an
interpretation of the Greek verbs different from Hempl's.
With regard to Germanic, he cites the meanings "of MHG
unterstdn : 'keep, assume, reach, undertake; snatch
something away from someone' of OE understandan :
'take for granted, assume, perceive, understand.' Germ.
911
Adz(e) Adz(e)

unterstehen carries out the idea contained in MHG.

understan, -sten, and did not pass through the meaning
'understand'.... OHG. firstantan, MHG. verstan, -sten
'intercept' : 'notice,' 'perceive,' 'understand' show
the same development of meaning as OE. under-
standan... Now it is possible that OE. forstandan, OHG
firstantan, firsta n 'verstehen' may have meant primarily
'stand before,' and hence 'watch, observe, perceive,
understand.' So Schade, Wb., explains them. This
interpretation I considered when writing my first article
on these words. But it seemed on the whole more
probable that Germ. verstehen, vernehmen, OE
understandan, underniman, undergietan all belonged to
one class and were explained by OHG. firneman
'wegnehmen, im besitz nehmen, vernehmen,
wahrnemen' ['take away, take in one's possession, learn,
perceive']; and that verstehen, understand are both
based on the transitive use of the root sta -, ste -, which
is found by the side of the intransitive use from IE. time
down to the present."
Gneuss (1999:119), an advocate of the idea that
under- in understandan means 'among,' refers to Wood
with approval and quotes L. Bloomfield (1933:425-26),
who believed that "I understand these things may have
meant, at first, 'I stand among these things'" (see also
Bloomfield [1933:433] on the meaning of understand).
However, as follows from the excerpts given above,
912
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Wood, unlike Hempl, thought of "standing among

things" only in the sense of separating and appropriating
them; compare his gloss of OE undergietan 'get apart,
take to oneself.' Obviously, such a meaning could de-
velop only with time, for the idea of separation is not
present in OE under-. In underpencan, it would be even
harder to come up with a gloss like 'get apart.' Wood's
analysis presupposes, as he says at the end of his second
article, the transitive use of standan.
OE forstandan is also troublesome. For- may be a
cognate of Go fra-, so that forstandan (with transitive -
standan) would have meant primarily 'snatch away,' but
it may be a cognate of Go faur- (with intransitive -
standan), and then the meaning would come out as
'stand in front.' The West Germanic cognates of Go fra-,
faur- and fair- (was there also fri-, as in frisahts?) merged
or were confused in many words. Such divergent
meanings of OE forstandan as 'defend, withstand, resist,'
'benefit, avail,' and 'understand; signify, be equal' did
not necessarily spring up from a single source. Wood
admitted that two interpretations of forstandan and
firstantan are possible, but the first was "on the whole"
more probable. It is more probable only within the
framework of his system. If we assume that verbs of
understanding are based on the concept of separation,
Wood's idea will be unobjectionable. However, even a
viable general principle, if it is a product of induction,
913
Adz(e) Adz(e)

should be applied with care. OFr ursta n and OHG

intstantan bear out Wood's conclusion because ur- and
int- (ModG ent-) meant what Wood expected them to in
such cases. It is verstehen and understand that remain
problematic.
The sense of a prefixed word is frequently de-
termined by the attraction of the semantic field rather
than by the etymological meaning of the prefix. For
example, we have OE ofergitan 'forget' and
undergi(e)tan 'understand.' The contrast is between
ofer- (to lose knowledge) and under- (to gain
knowledge). However, one of the synonyms of ofergitan
(with a cognate in the Frisian dialect of Sylt: Stiles
[1997:341]) was forgitan, so that in the pair forstandan ~
understandan, the prefix for- and under- are
interchangeable, while the verbs forgitan and
undergi(e)tan are antonyms. If we did not know the
meanings of E oversee and overlook, we would be unable
to guess which means what. The German for both is
übersehen. Ogura (1993:20) makes the same point for
Old English, and see what is said in sec 1, above, about
undergo, untergehen, and so forth.
In his analysis of Germanic verbs of forgetting,
McLintock (1972) touches on OE ongi(e)tan and un-
dergitan. He identifies on- in ongietan with Gmc and-;
with respect to under-, its "likeliest interpretation," he
says, "is that it is a semantic continuant of Gmc ub" (= Go
914
Adz(e) Adz(e)

uf-). "If under- were a replacement for ub- we might

regard the triad ongitan : undergi-tan : ofergitan as
parallel to Go. andhausjan ['listen'] : ufhausjan ['obey'] :
*ufarhausijan [*'forget, neglect'], the first two members
in each being synonyms" (pp. 87-88). Like Wood,
McLintock was motivated by the requirements of the
system and the wish to find a single principle governing
the use of the verbs he was examining. Yet he mentions
other possibilities and explores them.
One such possibility is that under- in verbs of mental
perception, such as understand, meant 'among.' But
under- might be a doublet of Gmc *und-. From a
historical point of view, under is the comparative form of
*und. Gothic and Old Icelandic retained the simplexes.
Gothic had und 'for, until,' which coexisted with the
prefix unpa- (recorded only in unpapliuhan* 'escape,' a
counterpart of G entfliehen) and under 'under' (also
undaro), not used as a prefix. In Old Icelandic, und
'under' was a poetic doublet of undir; there also were OI
unz (< und es) 'till' and undan (< *und-ana) 'away from.'
Under- in undergietan as a by-form of *und- seemed
acceptable to Seebold (1992:418: "[t]he verbal un-
der- is in this case... not taken from the free form OE
under- but is a secondary extension of *und- by way of
confusion with under 'below, beneath'"). He may not
have been aware of McLintock's arguments, for he says:
"It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine how many
915
Adz(e) Adz(e)

verbs with under- have shared this development... there

is... no help to be found in analyzing understandan").
Gneuss (1999:115, note 20) rejected Seebold's
reconstruction.
McLintock's (1972:88) comment is as follows:
"Although in Gothic there is no semantic overlap
between and and und as prepositions, the two are
doubtless related by Ablaut. Furthermore, there is some
evidence in Gothic that as verbal prefixes they were
interchangeable... Outside Gothic we find evidence in OS
antthat beside untthat for the interchangeability of the
prepositions. Now the Gothic prefix und-, which occurs in
undgreipan ['seize'], undredan ['provide, grant'],
undrinnan ['fall to one's share'], has a by-form unpa- in
unpapliuhan ['escape'], whose cognates in OE are up- in
nominal and op- in verbal forms... Since Go. unpapliuhan
corresponds semantically to OHG intfliohan, we might
regard Gmc. *und-, *unpa... as one of the sources of
OHG ant-, int-. We should then be able to link OHG
intstantan 'to understand' with OE understand and see
the Old High German pair firstantan, intstantan as
parallel to OE forstandan, understandan."
Newman (2001) offers a brief survey of early
scholarship (the main articles by Wood and Hempl; Jäkel
[1995:224], and a few modern dictionaries) and reduces
the hypotheses on the origin of understand to three
types: 1) 'stand between' > 'separate' = 'keep x apart
916
Adz(e) Adz(e)

from y' > 'understand'; 2) 'stand between' > 'separate' =

'take something away from the rest, thereby bringing it
to oneself' > 'perceive' > 'understand'; 3a) 'stand among'
> 'be physically close to' > 'understand,' and 3b) 'stand
under' > 'be physically close to' > 'understand.' "It is a
problem for all three hypotheses," he says, "that there
simply is no 'stand' meaning (e.g. 'stand between, stand
among, stand next to, stand near, stand at, stand under')
documented for OE understandan (with inseparable
prefix)" (p. 189). Turning to undergietan, he adds that it
"came into use as a more specifically abstract variant of
ongie-tan. The emergence of undergietan is instructive
because, like understand, when it makes its appearance,
it is only used in the abstract sense of 'understand,
perceive.' Undergietan is not used in any sense of 'take
among, take between, take under' etc. There is no
evidence that undergietan emerges gradually out of any
immediately prior concrete sense" (p. 193). These
observations are valid; compare the proposal in sec 4,
below.
In Newman's opinion, undergietan was introduced
"to carry the more abstract senses of another -gietan
verb" and "understandan was introduced to carry the
more abstract sense 'understand' of another standan
verb, namely forstandan 'defend; obstruct, stop (way);
understand; hinder from; help, avail, profit' " (p. 194). He
believes that the starting point was standan *'stand
917
Adz(e) Adz(e)

upright,' for what is correct is straight. According to this

reconstruction, the original meaning of understand must
have been *'take a stance.' This result does not sound
like a revelation, for 'stand' is 'stand.' With regard to
under- we are only told that its semantic complexity is a
factor to be reckoned with. The conclusion is so guarded
as to be almost devoid of interest: "The points I have
made concerning the semantics of OE under- and the
semantic components of 'stand' have been made in
order to establish motivations for the OE compound
understand, distinct from the motivations for this
compound proposed in previous scholarship. The
motivations which I point to in Sections 3 and 4 need not
to be thought of as replacing the earlier hypotheses.
Rather, one might consider the motivations proposed
here as constituting additional reasons for the
emergence and consolidation of understandan in OE" (p.
198). The most valuable part of Newman's article is the
one devoted to the interaction of synonyms for
understand in Old English.
By contrast, Hough's suggestion (2004) seems
unpromising. She quotes sentences in Old English in
which standan is connected with light (leoht stod, leoma
stod, etc) and sets up OE standan *'shine, gleam,' but
does not discuss the role of under- in the history of
understand. The meaning 'comprehend' could of course
have developed from 'see (the) light'; yet the path from
918
Adz(e) Adz(e)

'shine' to 'understand' is unimaginable, the more so

because stan-dan did not really mean 'shine': light
"stood," as rivers "lay" in Old English; it is only our view
that they shone and flowed.
According to Harm (2003:113-14, 123-24), OE
undestandan and its Old High German counterparts
developed from *and(a)standan 'stand in front' but he,
too, assumes that prefixes alternated in the verba
sentiendi. This assumption seems to be the most
reasonable starting point for the etymology of
understand.
4. The picture that emerges from the foregoing
discussion can be summarized as follows: 1)
OE understandan is one of many verbs in the Indo-
Understand

919
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Witch

European languages with a verbal root for 'stand'

and a prefix, the whole meaning 'get to know,
comprehend.' In West Germanic, int-, fir- (OHG), for-
(OE), and ur- (OFr) competed with under- and its
cognates in the formation of such verbs. 2) Other verbal
roots could be combined with under-and yield (almost)
the same meaning, as in OE un-derstandan and
undergi(e)tan. OE understandan was first recorded in
888, but its actual age cannot be determined. 3) OE
under- meant 'under' and 'between, among,' which
poses the question of whether the reference was to
standing under an object and exploring it from the
bottom up or standing among several objects and being
able to choose the right one. 4) If, however, under- is an
extension of *und-, the initial idea might have been one
of separation, approximately 'stand against an object, in
order to appropriate it.' The same interpretation of
understandan is possible even if under-meant 'among.'
5) The origin of OE forstandan ~ OHG firstantan is not
clear in all details. With so many similar verbs meaning
'understand,' it is not necessary to reconstruct a
concrete situation (a legal process, for example) that
gave rise to that verb. Since the origin of OE for- ~ OHG
fir- is ambiguous (several ancient prefixes may have had
for-~ fir- as their reflexes), the initial meaning of the
920
Adz(e) Adz(e)

prefixed verbs is often opaque. If for— fir- in forstandan

~ firstantan designated hindering, impeding, OE
forstandan might be synonymous with un-derstandan
'stand against, separate.' 6) Given a variety of prefixed
verbs of understanding and forgetting, new verbs
employing the same model arose easily. It would be
enough to have forstandan and undirgi(e)tan, both
meaning 'understand,' for understandan to come into
being. In such a process, reminiscent of blending, the
Indo-European etymology of under- would be of no
consequence. This summary leaves open the questions
about the origin of the earliest metaphor in OE
undergi(e)tan and forstandan (assuming that both are
older than understandan) and about the equivalence of
under-and for- in them. (Understand is not the only word
whose prefix under- has piqued the curiosity of linguists,
philosophers, and specialists in logic: cf L substantia and
Gk umooxaoij, both of which combine "under" and
"stand.")
The data at our disposal are insufficient for drawing
definitive conclusions about the origin of the West
Germanic verbs of understanding. Research into the
etymology of understand makes sense only as part of a
broader investigation of the entire group. Although
WGmc under had two meanings ('under' and 'among'),
the line demarcating them is one of our own making. We
have here an old preposition or adverb with a vague
921
Adz(e) Adz(e)

spatial meaning. Its referents depended on the situation.

This is a common occurrence. The difference between E
in the library ~ at the library, in the street ~ on the street,
above the river ~ over the river is irrelevant for speakers
of many other languages. The same, and much more
frequently, happens to conjunctions. The German phrase
wenn du kommst must be translated into English as
'when you come' or 'if you come,' but only exposure to
foreign languages makes speakers of German (unless
they are linguists) aware of the ambiguity of wenn. The
alternative made much of by modern etymologists—is
understand equal to 'stand under' or to 'stand between
(among)'?—is an anachronism. The pair undergi(e)tan
'understand' ~ ofergietan 'forget' refers to under- 'under'
as opposed to ofer-'over,' while the pair of synonyms
forstandan ~ un-derstandan seems to refer to events on
the surface.
The extent to which the idea of separation was
prominent in the minds of those who first endowed
verbal units like 'stand beneath ~ among,' 'stand in
front,' 'stand against' with the meaning 'perceive, get to
know, comprehend' is beyond reconstruction. Nor can
we establish whether those words go back to popular
usage or to the language of scholars (poets, priests). Go
frapjan ('be mindful of something, use one's mind' =
'understand') and OI skilja ('separate' = 'understand') are

922
Adz(e) Adz(e)

simpler and more transparent than their West Germanic

counterparts.
WITCH (890)
Old English distinguished between wicca (m) and
wicce (f). The leveling of endings and apocope wiped out
the difference between them, and ME wicce (m) was
later replaced by wizard. The etymology of wicca ~ wicce
seems to be almost within reach, yet it remains
disputable, and dictionaries either reproduce uncritically
one of the existing hypotheses or say "origin uncertain."
Wicca and wicce have been compared with Gmc *wlhs
'holy,' OE wlglian 'foretell the future,' OE wlcian 'yield' ~
OI vikja 'turn aside,' L vegere 'excite, stir,' and with the
verbs whose Modern German reflexes are weigern
'refuse,' wiegen 'sway,' (be)wegen 'move,' and even
wiehern 'neigh.' Since the original functions of and the
powers ascribed to the persons called wicca ~ wicce are
unknown (one can rely solely on haphazard Latin
glosses), the proposed interpretations differ widely and
include 'divinator,' 'averter,' 'wise man (woman),' and
'necromancer.' It is suggested here that OE wicca goes
back to the protoform *wit-ja- 'one who knows,' in which
-tj- merged with -kj- (> ch), as happened in several Old
English words and presumably in the history of the verb
fetch < ? fetian. If this etymology is correct, wicca ~ wicce
will align themselves on the semantic plane with L saga,
Russ ved'ma, and E wizard. There can be little doubt that
923
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OE wiccian 'use witchcraft' was derived from the noun,

rather than being its source.
The sections are devoted to 1) the naming of witches
in various cultures, 2) the early attempts to connect
wiccian with the ancient custom of predicting the future
by the neighing of horses (MDu wijchelen) and Grimm's
derivation of OE wiccian and wlglian from *wlhs, 3) the
relationship between MDu wichelen and OE wlglian and
between both of them and OE wiccian (wiccian appears
to be unrelated to either, and the origin of wicheln is
obscure), 4) the arguments against the derivation of
wicca from wltega, 5) other etymologies of witch, 6) an
attempt to understand wicca as 'necromancer,' and 7)
the proposed etymology of witch from *wit-ja-. Section 8
is an addendum on the origin of the words most often
mentioned in connection with witch, namely wicked,
wile, wizard, wiseacre, and wight.
1. The earliest recorded form of witch is OE wicca (m)
'man practicing witchcraft' (Laws of flLl-fred, 890). Its
feminine counterpart wicce surfaced in 1000 OElfric; see
both in OED). ModE witch usually refers to a woman and
continues wicce, but the reflexes of wicca and wicce
merged in Middle English because of the reduction of
endings and apocope. Two main hypotheses compete in
the attempts to etymologize wicca ~ wicce, though as
usual, several less known conjectures also exist. The
majority of recent dictionaries cite the Old and Middle
924
Adz(e) Adz(e)

English forms of witch and leave the question of origins

open.
In reconstructing the history of words for 'witch,' the
most important question concerns the exact powers
attributed to witches in a given society. The range goes
all the way from divinators, that is, sorceresses and
(presumably) wise soothsayers to charlatans and evil
creatures. Among the examples are L veneficus ~
venefica 'preparer of poison' (its Old English calque is
unlybwyrhta) and MHG goukelxre 'street entertainer,
conjurer, magician,' (on which see GAWK). TOE I:16.01.04
lists
sorceresses, divinators, and so forth. Most Old
English words are compounds with the roots dry-, lyb-,
sige-, galdor-, scin-, and -run. Other words glossed
'witch' include OI volva, to be discussed below (sec 6),
and OI tunrida ~ late MHG zunrite 'fence rider.' See Buck
(1497/22.43), Lauffer (1938:114-19), Poortinga (1968),
and Palsson (1991:158) for a survey of the properties
ascribed to witches in medieval literature and of words
designating witch in Indo-European languages.
In Germanic, especially difficult is G Hexe < OHG
hagzussa (akin to OE hxgtesse), a compound made up of
two obscure elements; see it and E hag in etymological
dictionaries. The most ingenious etymology of hagzussa
is Bergkvist's (1937; 1938:14 and 17). He combined hag-
'wolf' (originally 'shaggy creature') and -zussa 'a kind of
925
Adz(e) Adz(e)

cloth' (named after its fabric: cf OE tysse 'coarse cloth')

and obtained 'person in wolf's clothing,' like OI ulfhedinn
'wolf cloak' or berserkr 'berserk,' if the latter is
understood as 'bearskin' rather than 'bare-skin.' Guntert
(1919:119) partly anticipated his explanation of -zussa.
OE wicca ~ wicce are not compounds, but their etymon
almost certainly contained a suffix and was longer than
the earliest attested forms.
2. Kilianus cited Du wichelen and wijchelen, which he
glossed 'hinnire' ('neigh') and 'hariolari' ('foretell the
future, divine'). In present day Standard Dutch, wijchelen
'neigh' no longer exists. Even Hexham did not use it for
glossing neigh and whinny. According to Duflou
(1927:120), who refers to Kluyver (1884), Kilianus looked
on wichelen and wijchelen as different meanings of the
same word (the verb for neighing is probably
onomatopoeic; it has an English regional cognate wicker)
and quoted Tacitus's statement that "the Germans...did
principally...divine and foretell things to come by
whinnying and neighing of their horses." Minsheu,
Blount (whose English version of Tacitus is given above),
Skinner, the author of Gazophylacium (witch), Wachter
(wicker 'divinator'), and VV (wichelen) repeated that
quotation. Ten Kate (505) gives an excerpt from Tacitus.
Franck (EWNT) is the only modern researcher who
treated Kilianus's etymology of Du wichelen with some
interest. Van Wijk expunged the reference to Tacitus
926
Adz(e) Adz(e)

from Franck's entry. We can disregard the alleged

connection of OE wicca with MDu wichelen 'neigh,' but
its relatedness to MDu wijchelen 'foretell the future'
merits further discussion.
J. Grimm (1835: 581-82, see witch on p. 581; the
same in the later editions) cited OE wiccian 'use
witchcraft' and wlglian 'take auspices, divine,' along with
wiglere 'soothsayer, wizard,' wiglung and gewiglung
'soothsaying, augury, witchcraft, sorcery,' and their
numerous Germanic cognates, and referred them to the
root of Go weihs 'holy.' (In the present entry, OE wlglian
is given with a long vowel despite the lack of consensus
on this
subject.) Pictet (1859-63, II:643), Mueller, Leo
(1877:494), and E. Zupitza (1896:142-43) supported J.
Grimm's etymology, and after Osthoff (1896:4445;
1899:184-85) connected the entire group with L victima
'sacrifice,' the existence of a verbal root 'separate' lost
its hypothetical character. "In Lat[in] and esp[ecially]
G[er]m[ani]c, this base was adapted for the notion
'sacred; forbidden to (separated from) humans'" (Feist-
Lehmann, 398). See
Berneker (1908:2), Torp (1909:408-09), WP I:392, 1.
ueiq-, IEW 1128, 1. ueik-, IsEW 112, ueiq-, and AHD1
1548, weik-2: "In words connected with magic and
religious notions (in Germanic and Latin)." Many authors
believe that Go weihs and L victima belong together, but
927
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the situation with OE w glian and wic-cian and the origin

of MDu wijchelen is less clear. (For a different etymology
of victima see Ode [1927:98-99], who posits the root
*gui- 'live' in it and dissociates victima from Go weihs.)
The etymology proposed by Grimm appeared in
Webster's dictionary in 1864 and stayed there
until 1880. In 1882 Skeat1 came out, and W 1890
changed its explanation of witch. But W3 reinstated
Grimm's idea. Partridge and Barnhart copied from
W3. WNWD1 follows W3, except that the first edition
gives the root *weiq- 'violent strength' and cites L vinco
'conquer' as a cognate. Apparently, a wrong paragraph
from IEW (1128: ueik 2) was reproduced; the mistake
was caught later and not repeated, but it recurs in
Limburg (1986:171).
3. In Go weihs 'holy,' h is not the product of de-
voicing before s, as follows from gaweihan 'consecrate,'
and it corresponds regularly to h in the related forms
elsewhere in Germanic (Feist). Sometimes g turns up in
them. One of the variants of OE we ofod 'altar' (also we
ofud, w obud, and wiohbed) is Northumbr w gbed,
whose first component (w g-) should be understood as a
variant of w h- by Verner's Law, especially because OE w
g 'idol, image' has been recorded. Although standard
works on the history of English do not discuss the origin
of -g in w g, Barber (1932:98), in a book on Verner's Law,
notes the alternation in question. Likewise, A. Noreen
928
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(1970:231, a) treated -veig in OI Rannveig and other

women's names as related to ve < *wiha-'altar.'
However, the etymology of OI -veig is debatable (see it
in AEW). In OI vigja 'consecrate,' a weak -ja- verb,
voicing is to be expected, but the proper name Vignir
shows that the root vig- had an independent existence in
Icelandic word formation. Consequently, /g/in OE w
glian is not incompatible with /h/ in Go weihs and /k/ in
L victima.
OE wiccian and w glian also seem to be related, but
the difference between /k:/ and /g/ poses problems
even if the geminate is of expressive origin. Martinet
(1937:179) pointed out that OE fricca 'herald' is a nomen
agentis of the verb frignan 'ask, inquire.' The pair frignan
~ fricca would be a counterpart of w glian ~ wicca if the
etymology of fricca were more convincing. Why should
a herald, a crier be called 'inquirer' or 'questioner'?
Holthausen (AeEW), whose etymology Martinet must
have used, compares fricca and Skt prasnin-'one who
asks' but offers no discussion. Fricca, more probably, is
traceable to OE fricgan 'investigate' and friclan 'seek,
desire,' but a herald is not a spy, and one has little choice
but to agree with Förster (1908:337, note 2) that fricca
has nothing to do with fric, frec, and so forth. WTglian ~
wicca and frignan ~ fricca look like forming a perfect
group, but each pair is probably a mismatch.

929
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The etymology of MDu wi(j)chelen is debatable. Van

Wijk (EWNT2) states that k in MDu wikelen, a doublet of
wi(j)chelen, and by implication, in OE wiccian cannot be
old, because Gmc *k in them would leave g in OE wiglian
unexplained (he does not consider the possibility of
Verner's Law in the forms with g), and traces it to the
influence of some synonym. In his opinion, the source
of /k:/ in words like OE wiccian was PIE *kn, *kn, *ghn,
or *ghn. Thus he goes a step further than Kluge
(1884:165), who listed a series of weak nouns with /k:/
but did not commit himself to their origin. However, he
believed that OE wicce was related to OE wiglian.
Wood (1913-14:337/71 and 1923:336) connected OE
wicca with the circle of G wiegen 'rock, sway' and MHG ~
MDu wigelen 'sway, shake.' He mentioned E wiggle but
not OHG wegan 'weigh' (ModG wägen) or MHG ~ ModG
bewegen 'move; induce,' though all of them may be
related to one another and to MDu wijchelen. In focusing
on the verbs of weighing, Wood possibly followed
Wedgwood, who compared OE wicca and Du wikken
'weigh' (later 'consider, conjecture, predict'), even
though, according to Wood, the meaning underlying the
entire group of verbs is 'rock, swing, shake,' because
conjurers used to roll violently. L vates 'prophet, seer'
and Gk μάντις 'diviner, prophet,' he adds, received their
names from frenzy: compare Gk μανία 'fury' and Go

930
Adz(e) Adz(e)

wods 'furious, possessed' (ModG Wut < OHG wuot 'rage,

fury').
If Motz (1980) had been aware of Wood's
etymology, she would perhaps have explained OI
volva as 'one who wallows, rolls (in ecstasy).' She
mentions wallow and its congeners but comes to
different results (see the end of sec 6, below). As J. de
Vries observes (NEW, wichelen), our insufficient
knowledge of the practice of divination at a time when
wichelen was coined makes such reconstructions
unverifiable. In addition, he examines the hypotheses
that bring the roots of such words as E willow and G
weigern 'refuse' (v) into the picture. To complicate
matters, owing to the workings of Verner's Law, at a
certain point, the paths of Gmc *wihan- 'consecrate' and
*wigan 'fight' crossed. Ettmuller (1851:134-37), for
instance, listed them together (see OE wicce on p.
137).
A few tentative conclusions follow from the material
presented so far. Old English had the synonyms wiccian
and wTglian 'foretell the future.' They may have been
derived from the same root, but if they were, the
relation between their postradical consonants remains
unclear: neither the length of /k/ in wiccian nor the
presence of a voiced stop in wTglian has been explained
in a fully satisfactory way.

931
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The origin of MDu wi(j)chelen is equally problematic.

Even if wichelen and wiccian are phonetic variants of the
same earlier form, their kinship with Gmc *wihs 'holy'
need not be taken for granted. Nothing points to the fact
that Du wichelaar and OE wiglere (soothsayer) have ever
been priests, though the line between an augur and a
priest is admittedly blurred. 'Weigh' and 'move violently
(in a state of ecstasy or religious frenzy)' are two other
semantic bases that have been suggested for wiccian. A
connection of witch with a Proto-Indo-European root for
'consecrate' (MA, 493) rests on a flimsy foundation. OE
wicca cannot be separated from wiccian, but wicca and
wTglian should be assigned to the same etymon with
reservations, if at all.
4. For a long time etymologists tried to connect witch
with wise and wit, a derivation partly inspired by wizard,
always (and correctly) understood as 'wise man.' From a
historical point of view, witch and wizard are not a
perfect fit, because witch goes back to Old English,
whereas wizard was first recorded and probably coined
in the first half of the 15th century; its root is wise, not
wit. Blount explained only witch according to Kilianus
and Minsheu and traced wizard to OE wi tega 'sooth-
sayer, prophet.' Phillips, as usual, copied from Blount.
But Lemon referred to his predecessors, including
Casaubon, who treated wise, wit, witch, and wizard as
related and akin to some forms of Gk Fei'Sco 'see,' FtiiScx
932
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(perfect) 'be aware, know' (in his opinion, witch was

derived from L va tes). Serenius allegedly supplied Sw
vita (now veta) with the Latin gloss fascinare ('charm,
enchant'), and Todd cited his gloss, but nothing similar
appears in Serenius (1737) at Sw weta. Johnson did not
propose any etymology of witch.
J. Grimm (1835:582) states that although the senses
of OHG wizago ~ OE wit(e)ga and MDu wichelen refer to
nearly the same reality, the sounds (he says: letters) do
not match (buchstäblich unverwandt). For that reason,
he found it impossible to derive OE wicce from wltega.
With respect to meaning, witch 'wise, knowing woman'
would correspond to L saga 'seeress,' but since Grimm
could not explain away the phonetic difference between
wicce and wit(e)ga, he opted for *wihs as the root of
wichelen and wiccian. Yet some books present wizard,
witch, and wit as cognates (Talbot [1847:197], Cockayne
[1861:356-57], Baly [1897:110], Swinton [1864:101], and
Mitchell [1908:354]).
Skeat1 supported the etymology that Grimm
rejected. He called OE wicca "a corruption" of OE witga
and cited OI vitki 'conjurer, magician' derived from vita
as proof. Skeat also noted that wicca "does not appear
to be in very early use" and has no cognates except EFr
wikke and LG wikken. In his opinion, both OE wiccian
(but not wicca) and wiglian are related to OE wig (= wih;
he follows Grein and glosses it 'temple'). "I do not see
933
Adz(e) Adz(e)

how we can possibly attribute wicca to the same root, as

some propose to do," he says. ID, ED, and W (1890)
quote Skeat and repeat his etymology.
Scott (CD) offered the most eloquent defense of
Skeat's etymology (the text is identical in both editions).
It is reproduced below in full. Witch "< ME. witche,
wicche, wichche, wiche, a witch (man or woman), < AS.
wicca, m., wicce, f. (pl. wiccan in both genders), a
sorcerer or sorceress, a wizard or witch, = Fries. wikke =
LG. wikke, a witch; cf. Icel. vitki, m., a witch, wizard,
prob. after AS.; prob. a reduction, with shortened vowel
and assimilation of consonants (tg > tk > kk, in AS.
written cc), of AS. wi tga, a syncopated form of wi tiga,
wi tega, a seer, prophet, soothsayer, magician (cf.
deoful-wi tga, 'devil prophet,' wizard) (= OHG. wi zago,
wi zzago, a prophet, soothsayer), < *witig, seeing, a form
parallel to witig (with short vowel), knowing, witan,
know, *witan, see: see wit1, and cf. witty. The notion
that witch is a fem. form is usually accompanied by the
notion that the corresponding masc. is wizard (the two
words forming one of the pairs of masc. and fem.
correlatives given in the grammars); but witch is
historically masc. as well as fem. (being indeed orig., in
the AS. form witga, only masc.), and wizard has no
immediate relation to witch. Cf. wiseacre, ult. < OHG
wizago, and so a doublet of witch. Hence ult. (< AS.
wicca) ME. wikke, wicke, evil, wicked, and wikked,
934
Adz(e) Adz(e)

wicked, wicked: see wick7 and wicked1. The change of

form (AS. wicca < wi tiga) is paralleled by a similar
change in orchard (AS. orceard < orcgeard < ortgeard),
and the development of sense ('wicked,' 'witched') is in
keeping with the history of other words which have
become ultimately associated with popular superstitions
—superstition, whether religious or etymological,
tending to pervert or distort the forms and meanings of
words."
The main difficulty of J. Grimm's etymology consists
in that a bridge has to be drawn from /% / in *wi chs
to /g/ in wlglian and from /%/ or /g/ to /k:/ in wiccian
and wicce. Some possibilities to overcome it exist, but as
stated above, none is fully satisfactory. Skeat's
etymology faces similar problems. Scott mentions the
change tg > tk > kk, but later he says that the
development of cc in wicce, with its palatalization of a
later period (after which c c became an affricate), is
paralleled by a similar change in ortgeard < orcgeard <
orceard. His use of letters instead of phonetic symbols
complicates his exposition. Medially, OE g designated [j]
between front vowels and a resonant. Before a back
vowel, [j] was possible only if it followed a product of i-
umlaut, as in b egan 'bend' (the causative of bugan
'bend, bow') and fegan 'join' (Old Saxon had fogian).
Elsewhere in the middle of a word, it designated [g], a
voiced velar spirant (A. Campbell [1959:sec 429]).
935
Adz(e) Adz(e)

At first sight, w tiga and w tega, with g between a

front and a back vowel were pronounced *['wi:tiya] and
*['wi:teya]. Syncope would not have changed the status
of [y] in witga (assuming vowel shortening), which
would have retained the value of a velar spirant.
Proximity to [t] would at most have devoiced it, so that
the result would have been [wit/a]. The group [t/] was
impossible in Old English. It might have produced [k:],
but usually, when a stop and a spirant found themselves
in contact in Old Germanic, the stop suffered spi-
rantization; [p/] would have been a more likely result.
The change [tk] > [t:] is not unthinkable (though only in
Old Icelandic; cf OI etki 'not' > ekki), but the change of
[t:] to [k:] would still remain unexplained and
improbable.
The case of ortgeard (that is, ort-geard) is different,
for in initial position, OE g had the value of [j] before
front vowels. Geard was [jeard], and [j] has been
preserved to this day in yard, the modern reflex of OE
geard. In ortgeard and orcgeard, the stop, whether [k] or
[t], always stood before [j] and only the variation [kj] ~
[tj] (> [kk] > [tj]) has to be accounted for, whereas in w
t(e)ga we must go the long way from [ty] to the rather
implausible geminate [t:] and then to [k:] and [tj].
In all probability, Scott had a more realistic string of
changes in mind. OE w tiga, like its cognate OHG
wizzago, is a substantivized adjective
936
Adz(e) Adz(e)

(the alternation -ig- ~ -ag- is the same as in OE fig ~

OHG ebah: see IVY). The suffix -ig was pronounced [ij].
This follows from the modern pronunciation of
adjectives like witty and heavy (OE wittig, hefig) and
nouns like ivy and body (OE fig, bodig). OE w tiga
continued into the 13th century, and its Middle English
spelling witie (OED) shows that witiga was never
pronounced with [y]. Scott may have reconstructed the
palatalization process so: from [wi:tija] to [witja] (with
[t] palatalized) and then to [wit:a] and [wik:a]. Given this
order of events, orchard and witch can be understood as
similar cases, except that Skeat and Scott took the
shortening of in w tga too lightly. In Old English
disyllabic words, vowel shortening has been attested
before geminates and ht. No examples resembling w tga
> witga occur in SB, sec 138. Grimm's etymology also
passed over some problems of vowel length (see EWNT 2,
wichelen), but an erratic development of consonants
overshadowed them.
The reconstruction from w tga, whatever its
pronunciation, to wicca is burdened with one more
inconsistency that neither Skeat nor CD noted. OE w
t(i)ga (897) and wicca (890) were recorded at almost the
same time, and Skeat's statement that wicca does not
appear to be in very early use is wrong. To accept his
etymology, we need to assume that already at the
earliest period, witga, the syncopated variant of w tiga,
937
Adz(e) Adz(e)

split off from its maternal form and turned into wicca.
The proposed change [t:] > [k:] must have been
completed and forgotten by 890 for scribes to adopt the
spelling wicca of the word that had once been w tga or
witga. But w tga occurred in Old English beside wicca,
and the coexistence of the synonyms w tga < w tega and
wicca < w tega is unlikely. The derivation of wicca from
wltega has no more appeal than its derivation from wih
~ wig and wlglian. In both etymologies, a few important
phonetic problems have not been solved.
5. As already pointed out, in addition to two most
influential etymologies of witch—from OE w glian (an
alleged cognate of wiccian, supposedly related to Go
weihs and L victima) and from OE w tiga—there have
been others. Junius's entry is short. He refers only to
Lindenbrogius, that is, probably to his Codex Legum
Antiquarum, 1613 (Mayou [1999:125]). There witch is
said to be akin to L vegius, a word that occurs in British
Latin, and nowhere else. Du Cange's explanation of it
needs no corrections: vegius 'hariolus' is a Latinized form
of OE w glere 'soothsayer.' In later lexicography, only
Mueller1 mentions Lindenbrogius's derivation (without
references to him or Junius). Quite possibly, medieval
scholars and priests noticed the similarity between OE w
glian and L vege re 'excite, arouse, stir' and decided that
a soothsayer was 'a vigilant one.' They must also have
noticed the closeness of w glian and wiccian and
938
Adz(e) Adz(e)

pondered the nature of that closeness, but no extant

gloss connects wicca and vegius.
Tooke (1798-1805:II, 313) explained wicked as
(be)witched, a past participle of OE wiccian 'practice
sorcery' (his gloss is 'incantare'). He treated nearly all
English nouns as past participles; in this case, his
explanation happened to be partly acceptable. Webster
(1828), too, used wicked as his starting point in
reconstructing the ancient meaning of witch. However,
he compared wicked with OE w can 'recede, slide, fall
away' (his glosses) and wicelian 'vacillate, stumble.' "It
seems to be connected in origin with wag," he says. "The
primary sense is, to wind and turn, or to depart, to fall
away." Did he think of a witch as a stumbler, an
anomaly, or an apostate? OE wiclian, which Webster
found in Somner, is, most likely, a ghost word
(W. S. Morris [1967:46]). ID1 copied Webster's ety-
mology.
Mahn (W 1864) followed J. Grimm, while W (1890)
substituted Skeat's etymology for Mahn's. W1 cites LG
wikken 'predict' and Icel vitki 'wizard' ~ vitka 'bewitch,'
"perhaps akin to E. wicked." W2 removed the Icelandic
word but added hesitatingly L victima as a cognate. W3
lists OE wiccian 'practice witchcraft,' MHG wicken
'bewitch, divine' and OE w gle 'divination,' along with OE
w g 'idol, image' and OI ve 'temple.' Grimm's and

939
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Osthoff's etymology has returned, with none of its

obscure points illuminated.
Levitskii (2000-03:II, 249, w h1) admits that OE
wicca may go back to the root of Go weihs. "The
concept of witchcraft," he remarks, "is more often
connected with the idea of cutting, but OI
seid-'witchcraft' has been traced to IE se i- 'bind' (see
seid2). Therefore, Gmc wih ~ wikk can be a derivative of
the root ueik- ~ ueig- 'bend, turn'; in all probability, this
root had the syncretic meaning 'bind together ~
separate' (see wid-)." At wi5, II:248-49, he says nothing
new about witch.
The equation 'bewitched' = 'spellbound' is common.
Holbrooke (1910:267) cites witch in a list so long and
heterogenous that it cannot be put to any use; L vincere
'bind' turns up in it among many other words.
Enchantment is connected with the power of speech or
singing, whence incantare and enchant. Lessiak
(1912:146-47), who traced the names of several diseases
to magic, searched for a bond between witch and L vox
'voice' and related forms (he gave the Proto-Indo-
European root as *vequ-) but dissociated it from OE
wigol.
OE wicce has thus been assigned to various Proto-
Indo-European roots, namely *weik- (Gmc *w1h-) 'holy,
sacred' (J. Grimm, Osthoff, and their numerous
followers), *w1g-, which is on one hand a variant of
940
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*w1h- by Verner's Law but on the other an independent

root meaning 'fight' (see Ettmuller's multiple glosses of
vihan ~ vigan: 'facere, conficere; premere, pugnare;
sacrare, colere; ariolari, incantare'), *weik- 'turn, move'
(this is the root of Webster's w can), and weku- 'speak'
(Les-siak's *vequ-). Levitskii considers *wlh- to be possi-
bly related to *weik-.
Skeat never gave up his idea of the origin of witch
but relegated it to a kind of footnote: "... also explained
as a corruption of OE w tga" (Skeat4, witch; in CED, 1910,
even that brief mention is absent). In his latest version of
the etymology of witch, he makes no concessions to
Grimm. He lists OE wiccian (but not w glian) and other
related forms with -kk- (-ck-, -cc-) and refers to OI vikja
'move, turn, push aside' and N vikja 'turn aside, conjure
away' (it is an error: the Bokmdl form is vike 'retreat,
etc'). OI vikja is a cognate of OE wican that attracted
Webster's attention. Skeat concluded that wicca was
perhaps at one time understood as an averter (he did
not specify of what). Witch the averter does not solve
the problem, but a partial revival of Webster's
etymology is curious. AeEW gives w can as a cognate or
the etymon of wicca, but in the entry w gle, wicca
appears again. Webster's idea that OE w glian may be a
congener of ModE wag also reemerged, though in a
revised form, in later research. In his discussion of witch,
Wood mentioned E wiggle. Wiggle is related by ablaut to
941
Adz(e) Adz(e)

waggle, a frequentative (iterative) verb derived from

wag.
These then are the verbs that have been proposed as
more or less remote cognates of witch: wiegen, wegen,
wagen, weichen, wiehen, and weigern (Modern
German); wijchelen (Middle and Modern Dutch); vikja
(Old and Modern Icelandic); wican, wiccian, and wiglian
(Old English); wag and wiggle (Modern English). Their
history can be traced to the older periods of Germanic
with the help of numerous etymological dictionaries. The
quickest search will reveal the fact that the only reliable
connection is between OE wicca and OE wiccian (and the
almost identical verb in Low German); the other leads
are of little value. It appears that today we do not know
much more about the origin of witch than did our prede-
cesors four, three, and two centuries ago. Even J.
Grimm failed to break the spell laid by language on
this word.
The authors of popular books on the history of
Germanic and English words and on matters not directly
connected with etymology take their information from
some easily available sources. Wesche (1940:99) repeats
J. Grimm. Bleckert and Westerberg (1986:372) do the
same. Makovskii (1999a) mentions the Proto-Indo-
European root *ueg- 'bind (with charms)' but considers
the possibility that wicca is a cognate of OE swegel 'sky'
and swegle 'brilliant, shining,' because witches are seers;
942
Adz(e) Adz(e)

then the original root of wicce is PIE *uig- 'twinkle,

glitter' (the postulated development is from 'glitter' to
'see'). He adds that it is important to take into
consideration OE swincian 'deceive.' This verb cannot be
taken into consideration, because it did not exist,
whereas OE swincan meant 'work, struggle, languish.'
Perhaps G schwindeln was meant. A. Hall (1906) gives
another exotic list of the cognates of witch.
6. Huld (1979) made the only serious recent attempt
to look at witch in a new way. He points out that in an
11th-century gloss, OE wiccecrxft 'witchcraft' glosses L
necromantia and makes that fact a cornerstone of his
reconstruction. He quotes Wulfstan's Sermo ad Anglos in
which the phrase wiccan and wxlcyrian 'witches and
valkyries' occurs and says: "This would be well justified if
witches were necromancers and also dealt like valkyries
with the dead. This interpretation is supported not only
by many early Germanic references to necromantic
practices but also by the following etymology of wicca.
Wicca reflects P[roto-] G[ermanic] */wikyoon/, which
cannot, as Skeat saw, be related to
P[roto-]I[ndo-]E[uropean] */uek/ 'be holy.' It is instead
related to PIE */ueg/ 'stir, make live,' the same root [as]
in OE wacian 'wake,' weccan 'awaken' and Lat[in] vege
re 'be lively, stir up'. Wicca is then 'waker (of the dead)'
reflecting PIE */ueg-ioon/" (pp. 37-38).

943
Adz(e) Adz(e)

J. Puhvel suggested to Huld that */ueg-ioon/ can be

interpreted as 'the wakeful one,' but he preferred not to
change the gloss 'waker' (note 8 on pp. 38-39). In his
opinion, the witch of the Anglo-Saxons was not unlike
the Icelandic draugr 'revenant.' He drew a parallel
between English and Scandinavian beliefs concerning
female necromancers: "By far the most famous
necromantic operation is Osinn's consultation with the
spirit of a volva in the Voluspd" (p. 38).
Huld's treatment of word formation is realistic. OED
states that wicce and wicca are "app[arently] derivative
of wiccian." This derivation looks like a tribute to J.
Grimm, who based his etymology of wicca on the
meanings of the verbs wlglian and wic-cian. But wicca
cannot owe its origin to wiccian. As Huld notes (p. 36),
the geminate in wiccian, a second class weak verb, is
impossible to explain from *wikojan. If wiccian were a
reflex of *wikojan, one would also expect a geminate in
OE locian 'look,' macian 'make,' and so forth, but the
weak verbs of the second class are subject to neither
umlaut nor West Germanic gemination. Therefore,
wiccian must have been derived from wicce, and not the
other way around.
The chronology available to us also runs counter to
the idea that wicca ~ wicce were back formation from
wiccian (even if such an idea had merit). OE wiccian
surfaced in texts in the year 1000 (see witch, v in OED),
944
Adz(e) Adz(e)

110 years later than wicca. The implication need not be

that wiccian was coined late, but the opposite conclusion
(an early date of the verb) would be equally
unwarranted. However, even Weekley and Wyld (UED)
did not dare contradict OED and repeated the etymology
of witch offered in its pages. (ODEE says diplomatically
that wicce is related to wiccian; the same in the later
editions of SOD.) Huld's Proto-Indo-European protoform
*wegion- has another advantage in that it accounts for -
cc- in wicce without an ad hoc reference to expressive
gemination. Yet his reconstruction is not without
problems.
The putative Proto-Indo-European base of wake is
represented in Germanic almost exclusively by the a-
grade: compare Go wakan* 'awake, be awake,' OI vaka
'be awake,' OE -wacan, their weak counterparts (like OE
wacian), and their causatives having the umlaut of a in
the root. Gothic had o in the noun wokains* 'watch.' The
congeners of Go wokrs* 'interest on money' (originally
'fruit, progeny') do not seem to belong with wakan*
(Feist-Lehmann). Given Huld's etymology, OE wicca and
its nearest cognates in Frisian and Middle Low German
will be the only Germanic reflexes of *weg- in the e-
grade. If wicca had been recorded with the meaning
'awakener,' it would have been recognized as related to -
wacan, but since the existence of this meaning is what
has to be proved, the entire reconstruction becomes
945
Adz(e) Adz(e)

unsafe. Note that the Latin words beginning with veg—

vig- refer to vegetation, vigor and vigil, rather than being
awake. Nor has Huld dealt with all the semantic
difficulties.
In the Middle Ages, various kinds of witchcraft were
associated with acquiring mantic knowledge, that is,
they presupposed contacts with the dead. Kögel
(1894:207-08) cited OE heagorun 'witchcraft,' glossed as
'nicromancia' [sic]; see also Güntert
(1919:121). OE hellerune is 'sorceress' and 'demon'
(the latter in ^lfric), but OE hellirune was likewise glossed
as 'necromantia' (one can assume without much risk the
existence of OE *heagorune), and Jordanes glossed
sorceresses 'haliurunnas' (Motz [1980:204-05).
Apparently, necromancy was not a function associated
with, let alone unique to the wicce. Perhaps necromantia
became a synonym for black magic and sorcery, not tied
to the magician's ability to conjure up the spirits of the
dead. Therefore, caution is required in etymologizing
wicce as 'necromancer.'
The volva of ancient Scandinavians must have
c
been endowed with the powers similar to those of
the hellerune ~ *heagorune. The etymology of the word
volva is debatable. Motz (1980) undermined the idea
that volva is connected with volr 'round stick,' but her
explanation of volva as 'a hidden one' (this is exactly
946
Adz(e) Adz(e)

how Guntert understood G Hexe) is not convincing,

because 'roll' and 'wallow' do not mean 'draw the
borders, circumscribe' and by implication, 'conceal.' Be
that as it may, the Icelandic volva never raised anyone
from the dead: it was she whom OBinn woke up to learn
the secrets of the subterranean kingdom. She was
neither 'a waker' nor 'a wakeful one.' The same holds for
the revenants of Icelandic folklore. They did not need
anyone to wake them up; on the contrary, they could
not be put to rest.
Finally, as regards necromancy, the phrase wic-can
and wxlcyrian is not a strong argument for a particular
closeness between witches and valkyries in England at
the epoch of the Viking raids. Whatever the etymology
of wicca, it had become obscure by Wulfstan's time,
whereas wxlcyrie 'corpse chooser' was a transparent
word. Wulfstan's use of alliteration is a prominent
feature of his rhetoric. Both witches and valkyries
designated (demonic?) individuals capable of laying
spells and perhaps murdering people rather than
animating the dead. Their vicious power made them
good companions of the plunderers, robbers, and
despoilers mentioned in the passage Huld quotes. All
were abominable creatures, and wiccan and wxlcyrian,
the names of two pagan figures, formed an alliterative
binomial. Wulfstan did not pass up such an opportunity.

947
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Huld's etymology found its way into AHD 3-4. Witch, or

rather wicce, was reassigned from *weik-to the root
*weg- 'be strong, be lively' and defined 'necromancer.'
7. The etymology proposed below retains some
elements of Skeat's and Scott's, as well as Huld's
etymologies. It is based on the supposition that the
protoform of OE wicca was *wit-ja-.
Old English seems to have distinguished between
wita 'wise man,' w t-ig-a (or w t-eg-a) 'wise man,
prophet, soothsayer,' and *wit-ja, originally 'divinator' or
perhaps 'healer' ('witch doctor'), like Russ znakhar'
'physician, specialist in folk medicine' (from znat'
'know'). The negative connotations inherent in ModE
witch probably appeared late. Nothing testifies to the
wicca ~ wicce as an ancient seer. The English counterpart
of OI volva was helleru ne. The value of L (h)ariolus,
parcae, and py-tho, used to gloss OE wicca ~ wicce,
should not be overestimated in the reconstruction of the
English protoform, because most medieval glosses are
approximate. Scribes knew the meanings of the words of
their native language but often strung Latin synonyms
indiscriminately. To them wicca and helleru ne were not
interchangeable, and they strove to attain ever subtler
distinctions (otherwise they would not have borrowed
dry 'magician' from Irish), but the Latin nouns were in
their memory mere labels belonging to the sphere of the

948
Adz(e) Adz(e)

supernatural, from foretelling the future to determining

one's destiny.
Wita and witiga yielded wite and witie respectively
and had a short life in Middle English, whereas *witja-
presumably became *witta (with palatalized /t:/) and
then wicca and continued into the modern period.
Whether wicce goes back to *wit-jo - or was formed as
the feminine counterpart of wicca cannot be decided
and is of marginal importance for its etymology. A
derivational analogue of wicca from *witja- would be
wrxcca 'outcast, exile' (ModE wretch) from *wrakja-,
with the immediately noticeable difference between -tj-
in the first word and -kj- in the second.
Scott (CD), who traced wicca to w t(i)ga, cited the
history of the affricate in orchard as evidence that t
might become k. A stronger case is E fetch (v) from OE
fecc(e)an, believed to be an alteration of fetian. Scott
preferred to ally OE fecc(e)an with OE facian 'try to
obtain, reach,' because "[a] change such as that of fetian
to feccan, fecchen (ti ty), > ci (ki, ky), > ch, tch (ch) is...
otherwise unexampled in AS., though a common fact in
later LL, Rom, ME, etc (fetch)." When writing the
etymology of witch, he did not treat that change as
unexampled. Bulbring (1900b:77-80) explained how, in
his opinion, fetian became fecc(e)an, but the problem
remains partly unsolved.

949
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Despite the uncertainty about the origin of fetch and

the exact time when kj and tj merged in Old English, the
fact of their occasional merger before the date of the
first occurrence of wicca in texts cannot be disputed. The
examples given in grammars are not numerous. Fetch
and orchard are the main among them, but also of
interest is the spelling crxfca 'craftsman' beside crxftca
and crxftga, all of them from crxft-ig-a, a substantivized
adjective like wit-ig-a. See SB, secs 196.2, 206.8, and 227,
note 3, Kaluza (1906-07:1, sec 84b), Luick
(1964:secs 668, note 2, and 686), and A. Campbell
(1959:sec 486, note 1). Those forms could have been
used to support Skeat's etymology of witch < witega but
for the problem of shortened i and the competition
between ME wicce and witie, allegedly from the same
etymon.
The crowding of near synonyms, which also
happened to be near homonyms (wita, wi tiga, and
*witja-), must have accelerated the change *witja- >
wicca. The verb witan 'know' often referred to people's
familiarity with arcane things. This follows from
Rittershaus's survey of Go witan and its cognates with
and without prefixes (1899:73-77). OE witt (that is, wit-t)
meant not only 'knowledge' but also 'understanding,
consciousness, conscience,' whereas OI vitt meant only
'witchcraft, charms.' L saga and OE wi tiga ~ OHG
wizzago show that a 'sagacious' and 'witty' person was
950
Adz(e) Adz(e)

intelligent and privy to things hidden from others,

especially events to come. A close parallel to witch
derived from *wit-ja- is Russ ved'ma (morphologically
ved'-m-a). ORuss ved' meant both 'knowledge' and
'witchcraft.' Otkupshchikov (1977:271 = 2001:235)
suggested in passing that witch is related to wit but
offered only typological arguments; his topic was the
origin of two Baltic words.
The idea that wicce goes back to *witja retains the
semantic base of Skeat's etymology, Scott's phonetic
reasoning, and Huld's derivational model. Since *witja- is
an asterisked form, its existence is bound to remain
hypothetical. However, this hypothesis seems to be less
vulnerable (it is less daring and less speculative) than the
others discussed in secs 1-6.
8. Several English words are sometimes mentioned in
connection with the etymology of witch. A brief
discussion of them below will be confined only to the
facts relevant for understanding the origin of OE wicca ~
wicce.
1) Wicked. ME wicke (1200) 'wicked' has an obscure
history. It is identical with either the noun wicce (<
wicca) or OE wicci 'wicked,' an adjective recorded only
once (1154). Wicked (1275) looks like a past participle
but is probably an adjective of the type represented by
wretched (1200). Weekley followed Skeat and said that
wicked is related to weak. However, he connected witch
951
Adz(e) Adz(e)

with Go weihs and L victima. His etymologies are

incompatible, for wicked is akin to OE wicca, whereas
weihs and weak are not allied. Skeat thought that
wicked had originally been a past participle meaning
'rendered evil.' This is unlikely because no evidence
exists that the wicca of the Anglo-Saxons was wicked. In
Skeat's opinion, OE wiccian was derived from the
adjective wikke (in its Old English form).
2) Wile (1154). A connection between wile and
guile is a matter of debate. OE wi l may be akin to the
verb wiglian 'practice sorcery'; compare the Old Kentish
gloss wilung 'divinatio' and OE wigle 'divination.'
However, if the word wi l was borrowed from
Scandinavian, its etymon was akin to OI vel 'device,
machine; trick' from *vihl-, a form related to OE wigle by
Verner's Law (ODEE; OED is more cautious). The etymon
will turn out to be the same in both cases. Since wicca
has probably nothing to do with wiglian, the etymology
of wile is irrelevant in the present context.
3) Wizard (1400; the meaning 'man skilled in occult
arts' was recorded only in 1550). This word deserves
mention here because at present wizard is understood to
be a male counterpart of witch. It is a coinage made up
of the root of wisdom and a suffix, as in coward,
drunkard, and the like.
4) Wiseacre (1595). Wiseacre is believed to be an
alteration of MDu wijssegher 'soothsayer,' literally 'wise
952
Adz(e) Adz(e)

sayer.' The ironic connotations that have always been

present in wiseacre make the idea of a borrowing from
Dutch credible. Weekley quotes Blount: "One that knows
or tells truth, but we commonly use it in malam partem
for a fool." G Wahrsager is a folk etymological reshaping
of OHG wiz(z)ago, a cognate of OE wi tega, discussed at
length above.
5) Wight. OE wiht has numerous cognates: Go
waihts, (M)Du wicht, OS and OHG wiht, and OI
vxttr, with meanings ranging from 'thing' to 'crea-
ture' and 'demon; dwarf; elf' (compare also E whit). In
his discussion of OE wicca, J. Grimm suggested that all
these words are related to Go weihs. The development
would then be from 'spirit' to 'living creature, child,
(girl),' and further to 'thing.' The span is broad, but any
attempt to explain waihts has to come to grips with an
unusual diversity of meanings. Although Grimm's
etymology may be the best there is, even Feist does not
mention it in his survey of the literature. The difference
between the full grade in weihs and the zero grade in
waihts is probably not fatal for connecting them.
According to the etymology proposed here, *wih-and
wicca are unrelated. Consequently, further discussion of
Grimm's hypothesis, however per-
Witch

953
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Ye t

suasive, is not warranted in this entry. Yet it is

interesting to observe how many of the words
mentioned above turn up in the recorded approaches to
explain the origin of waihts, L vox, L vegere, and OE
wegan being among them. There is also Russ veshch'
'thing,' an important cognate of E wight, with congeners
elsewhere in Slavic.
YET (888)
The Old English for yet was glet(a), glt(a), gyt(a), and
get(a). In the Anglian dialects, those forms competed
with gen(a) and gïn(a), neither of which continued into
Middle English. It has always been understood that yet
was originally a compound, and early researchers often
cited Gk ëxi 'still' as its cognate. Of the numerous
attempts to find an adverbial phrase that later became
yet, the most convincing one is Berneker's. He traced
MHG je zuo (> G jetzt) 'now' and E yet to the
combination *iu-ta, with iu 'already' and the enclitic -ta
(< *-do), the latter having secure cognates outside
Germanic. The development must have been from *iuta
to *iuta, which means that the earliest form of E yet was
gyta, not geta (gieta and glta are side forms of gyta).
Unlike gyta, OE geta cannot go back to *iuta. Its possible
etymon is *e2-ta, whose *e2 can be associated with the
locative of the adverb *ei. The initial consonant of geta
954
Adz(e) Adz(e)

seems to have arisen under the influence of gyta and its

variants. The existence of *j in the Proto-Indo-European
protoform is less likely.
The phrases *iu-ta and *e2-ta must have been
synonymous in Early Germanic. In Old English, the
meanings of gyta and geta are indistinguishable. It is
argued here that OFr eta and ieta preserved the reflexes
of the oldest alternation. No etymology of OE geta ~ gyta
is valid unless it also explains the Frisian forms. MHG je
zuo is akin to yet, though zuo in it may be an adverb. The
Middle Low German cognates of yet (jetto, jutto, etc) are
genuine counterparts of OE get and gyta. Like yet and
the later Frisian forms, jetto and jutto underwent the
shortening of the radical vowel. Despite some
uncertainty about the history of oo- in Du ooit 'ever,' ooit
is another cognate of yet.
Beside the reflexes of the synonyms *iu-ta and *ei-ta
(?*jei-ta), gena and giena were current in Old English,
with a doublet geona, apparently having a short vowel.
The enclitic -na occurs elsewhere in Germanic: in OE
peana (= peah) 'though,' OI hérna 'here,' and adverbs like
Go aftana 'from behind. ' The coexistence of gyta and gyt,
gena and gen has many parallels; one of them is OHG
ûzana and ûzan 'outside.' In Early Germanic, the enclitics
*-to ~ *-ta and *-no ~ *-na, each with its distinct
etymology, must have had the same meaning pairwise.
ModE yit, still in use in the 17th century, might continue
955
Adz(e) Adz(e)

OE gyt(a), glet(a), or glta, whereas yet is apparently the

continuation of get(a).
The sections are devoted to 1) the use of glet and its
variants in Old English and the possible causes of vowel
shortening in those forms, 2) attempts by lexicographers
from
Casaubon to our contemporaries to etymologize yet,
3) conjectures in the non-lexicographical literature on the
word group of which OE gieta and giena are later
contractions, 4) Berneker's reconstruction and the
etymology of -na in gi(e)na, 5) the development of OE
geta from *eta, different from *iu-ta, and the origin of g-
in it, and 6) the etymology of Du ooit. Section 7 is the
conclusion.
1. OE giet (git, gyt, get), gieta, geta, and their Middle
English reflexes meant 'besides, moreover, more'
(preserved in yet again, yet once more), 'even, still,' to
strengthen a comparative (as in ModE yet more closely),
'still' (in the archaic you look ill yet), 'till now' (familiar
from not yet), and as a conjunction. The later use (as in
ModE the splendid yet useless imagery) developed from
'besides, moreover,' but the earliest examples of it do
not antedate the beginning of the 13th century. In
present day English, yet alternates with still and already.
Cf Has he come yet? ~ Yes, he has already arrived. / No,
not yet and He is still here ~ He is not here yet (see OED).
OE g et is glossed as 'still; besides; hitherto; hereafter;
956
Adz(e) Adz(e)

even, even now'; pa g et, as 'yet, still; further, also'; nu g

et, as 'until now, hitherto, formerly; any longer' (Clark
Hall; see a similar list in BT). The glosses of gen (gien,
gena, giena) are nearly the same.
Only one addition may be in order here. The adverb
still 'without moving,' as in stand still, acquired the
meaning 'always, ever, continually,' known from
Shakespeare (for example, Thou still hast been the father
of good news—Hamlet II ii, 42). Apparently, in some
dialects, yet has the same meaning, though neither OED
nor EDD mentions it. According to Hales (1884b), the
lines from Wordsworth's sonnet: "So didst thou travel on
life's common way / In cheerful godliness; and yet thy
heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay" ("Milton!
thou shouldst be living at this hour...") are
misunderstood by "the general reader" (yet in them
means 'always,' not 'however'). He quotes a native of
Cumberland, who wanted to say that in a certain part of
the county a spectator could keep the harriers long in
sight and expressed his thought so: "You can see them
yet all along the fellside." Yet here corresponds to
Hales's Latin gloss adhuc 'still, until now.' A similar
medley of meanings can be observed in G noch: noch
nicht 'not yet,' noch drei Stunden 'three more hours,'
noch besser 'still (even) better,' noch hier 'still here,'
immernoch 'constantly.'
The first vowel in ge ta and ge na is long. J.
957
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Grimm (1822-37:120 = 1890:113) erred in positing

g'eta with old e. Sweet (1885:526) also gives get (in
his dictionary [1897], the form appears as g et), and
Kugler (1916:57) is based on Grimm's reconstruction.
Sievers (1885:500) emphasized that e was long in ge na,
but his reference to velar umlaut in geona (ASG2, sec
157.2) presupposes *e, because velar umlaut does not
affect long vowels (see the discussion in E. Brown
[1892:250]). The form geona in ASG1 (the same section)
has a length sign. In ASG3 (sec 74, note 1), Sievers
supplies the vowels with macrons but calls their history
"unclear." Jordan (1906:49-50) does not object to
positing eo in geona and e in gieta and admits that gieta
may not reflect the original form. Whatever the ultimate
etymon of giet(a) ~ get(a) and its synonyms giena ~ ge
na, the root vowels in both probably had the same
origin, and the diphthong in g eta is believed to reflect
*e2 after /j/ (SB [sec 45.6 and 91d], A. Campbell
[1959:sec 185], G. Schmidt [1963:122]). Since the origin
of ge ta and ge na remains to a certain extent obscure, it
is better to follow Luick's example (1964:secs 172.2 and
173, note 2) and in the early stages of the investigation
stay away from reconstructed protoforms.
Ge na was an Anglian form (Hart [1892], Jordan
[1906:50]). Hempl's attempt to prove that it had wider
distribution was unsuccessful. In poetry, West Saxon and
Anglian forms alternated (see Jordan [1906:62] and the
958
Adz(e) Adz(e)

examples from Beowulf, below), but in prose West Saxon

scribes either did not understand ge n(a) or considered it
as an oddity and
wrote g eta instead (J. Campbell [1952:383-84]).
In Early Modern English, the vowel in both git and
gyt underwent shortening, which Luick (1964:sec 354.1)
ascribed with some hesitation to the lack of stress.
However, judging by their use in poetry, g t and gy t did
not always occupy a weak position. In Beowulf and "The
Fight at Finnsburg," g t and gy t occur eighteen times (in
addition to the glossary in Klaeber [1950], see Jordan
[1906:62-63]). In the adverbial group pa gyt 'further,
besides' (eight occurrences), gy t does not carry stress,
but in nu gy t it does. Hempl
(1892a:124) called attention to the fact that in the
early literature g et or g en alone seldom express the
temporal meaning 'still': in the past, pa g et is used, and
in the present, nu giet, less often giet od pisne dxg. He
adds: "The two latter expressions are clearly emphatic,
but it would be very difficult to find in the pa and nu any
force other than that of the tense, which is also
expressed by the verb. At times one might translate
pagiet 'then still' or nugiet 'now till' or 'even now,' but I
know of no cases where 'still' or 'yet' is not fully as
satisfying, and in the great majority of cases this is the
only admissible translation. Indeed, nugiet may, like
simple giet, be strengthened by todxge."
959
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Gyt and git may begin or conclude the line (compare

ModE and "yet this is "true versus it's not "over yet), and
sometimes, when they are not line final, they alliterate
with other g-words. The syntax of yet has not changed
too much since the days of Beowulf (except that yet no
longer needs props like nu and pa): cf gyf heo gyt lyfad 'if
he yet [= still] lives' (944b) and gy t ic wylle 'yet I wish'
(2512b; the lines as in Klaeber [1950]). Gen occurs ten
times and ge na twice in Beowulf. The contexts are
largely the same as for gy t ~ g t. In the phrases pa ge na
and pa ge n, the second adverb is unstressed. It is also
unstressed in the two verses in which it is not preceded
by pa or nu . In the phrase pa ge n, which turns up three
times, ge n carries stress only in line 2677, and it is
stressed in both occurrences of nu
ge n.
The words for 'yet' had short vowels already in Old
English (note especially OE gett [SB, 65, sec 91d]), which
may have been caused by the variation 'nu gyt ~ pa 'gyt
(that is, 'nu *gyt ~ pa 'gyt). The other forms probably lost
their length later when massive shortening occurred
before dentals, as in bread, breath, threat, and the like.
Yit is also an old form, predating early Modern English by
many centuries. It was regular in the seventeen-
hundreds, but i in it is believed to be a reflex of e before
dentals rather than the continuation of or y. More likely,
yit continues OE gy t(a) ~ gt (e)ta, whereas yet is a reflex
960
Adz(e) Adz(e)

of geta (Luick [1964:secs 379, 540-41]; HL, 133; Jordan

[1968, secs 34.1 and
78, note]).
2. The origin of yet has been an object of endless
speculation: 1) Casaubon (1650:264) proposed the
connection between yet and Gk επι 'beyond, besides.' N.
Bailey (1721) alone endorsed his proposal. It is absent
even from N. Bailey (1730). 2) Minsheu glossed yet in
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
Townsend (1824:123) and Bosworth (1838) looked
on Hebr ΊΊ2 (Od) 'beyond, further, etc' as a cognate
of yet. 3) Junius made a more realistic conjecture. He
compared yet with Gk ετι 'until now, still, besides' and
είτα 'back; again; after; in (one's) turn' and mentioned
Welsh etwa ~ etto 'already; now; also; even; still; again.'
Nugent (1801:392), like Junius, derived yet from ειτα. 4)
Whiter accepted Junius's etymology, added L etiam 'also,
even, still' (etiam is one of Junius's glosses of etto) and G
jetzt 'now' and suggested that the root of yet is the same
as in E it and L id 'this or that thing' (Whiter's gloss). In
his opinion, yet may have been the compound y-et.
5) True to his plan to derive English words from
imperatives, Tooke (1798-1805:I, 178) explained yet as
get! (= OE giet!) and still as stell! (OE stellan 'put'). Todd
(in Johnson-Todd) mentions only Tooke's etymology of
yet. Richardson had access to Junius but sided with
Tooke: "Yet, meaning get, must be interpreted as
961
Adz(e) Adz(e)

equivalent to being or having been got or gotten."

Tooke's idea found its way into W (1828), Kaltschmidt
(jetzt), and
Diefenbach (1851:II, 411). Mueller1 cites get as a
possible etymon of yet, but in the second edition, he
calls that combination unlikely. Tooke's etymology has
analogues in contemporary research. For example,
Seebold (KS, auch) did not discard attempts to connect
Go auk 'for; and; but' with the imperative of aukan*
'increase.'
6) Jamieson (1814:137) found Tooke's explanation
unacceptable, doubted that yet was of native origin, and
derived it from Gk exoj 'year' (dative: exei). He added
Hebr "!")[ 'yet,' among others, for "[t]hose who are
attached to oriental etymons." As an anonymous
reviewer put it: "If the word is originally Egyptian, it
must have had a long journey northwards" (anonymous
[1815-16: 109]). Bosworth (1838) copied Jamieson's
etymology (without referring to it) and added a new
idea. Since he thought that the basic meaning of yet was
'movement beyond a certain point,' he numbered OE -
giht 'going (in gebedgiht 'evening,' literally 'bed going'),
which he glossed as 'time,' among the possible etymons
of yet. Such fantasies have never been repeated, but exi
as a putative cognate of yet did not lose its appeal for a
few more decades (so Cockayne [1861:sec 351]).

962
Adz(e) Adz(e)

7) Graff compared je zuo (since it is a late phrase, it

appears in parentheses) and Go hita, the neuter
accusative of a pronoun that occurs only in the phrase
und hita (nu) 'until now, hitherto.' J.
Grimm (1822-37:III, 120 = 1890:III, 113) rejected
Graff's comparison. He was unwilling to ascribe a
pronominal origin to an adverb of time, saw no
possibility to connect Go h- with OE g-, and dissociated
OE ge ta from the numerous recorded forms of G jetzt.
Despite his objections, Schwenck adopted Graff's
etymology; both Hempl and H. Schroder offer variations
of the same idea (see sec 3, below).
The pair E yet ~ G jetzt, which Graff noted,
constitutes a special problem. Diefenbach (1851:I, 123)
treated yet as a cognate of jetzt, and before him Webster
(1828) did the same, but Mueller2 followed J. Grimm and
called the similarity between yet and jetzt deceptive. Nor
does yet appear in the entry jetzt in any edition of EWDS.
See more about jetzt in sec 4, below.
Cosijn (1888:56) probably followed Graff but gave no
references. He only said that git is not a good example of
the change /g/ > /j/ because it goes back to ja + te, as
does gieta, allegedly from ja + to. It is unclear what ja is
supposed to mean, but te must be a form of the
preposition.
8) The broad range of cognates—from Welsh etto to
Gr exi—pleased Wedgwood, who did not go further than
963
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Junius. 9) Skeat1 analyzed OE ge ta into *ge-to 'and too,

moreover.' That compound looks like MHG je zuo 'jetzt,'
even though OE ge 'and' has a short vowel and the first
component of ietzt is believed to mean 'ever, always'
rather than 'and.' 10) Scott (CD) accepted Skeat's
derivation but added an important remark and a
disclaimer. He said that MHG je in je zuo is either 'ever'
or a form cognate with OE ge and that zuo in je zuo "may
merely simulate zuo." 11) Weekley repeated Skeat's
explanation without comments. 12) Among the modern
dictionaries, only RHD invites us "to compare" jeze and
yet. 13) OED and ODEE relegated yet to words of obscure
or unknown origin. 14) W1, W2, W3, EW, and UED do not
venture any hypotheses on yet.
3. Yet has also been an object of several special
investigations outside dictionaries. 15) Kluge (1895:333)
derived -a in OE so na 'soon' and ge na ~ geta from *-a,
which he traced to an adverb meaning 'always, ever' (OE
a wa, Go aiw). Pogatscher
(1898:100, 1902:15-16) and Luick (1964:sec 313)
supported Kluge's idea. 16) Brunner (SB, sec 317)
asserted that -a in geta, and so on goes back to *-a < *-o,
this *o being the Proto-Indo-European ablative ending *-
od ~ *-ed. 17) Kaluza (1906-07:I, 320, sec 193) posited
the adjectival endings *-om and *od as the etymons of -a
in adverbs and extended his reconstruction to such
adverbs as have no correlates among adjectives, for
964
Adz(e) Adz(e)

example, geta, gena, geara 'once,' giestra 'yesterday,' so

na 'soon,' ofta 'often,' and others.
In KL, Kluge repeated his derivation of so na (soon)
but gave no etymology of ge ta (yet). Whatever the
origin of so na, at first sight, there may be some
justification in dividing it into son-a. Geara, ofta, and so
forth are ge ar-a and oft-a, but ge na, ge ta are not
necessarily ge n-a, ge t-a or ge -na, ge -ta. Besides that,
even a convincing etymology of -a leaves the origin of ge
n- and ge t- unexplained. Kluge may not have known
that he was not the first to compare -a in the gi eta
group with OE a 'always, ever.' Hempl (1892a:124)
pointed out that in Thomas Miller's edition of Bede
(1890-91) gyta occurs each of three times with an accent
over -a. No other unstressed -a in adverbs has a similar
distinction. Since lengthening in an unstressed syllable is
out of the question (one could rather expect shortening),
Hempl asked whether gy ta might not be a
conglomeration of g et and a 'ever.' It will be shown later
that Kluge's and Hempl's suggestions are wrong. Both
fell into the same trap as Old English scribes, who,
guided by one of the meanings of gyta, interpreted the
adverb as gyt + a. This is folk etymology.
18) Hempl (1891) had offered another etymol-
ogy of gena ~ geta before he noticed accents over -a.
He supposed "the words to be composed of iu, geo
[sic] (Goth. ju) 'once, already, now, still,' and the
965
Adz(e) Adz(e)

adverbial accusative: masc. (with 'day' under-

stood), and neut., of the demonstrative hi-, which
was preserved in Gothic only in forms used as
temporal adverbs (d. himma daga and a. hina dag
'today, heretofore'; und hita 'thus far')." Hempl's
scheme is as follows. Gmc *iu hino - yielded Go *ju
hina and OE *ge ohin. Depending on whether um-
laut and breaking before h affected the form
*geohin, the reflexes were *gxehin and glen (West
Saxon) or *ge hin > ge n and *ge ohin > ge on (Anglian);
later, giena, geona. Likewise, Gmc *iu hito allegedly
produced Go *iu hita and OE *geohta. From *geohta
we have *giehit, giet (West Saxon) and *gehit > get,
*ge ohit > ge ot (Anglian). "The forms in -a," Hempl
concludes, "may be wholly due to the analogy of
other temporal adverbs in -a. or the way may
have been led by forms in -e like hine, Germ[anic]
hino n-." Further discussion (Mayhew [1891b], E.
Brown [1892], and Hart [1892]) concerns details
rather than the principle according to which ge ta
and ge na were formed.
Kaluza (1906-07:I, sec 147.4; -gyt < *jau hit) and
Mayhew (1891b) accepted Hempl's etymology, but later
research passed it by, except perhaps Partridge (1958),
who suggests, in his familiar confusing way, that yet may
be akin to Go ju 'now, already,' "hence to L iam (ML
jam)." L jam 'now, already' is related to Go ja 'yes,' not
966
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Go ju. Jordan (1906:49) dismissed Hempl's

reconstruction without offering any arguments, probably
because he shared Kluge's idea that yet and jetzt are
unrelated. Hempl's etymon *iuhino ~ *iuhito and Graff's
and hita share common ground in that they contain an
oblique case of the same demonstrative pronoun (the
first elements they proposed are different).
19) H. Schroder (1910:61-62) suggested an ety-
mology reminiscent of Hempl's. He was obviously
unaware of a predecessor, but he did not refer to
Graff either. Of all the attempts to connect jetzt
(and by implication yet) with the pronominal root
*hi- Schroder's is the most resourceful. He begins
by stating what had always been sensed, namely,
that the meaning 'jetzt' ('now') cannot be obtained from
'ever' with a preposition or an adverb after it. The
Middle Low German cognates of jetzt are jetto, gitto, and
jutto 'until now; already; further' and juttonigen 'now,
already,' whereas in Austrian dialects their analogues are
hiazunder, hietz, hietza, hiet-zen, hietzunder, hiez and
hiaz. Schroder, like Lexer and Schmeller before him (see
his references), believed that h- in the Austrian forms is
old and reconstructed the following string of changes:
*hiu-to > *(h)iuo > jutto; *hio-to > *hieto > *(h)ieto >
jetto, and HG *hio-zuo > *hiezuo > *(h)iezuo > jetzo, jetzt.
The history of G heute < OHG *hiu-tagu constitutes, in
Schroder's opinion, a parallel to jetzt < *hio-zuo.
967
Adz(e) Adz(e)

His is an ingenious reconstruction. The shift of stress

in the diphthong iu occurred many times. For example,
the reflex of OHG iu merged with MHG u. The merger
could have happened only if iu was pronounced iu. The
German adverb je 'ever' developed from a form like eo.
See also Luick (1964:secs 265-66) on similar processes in
the history of English. The meaning 'jetzt' ('now')
matches exactly that of *hio zuo. WP I:453 and IEW (609)
repeat Schroder's etymology of jetzt. Although well
thought out and elegant, it is not flawless, because it
presupposes the loss of h- in MLG jetto and so forth and
in HG jetzt. Contrary to jetzt, heute has preserved h-. The
idea of an early addition of h- to Bavarian forms under
the influence of words like heute and hler should not be
disregarded. Such is also the opinion of G. Schmidt
(1963:125).
20) AHD1,3,4 refers yet to the Proto-Indo-
European root *i-, a pronominal stem (see it in IEW,
281, 3. e-). Once again a pronoun emerges as the etymon
of yet, but this time it has been detected in the first
element of the English adverb. Under the root AHD lists E
ilk, yon, yond, yea (yes), yet, and if. However, OE ge t(a)
does not appear in WP or IEW. Probably for this reason,
AHD says the following about yet: "preform uncertain."
Shipley (1984) asserts that yet is from *i, as in L id. He
mentions yet under this root in the index, but it does not
appear in the main part of the book.
968
Adz(e) Adz(e)

21) Bammesberger (1990:258-59) proposes a

different version of the etymology that we find in
AHD. His starting point is the protoform
*je2-t-a-, with -a being of the same origin as in OE
so na (see Kluge's reconstruction above). He admits
that the radical vowel, most likely *e 2, has an ob-
scure history but suggests that perhaps it is a
lengthened (vrddhi) grade of PIE *yod, the neuter
of the pronominal stem *yo -, so that *j-e-at-a re-
sulted in *je2ta-. With yet traced to *i ~ *yo-, we are
back to where Junius and Whiter sought the origin of yet
but at cross-purposes with J. Grimm, who was reluctant
to reconstruct a pronominal stem in a temporal adverb.
In his review, J. Klein (1992:140) called Bammesberger's
etymology bizarre. It is not bizarre, but too speculative.
4. Despite the obscurity enveloping the history of
geta and gena, the efforts to etymologize them have not
been wasted. A consensus exists that both adverbs were
at one time compounds. Direct comparison with
Hebrew, Greek, Welsh, and so forth was a mistake,
because all such forms have postvocalic t instead of the
expected d. However, if the words to be compared are
from the historical point of view e-XI, e-t(t)o, and ge-ta,
their first syllables can be cognate. The same holds for
MHG ie-ze, ie-zuo.
Some compounds meaning 'still, yet, already' are
transparent (for example, L adhuc), but most of them are
969
Adz(e) Adz(e)

short and opaque. Such are the words from Greek, Latin,
and Welsh cited above, as well as Russ eshche 'yet' and
uzh(e) 'already,' with cognates in other Slavic languages
(in Russian, they are stressed on the last syllable). Both L
aut 'or' and Go auk 'too' (unless the latter is an
imperative, which seems unlikely) also consist of two
elements. Graff's and especially Hempl's reconstruction
incorporates yet into the group of which eti and the rest
are legitimate members. Their approach is more
promising than Kluge's, because Kluge accounts for the
origin of -a but says nothing about ge t- and ge n-.
If the morphemic cut in OE geta ~ gena was at one
time after ge , -ta and -na may go back to some enclitic.
Germanic enclitics are numerous but are distributed
unevenly in the extant vocabulary, and their frequency is
an unsafe clue to their role at earlier periods. For
example, -(u)h is common in the text of the Gothic Bible,
but in Old High German it can be detected only in doh
'yet' and noh 'yet, still' (see G doch, noch, Go nauh, OI
pd, and OE peah ~ ModE though in etymological
dictionaries). The Old Icelandic negative enclitics -a and -
at have no counterparts anywhere in Germanic, whereas
Go -hun and OI -gi ~ -ki are akin to OE -gen ~ OHG -gin. In
some monosyllabic adverbs and pronouns, final -t goes
back to a demonstrative pronoun: see the history of E
what, Russ tut 'here,' and Russ net 'no.'

970
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The problem consists in finding cognates of OE -t(a)

and -n(a) that have a similar function and match them
phonetically. Hempl's etymology meets those demands,
though it involves many intermediate steps—a
circumstance that weakens its explanatory power. His
initial idea was that -a in gieta ~ giena arose under the
influence of other adverbs ending in -a. Such adverbs
were not numerous: gegnunga 'immediately, certainly,
etc,' geostra 'yesterday,' tela 'well' (and untela 'badly'),
singala 'always,' geara 'formerly,' sona 'soon,' fela
'much,' and those with the second component -hwega
'about, somewhat' (Nicolai [1907:sec 26]). Even though
Hempl's idea is realistic, certain considerations make it
unlikely. Such forms as Go ufta, OFr ofte, OS ofto, and
OHG ofto 'often,' coexisting with OE oft, OI opt, OS oft
(the latter alternated with ofto, mentioned above) show
that we are dealing with ancient doublets. The words for
'yet' must have belonged with oft ~ ofta.
22) Berneker (1899:157) compared the cognates of
Russ uzh(e), Lith jaU, and others, related to them, not
only with Go ju but also with ie-, as in MHG je zuo 'now'
and iesä 'at once.' As already mentioned, G jetzt, despite
its seemingly transparent inner form, baffles
etymologists, because the sum io 'ever' and zuo 'to' does
not yield the meaning 'at present.' Kluge said so in the
first edition of EWDS, and Seebold is no closer to the
solution in KS. H. Schröder had every reason to give up
971
Adz(e) Adz(e)

the traditional etymology of jetzt, but he did not know

that Berneker had partly anticipated his conclusions.
Jezuo appeared in German texts in the second half of
the 12th century (Bahder [1929; see the details on p.
432]) and developed several variants. The one current in
Modern German had excrescent -t (as in Artzt 'doctor'
and Obst 'fruit,' for example), but the meaning of jetzt
has not changed since roughly 1150. From the semantic
point of view, it is unlike E yet. Kluge (EWDS9) cited G
immerzu as a structural analogue of MHG je zuo, but
immerzu means 'constantly,' that is, exactly what is
expected of immer + zu; apparently, zu could be added
to another adverb for reinforcement.
Berneker, whose opening statement is almost
verbatim the same as H. Schröder's, written eleven years
later, guessed correctly: je in je zuo is related not to OHG
io 'always, ever' but to Go ju 'already, now.' The
occurrence of Go jupan 'already' shows how easily *iu
entered into adverbial phrases. The following adverbs
should not be confused: Go aiw 'ever' (OHG, OS eo, io;
MHG ie; OE a, o; OI x, ei, ey; they are discussed at EVER)
and Go ju 'already, now' (OHG, OS iu; no corresponding
form in Old English except presumably in g t, g eta).
Kluge proposed OHG io as a cognate of ie in je zuo, but
the correct choice is OHG iu. Tracing the first component
of yet and jetzt to *iu overcomes the main flaw of H.

972
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Schroder's etymology, namely, the presumed loss of

initial h-.
Berneker compared zuo in je zuo with Slavic -da, as
in OSl sto-da 'what,' dze-da 'where,' Russ pokida 'as long
as' (the form in the modern Standard is pokuda; stress
on the second syllable), and Pol nedaktory 'no one' with
-t in E yet. He pointed to the parallelism between Go ju
ni 'no more' and E not yet. The problem of OE gy ta
(Berneker referred only to ModE yet) was solved: -ta in
gy ta is the same element as -ta in Go pata 'that' (n).
However, with regard to G je-zuo Berneker probably
erred in that he looked on -zuo as an incontestable
cognate of Sl -da. Scott (CD) remarked that zuo in je zuo
may merely simulate zuo (see the end of sec 2, above).
Since the earliest extant German form is not old, zuo
need not be a reflex of an ancient enclitic. Perhaps it is a
homonym of the enclitic preserved in OE gy ta, but the
existence of immerzu makes the simplest reconstruction
more likely. We may assume that zuo in je zuo is an
adverb.
The hypotheses by Berneker, Hempl, and H. Schroder
are based on the assumption that iu- in *iuta went from
a falling to a rising diphthong (iu > iu). An acceptance of
this development means that the most ancient form of
yet was not ge ta but gy ta, whereas gi (e)ta arose under
the influence of g (palatal). According to G. Schmidt
(1963:123), -t(a) in giet(a) continues Gmc *to ~ *ta 'to.'
973
Adz(e) Adz(e)

*To may be the same word as the adverb and

preposition to . Cases of an adverb used in other adverbs
as an enclitic are known. Compare, in addition to G im-
merzu, OI hingat and pangat from *hinn-veg-at 'here'
and *pan(n)-veg-at 'there' (AEW, ABM). Perhaps G dort
'there' (< OHG tharot ~ dorot) and its cognates (see them
in KM and KS at dort) also belong here. The element -ta
in Go pata goes back to a Proto-Indo-European pronoun,
and it is unclear whether it has the same etymon as the
preposition to . On
Slav da see ESSI IV, 180-81: da and VI, 7: e da, and
Vasmer I, 400: gde 'where,' 480: da; II, 399: kuda.
Slavic adverbs ending in -gda, such as Russ kogda
'when,' togda 'then,' and vsegda 'always,' constitute a
special group.
23) J. Zupitza (1880:25 and 1883) advanced two
arguments against the kinship between E yet and G jetzt.
The first concerns the Middle High German diphthong ie,
which, in his opinion, was incompatible with /j/ in OE ge
ta. Kluge reconstructed the shift of stress in ie (le > *ie >
je) and disposed of that problem. Secondly, Zupitza
believed that WGmc *t would have become ss, rather
than z, in jeze if it were related to yet (cf E water and G
Wasser < OHG wazzar). This is a particularly weak objec-
tion. The group je zuo consisted of two independent
words, and the initial consonant in zuo is a regular reflex
of WGmc *t (cf E ten and G zehn).
974
Adz(e) Adz(e)

After Berneker's remarks, the following became

clear: 1) MHG je in je zuo goes back to *iu 'already, now,'
so that je zuo is a reinforced variant of ie, whatever the
distant origin of zuo here, and the mystery of its
meaning exists no longer; 2) OE gy ta should be divided
gy-ta, with gy - corresponding to MHG ie and -ta
corresponding to Slav -da (the protoform of both must
have been *do).
If gy ta is gy -ta, ge na is, in all likelihood, ge -na. The
element -na is easier to etymologize than -ta because it
is not isolated in Germanic word formation. It turns up in
OE pe ana 'nevertheless, yet,' a sum of peah 'although;
however; still, yet' and -na (peana < *pau-h-na). Old
Icelandic has herna 'here,' parna 'there,' and svdna 'so.'
In Gothic, -na was a productive suffix of local adverbs,
for example, in aftana 'from behind,' hindana 'from
beyond,' u tana 'from outside,' and innana '(from)
within' (with cognates elsewhere in the Germanic
languages); -na has been traced to PIE *-ne . See these
words in Feist (-na), AEW, ABM, and G. Schmidt
(1963:25961).
Here, too, shortened variants occur: Go aftana,
hindana, innana, and u tana coexisted with OE xftan,
OS (at)aftan, MHG aften, OI aptan; OE, OS hindan
(OHG hintana); OE, OS, OI innan (OHG innana), and
OE, OS, OI utan (OHG uzan and uzana). If -n(a) is akin to
the pronominal stem in E yo-n, G jen-er 'that (one),' Go
975
Adz(e) Adz(e)

jai-n-s (the same meaning), and others, the parallelism

between, for example, Go pa-ta ~ OE ge -na and OE pat ~
OE ge t is complete, since -t(a) is also of pronominal
origin. OE gi ena and ge na left no traces in Modern
English.
5. Of all the Old English forms for yet, to the extent
that they end in -t(a), the hardest one to explain is ge
t(a), which occurs only in the Anglian dialects. If, as has
been proposed above, i e in gi eta is not the product of
*e2 diphthongized after /j/ but a side form of y from *iu
and if g- goes back to *i (non-syllabic) rather than g
(palatal), then geta and gi eta cannot be directly related.
Nevertheless, OE ge ta is a legitimate form, not a chance
hybrid (Mischform) or gieta with ie monophthongized
for an unknown reason. This follows from the pair e ta
and ieta in Old Frisian.
G. Schmidt (1963:123), who, like all his predecessors,
considered OE ge ta to be the primary form and the
etymon of gi eta and gy ta, traced e in ge ta to an adverb
in the locative, namely, PIE *ei, which, despite the
absence of length in the diphthong, became Gmc *e2.
More probably, *e-ta (< *ei-ta) at one time alternated
with *iu-ta, as OE nu gy t alternated with pa gy t. If that
supposition is correct, Old Frisian retained the reflexes of
the ancient alternation: eta < *e2-ta (< *ei-to) alongside
ieta (< *yta < *iuto). EDD cites jit ~ jat (phonetic spell-
ings), t ~ it. The regular spellings are yit, yut, and three
976
Adz(e) Adz(e)

forms without a palatal onset: eet, et, and it(t). Doublets

with and without /j/ occur elsewhere in Germanic.
Compare ModE if, from OE gif ~ gyyb, and OFr jef ~ ef and
jof ~ of, coexisting with OHG ibu, and so forth. OHG
jamerlih 'miserble' had a side form amerlih in Notker.
In all probability, g- in OE ge ta is not 'organic' and
must have been added under the influence of g eta,
unless the badly understood protoform (here given as
*ei) contained j (compare Bammesberger's *yod).
Holthausen (AaEW) calls OE geona a word of unknown
origin and adds in parentheses: "The onset [Anlaut] is
doubtful." At gieta, he leaves out the statement about
the origin (no etymology is offered) and reproduces only
the parentheses. If gTet(a) and git from gyt(a) and get(a)
are reflexes of ancient synonyms, rather than four
continuations of the same protoform, then g- in gy ta ~
gieta ~ git goes back to i, whereas g in geta is due to
analogy. The case of OE ge ta is not unique, as OS eo and
io alongside gio 'always, ever' and OHG jener 'that'
alongside ener show (see Go jains in Feist).
6. The only incontestable cognates of OE gy t have
been found in Old Frisian. As we have seen, the affinity
between E yet and G jetz(t) needs special proof. The
Middle Low German forms belong to the same
problematic group. Thus we have OE gy t, g t, g eta, ge
ta; OFr e ta, ie ta, (ita); MLG jetto, gitto, jutto, and MHG
je zuo and jeze, spelled as two words or together. The
977
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Middle Low German adverbs underwent the same vowel

shortening that occurred in the history of yet. Fifteenth-
century
West Frisian also had jetta (Holthausen [1929b:425,
a comment on sec 82.5]). Du ooit 'ever' and nooit
'never' seem to be related to gy t and the rest.
ModDu (n)ooit is pronounced in two syllables,
that is, [(n)o:-it]. Franck (1898) showed that in
Middle Dutch the pronunciation of ooit was the
same as now and supposed that its etymon was *au-aiw-
wiht 'at that time,' with *au being a pronoun 'that one.'
His etymology is stillborn. The most authoritative works
on the history of (n)ooit are Psilander (1900 and 1902).
According to him, -it in ooit is identical with E yet < g et,
whereas oo-goes back to OFr a < *aiw 'ever,' because
Franco-nian a could have yielded e. In addition to ooit
and nooit, the forms ooint, nooint and MDu iewent (<
iewet) have been recorded. Psilander (1900:147)
compared them with OE gen ~ gien and derived e from
*e2. If ooit is a reflex of *a-iet, we obtain a mirror image
of what Hempl, Kluge, and Old English scribes, all of
them inspired by folk etymology, detected in OE gieta,
allegedly from *gtet-a, only a, instead of being an
enclitic appears in pre-position. Psilander (1900:146)
cites OE xfre giet and nxfre giet, literally 'ever yet' and
'never yet,' as other examples of intensified adverbial
phrases.
978
Adz(e) Adz(e)

Heeroma (1941:99) pointed out that OFr *a-ieta did

not exist and that since ooit and nooit had wide currency
in Middle Dutch, they do not look like Frisian imports.
Those are valid objections, but the solution he offers is
hardly credible. In his opinion, nooit arose under the
influence of pairs like Du ie 'ever' ~ nie 'never' and
ergens.
Between 1900 and 1902, Psilander changed his views
on -n- in ooint. In the later article (p. 123), he calls -n- a
mere insertion. Psilander (1902) was a response to Kern
(1901), who believed that ooit developed from *jo-tit (tit
'time') and referred to aait from altit in the dialect of
Twente. The experience of Franck, Hempl, Kluge, and
Schröder shows that combinations of this type are easy
to invent. The group *jo-tit might have yielded ooit,
though the loss of -t- poses a problem, but it is
preferable to agree on an etymology that takes care of
both ooit and yet. Inasmuch as OE tid has no relation to
yet, Kern's reconstruction should be rejected. EWNT2 and
NEW accept Psilander's ideas, but both expresses doubts
about oo. If Dutch had cognates of OE gena, then ooint
and iewent are hybrid forms. A direct comparison
between OE ge t and Du ooit (so Björkman [1916:248]) is
to be avoided. In any case, -it in Du ooit is akin to E yet
(Heeroma thinks so too) and all the words listed at the
beginning of this section.

979
Adz(e) Adz(e)

7. The verdict of English etymological lexicography

that yet is a word of unknown origin lacks foundation.
Yet has cognates in Frisian, Dutch, Low and High
German, and German linguists need not repeat Grimm's
statement that jetzt is not related to yet. OE giet(a)
consists of two demoti-vated elements, gze- and -t(a),
not giet- and -a. Consequently, -a should be separated
from a 'ever.' OE gien(a) had a similar structure: gie-n(a).
These facts are no longer controversial.
The second components of g et(a) and g en(a) go
back to pronominal stems occurring outside Germanic; -
na is a common Germanic element. Not only did gie
attract different enclitics; the same enclitic was
sometimes added to different roots. It may seem natural
to posit OE ge t(a) with *e 2 and trace g et(a), g t, and gy
t(a) to it. Likewise, MHG je zuo looks like a continuation
of *ja zuo, with *ja < *e 2. However, such a
reconstruction does not hold for OFr eta and e ta
because neither OFr e can be derived from e, coexisting
with it, nor e from le. Therefore, it has been suggested
here that OE ge ta and ge na have an etymon different
from that of g et(a) and g en(a).
The g e- part of g et(a) goes back to *iu 'already,'
with stress on u. The form *iut(a) became gyt; giet(a)
and git(a) are its variants. Gien(a) must have developed
from ge na. If the first syllable of OFr e ta and OE ge ta is
traceable to *ei, g in ge t(a) arose under the influence of
980
Adz(e) Adz(e)

g eta and gy t, and it is not necessary to reconstruct j in

the protoform. The absence of *gy na makes the history
of g- in ge na less clear.
The existence of competing adverbial phrases like
*iu-ta and *ei-ta is not unusual: compare OE nu gyt and
pa gyt. In East Slavic, two Proto-Indo-European words
merged: Proto-Slavic *ju(ze) and *u (Vasmer IV:151-52,
uzhe 'already'). Slav esce 'yet, still' has been derived
from *etsque, *adsque, and *jest-je. None of the
proposed etymons is fully convincing, but none is
improbable (Vasmer II:30-31, eshche).
The oldest meaning of *iu-ta seems to have been
'already' and 'at this moment,' preserved by MHG je zuo
(> jetzt). Phrases like nu gyt and pa gy t acquired the
meanings 'until now, formerly' and 'yet, still, further, in
addition.' At first, gy t in them only reinforced nu and pa
('right now' and 'just then'); later it began to convey the
same meaning alone. We no longer say *now yet and
*then yet, but phrases like now then show how
unpredictable and illogical such combinations sometimes
are. The distance from 'right now' to 'still' and from 'just
then' to 'yet' was relatively easy to cover. The abstract
meaning 'however' must have been the last to appear.
Although the paths of E yet and ever crossed more than
once (cf xfre giet), the origins of those adverbs are
different.

981
Adz(e) Adz(e)

The shortening of the vowel in yet and in its Frisian

and Low German cognates should probably be accounted
for by sentence stress. But the formula 'loss of length in
an unstressed position' would be misleading, because in
everyday speech gy t was sometimes stressed and
sometimes unstressed. Germanic generalized the
shortened form. By contrast, Slav *ace 'if, though, etc,' a
word group reminiscent of L atque 'and, and also,' has
lengthened a, ascribed, for want of a better explanation,
to emphasis (ESSI I:36-37).
Not every detail in the etymology of yet and its
cognates is clear, but in such matters absolute clarity is
unachievable. It is more surprising how thoroughly
historical linguists have investigated the origin of yet and
how little of the obtained knowledge is reflected in our
best dictionaries.

982
 This page intentionally left blank
BIBLIOGRAPHY

In using the bibliography, the following has to be

remembered: 1) Umlauted letters, namely ä/a, 0/0, and
ü, are treated as ae, oe, and ue respectively.
Consequently, Hoeufft follows rather than precedes
Höfler (as would have happened if ö were equal to o).
Likewise, Brnndal stands between Brocket and
Brogyanyi, and Mueller, Eduard follows Mülenbachs and
precedes Müller, Ernst. However, a is treated like a, not
like aa, and no distinction is made between c and C. 2) If
a book has been published in more than one volume,
this fact is mentioned only if each volume has its own
pagination. 3) Cross-references are given not only to
joint authors but also to the editors of all books. This
system makes the general picture more transparent,
especially because the same people often appear as
editors and as contributors. 4) The names of publishers
are given exactly as they appear on the title page: C.
Winter, Carl Winter, Carl Winter's Universitätsverlag,
Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, and so forth. Nor have
prepositions been deleted: At the Clarendon Press,
Gedruckt bey Joseph Kaestner, Apud Joh. Frid. Gleditschi
B. Filium, and the like. The places of publication appear
in their natural guise, for example, Firenze, München,
and Sankt-Peterburg, not Florence, Munich, or St.
Petersburg. 5) In references to Notes and Queries, the
roman number designates the series. 6) The titles of the
works in Russian, Ukrainian, and Czech have been
translated by the editor.

Abbreviations of Journal Titles and Book Series (See

abbreviated book titles like KLNM and RGA in the
bibliography.) A&A Anglistica and Americana.
Hildesheim, New York: G. Olms.
Aarbeger Aarbeger for nordisk oldkyndighet og
historie, udgivne af Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldskrift
Selskab. II. Raekke. Kjebenhavn: I Commission i den
Gyldendalske Boghandel.
AB Anglia Beiblatt (= Beiblatt zur Anglia)
ABÄG Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren
Germanistik
ABibl Altdeutsche Bibliothek. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer.
AC Archaeologica Cambrensis
AF Anglistische Forschungen. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter.
AG Americana Germanica
AGDSZ Abhandlungen herausgegeben von der
Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache in Zürich.
Zürich: E. Speidel, Akadem.
Verlagsbuchhandlung/Druck und Verlag von Züricher &
Furrer.
 AGI Archivio glottologico italiano
AGSM Abhandlungen der Geistes- und
sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse. Verlag der
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in
Mainz. Wiesbaden: Verlag der Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, in
Kommission bei F. Steiner.
AIAVS Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Allgemeine
und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft.
Wien: Gerold & Co.
AIL Anales del Instituto de Lingüistica de la
Universidad Nacional de Cuyo.
AION-FG AION-Filologia germanica AION-SL AION-
Sezione linguistica
AJ Acta Jutlandica/Aarsskrift for Aarhus Universitet.
Kebenhavn: Levin & Munksgaard.
AJGLL American Journal of Germanic Languages
and Literatures
AJP The American Journal of Philology
AK Archiv für Kulturgeschichte
AL Archivum Linguisticum
ALLG Archiv für lateinische Lexikographie und
Grammatik
AM The Atlantic Monthly
ANF Arkiv för nordisk filologi
ANQ American Notes and Queries
 ANVA Avhandlinger utgitt av Det Norske
Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo. II. Hist-filos. Klasse. Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget.
APSActa Philologica Scandinavica
ArAArchaeologica Austrica. Wien: Franz Deuticke,
Horn: Ferdinand Berger und Söhne
OHG.
Archaeologia Archaeologia: Or Miscellaneous Tracts
Related to Antiquity
Archiv Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen
und Literaturen
AS American Speech
ASNSP Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di
Pisa
ASP Archiv für slavische Philologie
ASTHLS: Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and
History of Linguistic Sciences: Amsterdam
ACL Classics in Linguistics. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins B.W.
ASTHLS: Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and
History of Linguistic Sciences: Current Issues CILT in
Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
ASTHLS/ Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and
History of Linguistic Science. Series IV: Current
IV Issues in Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
 Company.
ATS Antiqvarisk tidskrift för Sverige
AUU Acta Universatits Umensis/Umeâ Studies in
the Humanities. Umeâ Universitet
Avh. Avhandlinger utgitt av Det Norske
Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo. II. Hist-filos. Klasse.
NVAO Ny Serie. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
AWL Akademie der Wissenschaften und der
Literatur. Abhandlungen der Geistes- und
sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse. Verlag der Akademie
der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz.
Wiesbaden: Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH.
AYR All the Year Round
BAVSS Beiträge zur Assyrologie und
vergleichenden semitischen Sprachwissenschaft
BB [Bezzenberger's] Beiträge zur Kunde der
indogermanischen Sprachen
BBA Bibliothèque Bretonne Armoricaine publiée
par la Faculté des Lettres de Rennes.
Rennes: J. Plihon and L. Hervé.
BCILL Bibliothèque des Cahiers de l'Institut de
Linguistique. Louvain-la Neuve: Peeters.
BFH Biblioteca Filología Hispánica. Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas.
BG Bibliotheca Germanica. Bern: A. Francke AG.
Verlag, München: Leo Lehnen Verlag
 GMBH.
BH Biblioteca di Helikon. Rivista di tradizione e
cultura classica dell'Università di
Messina. Roma: Herder Editrice e Librería.
BM Bibliothèque du Muséon. Louvain: Publications
Universitaires. Institut Orientaliste.
BMDC Bijdragen en Mededelingen der Dialect-
Commissie van de Koninklijke Nederlandse
Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam.
Amsterdam: N.V. Noord-
Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij.
BN Beiträge zur Namenforschung
BNL Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
BRH Biblioteca Románica Hispánica. Madrid:
Editorial Gredos.
BRLF Biblioteca di Ricerche Linguistiche e
Filologiche. Università di Roma: Istituto di Glottologia.
BSGLN Bouwstoffen en studien voor de
geschiedenis en de lexicografie van het Nederlands. Het
Belgisch Interuniversitair Centrum voor Neerlandistiek.
BSLP Bulletin de Société de Linguistique de Paris
BT/RB Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Philologie en
Geschiedenis/Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire
BTLV Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde
van Nederlandsch-Indië
CE College English
 CF Collectanea Friburgensia/Veröffentlichungen der
Universität Freiburg (Schweiz) N.F.
Freiburg, Schweiz: St. Paulusdruckerei. Freiburg
(Schweiz): Kommissions-Verlag
Universitätsbuchhandlung Gebr. Hess & Co.
CFR English Linguistics 1500-1800. A Collection of
Facsimile Reprints Selected and Edited
by R. C. Alston. Menston, England: The Scolar Press.
CG Colloquia Germanica
ChEJ Chambers' English Journal
ChJ Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science,
and Arts
CJL Canadian Journal of Linguistics
CLSLP Collection Linguistique publiée par La
Société de Linguistique de Paris. Paris:
Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion.
CM Collegium Medievale
CMHS Collections of the Maine Historical Society.
Portland: Bailey and Noyes.
CoE Comments on Etymology
CP Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
CR The Classical Review
CRew Chiba Review
CS The Cheshire Sheaf
CSP Camden Society [Publications]. Oxford: Printed
for the Camden Society.
 DAWW Denkschriften der Akademie der
Wissenschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-historische
Classe. Wien: [no indication of publisher].
DB Driemaandelijke bladen
DCNQ Devonshire and Cornwall Notes and Queries
DFm 6 Danmarks folkeminder 6. Fra dansk
folkemindesamling 3: Meddelelser og
optegnelser. Kabenhavn: Det Schenbergske forlag,
1910.
DLZ Deutsche Literaturzeitung
DMT Durham Medieval Texts [no indication of
publisher].
DN Dialect Notes. Norwood, MA, etc: J. S. Cushing &
Co, etc.
DS Danske studier
DTg De Nieuwe Taalgids
EAO Episteme dell'Antichità e oltre. Roma: Il
Calamo.
EB Erlanger Beiträge zur Sprach- und
Kunstwissenschaft. Nürnberg: H. Carl.
EDSP English Dialect Society Publications. Publ
for the English Dialect Society by N.
Trübner & Co; [later] London: Henry Frowde.
EETS Early English Text Society. London: Trübner & Co.
and Oxford University Press.
EG Études Germaniques
EGSEnglish and Germanic Studies
 ELNEnglish Language Notes
ER Essex Review
ES English Studies
ESELL Essays and Studies on English Language and
Literature. Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln,
Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
ESt Englische Studien
ET English Today
FA Forum Anglicum. Frankfurt am Main, etc: Peter
Lang.
FC Filologia e critica. Roma: Edizioni dell'Ateneo &
Bizzarri.
F Frysk Jierboek. Assen: Van Gorcum &
J Camp. N. V.
F Forum Linguisticum
L
F Folia Linguistica Historien
LH
F Fraser's Magazine
M
F Frühmittelalterliche Studien
S
F Französische Studien. Heilbronn:
St Verlag von Gebr. Henninger.
F Forhandlinger i Videnskabs-
VC Selskabet i Christiania. In Commission
 bei Jacob Dybwad
(A. W. Br0ggers Buchdruckerei).
G Germanistische Abhandlungen.
A Breslau: M. & H. Marcus.
G Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik.
AG Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag.
G Germanistische Arbeiten zu Sprache
ASK und Kulturgeschichte. Frankfurt am
Main, etc:
Verlag Peter Lang.
G Germanische Bibliothek. I.
B/I Sammlung germanischer Elementar- und
Handbücher. 1.
Reihe: Grammatiken; 4. Reihe:
Wörterbücher. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
G Germanische Bibliothek. II.
B/II Untersuchungen und Texte. I. Beiträge
zur germanischen
Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
G Gießener Beiträge zur deutschen
BDP Philologie. Gießen: Von Münchowsche
Universitäts-
Druckerei Otto Kindt GmbH.
G Giessener Beiträge zur Erforschung
BESK der Sprache und Kultur Englands und
EN Nordamerikas
 G Göttingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen
GA
G Germanische Handbibliothek. Halle
H (Saale): Buchhandlung des
Waisenhauses.
G Göteborgs Högskolas Ärsskrift.
HÄ Göteborg: Wettergren & Kreber.
G Göteborgs Kungl. Vetenskaps- och
KVV Vitterhets- Samhälles Handlingar.
SH Göteborg: Wald.
Zachrissons Boktryckeri.
G General Linguistics
L
G German Life and Letters
LL
G Grazer Linguistische Monographien.
LM Graz: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der
Universität Graz.
G The Gentleman's Magazine
M
G Germanisch-Romanische
RM Monatsschrift
G Göteborgs Universitets
UÄ Ärsskrift/Acta Universitatis
Gothoburgensis. Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell.
H Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde
BV
H Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser af
FM Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes
Selskab.
K0benhavn: Munksgaard.
H Handelingen der Koninklijke
KZM Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor
Taal- en Letterkunde en
Geschiedenis
H The Huntington Library Quarterly
LQ
H Historical Magazine
M
H Historische
S Sprachforschung/Historical Linguistics
H Harvard Studies in Comparative
SCL Literature. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
H Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
SCP
H Historisk tidskrift
T
H Universität Hamburg. Abhandlungen
UA aus dem Gebiet der Auslandskunde.
Reihe B.
Völkerkunde, Kulturgeschichte und
Sprachen. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter &
 Co.
I lazyk i rechevaia deiatel'nost'
aRD
I International Anthropological and
ARL Linguistic Review
I Indogermanische Bibliothek.
B Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Universitäts-
buchhandlung.
I Innsbrucker Beiträge zur
BK Kulturwissenschaft, herausgegeben von
der Innsbrucker
Gesellschaft zur Pflege der
Geisteswissenschaften. Innsbruck: AMCE
I Innsbrucker Beiträge zur
BS Sprachwissenschaften. Innsbruck:
Institut für
Sprachwissenschaft der Universität
Innsbruck.
I Irish Church Quarterly
CQ
I Indogermanische Forschungen
F
I Indogermanische Forschungen
F(A) (Anzeiger)
I Inozemna filolohija
Fil
I Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis
JGLS
A
I The International Journal of
JP Psychoanalysis
I Innsbrucker Jahrbuch für Volkskunde
JVS und Sprachwissenschaft
I Izvestiia Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i
ORI slovesnosti Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk
S
J Journal of American Folklore
AF
J Journal of the American Oriental
AOS Society
J The Journal of Celtic Studies
CS
J Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-
DSG Gesellschaft
J The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

EGP
J Journal of English Philology
EP
J The Journal of Germanic Philology
GP
J Journal of Indo-European Studies
IES
J Journal of Indo-European Studies.
IES- Monograph Series. Washington, D.C.:
MS Institute for
the Study of Man.
J
Janua Linguarum. The Hague, Paris: Mouton.

L
J Jewish Language Review
LR
J Jewish Language Studies
LS
J Jahrbuch für Philologie

Ph
J Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur

REL
K King's College Medieval Studies.
CMS King's College London: Centre for Late
Antique and
Medieval Studies.
K Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung

VNS
K [Kuhn's] Zeitschrift für vergleichende
Z Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der
indogermanischen Sprachen
L LACUS [Linguistic Association of
ACU Canada and the United States] Forum
S
L Language Monographs. Philadelphia:
ang Linguistic Society of America.
M
 L Leuvense Bijdragen
B
L Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland

CD
L Linguistic Dissertations. Philadelphia:
D LSA, University of Pennsylvania.
L Language
g
L Linguistica Baltica
iB
L Literaturblatt für germanische und romanische Philologie

it.bl.
L Lore and Language
L
L Lippincott's Magazine
M
L
Lundastudier i nordisk sprâkvetenskap. Lund: G. W. K. Gleerup.

NS
L Lingua Posnaniensis
P
L Linguistic Society of America
SA
L Lund Studies in English. Lund: C. W. K.
SE Gleerup, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard
L Lexica Societatis Fenno-Ugricae.
SFU Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen seura.
L Linguistic Studies in Germanic.
SG Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
L
Lunds Universitets Ârsskrift. Lund: G. W. K. Gleerup, Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz.

UÂ
MInstitut
Meijerbergs arkiv för svensk ordforskning. Göteborg: Styrelsen för Meijerbergs

A
vid Göteborgs Universitet.

M MacMillan's Magazine
acM
ag
M Medium /Evum
M
M Mariner's Mirror
arM
M Medieval Academic Reprints for
ART Teaching. Toronto, Buffalo: University of
Toronto
Press in association with the
Medieval Academy of America.
M Marburger Beiträge zur Germanistik.
BG Marburg: N.G. Elwert Verlag.
M Manchester City Notes and Queries
CNQ
M
Manuales y anejos de "Emerita." Madrid: Instituto "Antonio de Nebrija".

E
M Münstersche Forschungen. Münster,
F Köln: Böhlau.
M Michigan Germanic Studies
GS
M Mededeelingen der Koninklijke
KA Akademie van Wetenschappen.
W Afdeeling
Letterkunde. Amsterdam: Uitgave der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen
te

Amsterdam.
M Modern Language Notes

LN
M Modern Language Quarterly

LQ
M Modern Language Review

LR
M Maal og Minne
M
M Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften.
MS München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
M Manchester Notes and Queries
NQ
M Le Monde Oriental
O
M Modern Philology
Ph
M The Monthly Review
R
M Moderna Spräk
S
M Mitteilungen der Schlesischen
SGV Gesellschaft für Volkskunde
M
Mémoires de la Société Néo-philologique. Helsingfors: Neuphilologischer Verein.

SN
M Monographien zur
Sp Sprachwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter.
M Mitteldeutsche Studien. Halle (Saale):
St VEB Max Niemeyer Verlag
N Nachrichten der Akademie der
AW Wissenschaften in Göttingen.
G Philologisch-historische
Klasse. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

N Namn och Bygd

B
N Nieuwe bijdragen voor regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving

BR
W
N The Nineteenth Century and After

C
N Neudrucke deutscher
DL Litteraturgeschichte des XVI. und XVII.
Jahrhunderts. Halle an
der Saale: Max Niemeyer.
N Niederdeutsche Mitteilungen
dM
N Nomina Germanica. Uppsala:
G Almqvist & Wiksells boktryckeri, A.-B.
 N Nomina Geographica Neerlandica
GN
N Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch. Jahrbuch
J des Vereins für niederdeutsche
Sprachforschung
N Nordic Journal of English Studies

JES
NJKAGDL(P) Neue Jahrbücher für das
Klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche
Literatur (und
Pädagogik)
N Neue Jahrbücher für Pädagogik
JP
N Nachrichten von der Königlichen
KG Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu
WG Göttingen.
Philologisch-historische Klasse.
Göttingen: Dietrichsche Buchhandlung.
N Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
M
N Namn och Bygd
oB
N North-Western European Language Evolution

OW
ELE
N Neophilologus
ph
 N Notes and Queries
Q
N
NORNA-Rapporter. Uppsala: NORNA-Förlaget.

R
N Niederdeutsche Studien. Köln, Graz:
S Böhlau Verlag.
N The New Shakspere Society's Transactions

SST
N Nysvenska studier
St
N Nordisk Tidsskrift for Filologi

TF
N Nieuwe Taalgids
Tg
N Nordiska texter och undersökningar.
TU Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Förlag,
Kabenhavn:
Levin & Munksgaard, etc.
N
A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott

VES
Company.
N Niederdeutsches Wort
W
N The New York Times Magazine
YTM
N Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift für
ZV Volkskunde
 O Ord og sag
&S
O Onomasiology Online.
O http://www.onomasiology.de
O Onze Taaltuin
T
P Publications of the American Dialect
ADS Society. Publ for the American Dialect
Society by
the University of Alabama Press.
P Publications of the American Folklore
AFS Society. American Folklore Society.
P Proceedings of the American
APA Philological Association. Hartford.
P [Paul und Braune's] Beiträge zur
BB Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und
Literatur
P Prager Deutsche Studien
DS
P
Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Strassbourg. Macon: Protat

FLU
S
Frères.
PGmbH.
Philologica Germanica. Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller, Universitätsbuchhandlung

G
P Papiere zur Linguistik
Li
 P Papers on Language and Literature
LL
P Proceedings of the Leeds
LPLS Philosophical and Literary Society. Leeds:
The Society.
P Publications of the Modern Language
MLA Association of America
P Proceedings of the Philological
PS Society
P Publications of the Philological
PSo Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press;
c London:
Humphrey Milford.
P Philological Quarterly
Q
P Proceedings of the Society of
SAS Antiquaries of Scotland. Edinburgh:
Printed for the
Society by Neill and Company Ltd.
P
Populärt vetenskapliga föreläsningar vid Göteborgs Högskola. Stockholm: Albert

VFG
H
Bonniers Förlag.

Q Quaderni dell'Atlante Lessicale

ALT Toscano. Regione Toscana.
Q Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach-
F und Culturgeschichte der germanischen
 Völker. Strassburg: K. J. Trübner.
Q Quaderni linguistici e filologici
LF
Q Quaderni Patavini di linguistica.
PL Publicazione del Dipartimento di
Linguistica
dell'Università di Padova e del Centro per gli Studi di Fonetica del C. N. R. Padova:

Unipress.
Q The Quarterly Review
R
R Regensburger Beiträge zur deutschen
BDS Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft.
L Frankfurt a.
M.: Peter Lang.
R
Rerum Britannicarum Medii ^vi Scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of Great

BM
^S
Britain and Ireland. London:
Longman, etc.
R Review of English Studies
ES
R Romanische Forschungen
F
Ren
Rijksuniversiteit te Gent. Werken uitgegeven door de Faculteit van de Wijsbegeerte

GW
Letteren. Antwerpen: De Sikkel, s'-Gravenhage: Martin Nijhoff.

R
Romanica Helvetica. Genève: Librairie E. Droz.
H
R Revue de l'Histoire des Religions
HR
R Rendiconti del'Istituto Lombardo.
IL Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Classe di
Lettere e Scienze
Morali e Storiche
R Revue de linguistique romane
LR
R Rheinisches Museum für Philologie

MP
R Romance Philology
P
Runrön Runologiska bidrag utgivna av
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S&SSpräk och Stil
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Bei B. C. Teubner.
Saga-Book Saga-Book of the Viking Society for
Northern Research
SAJL/SATT South African Journal of Linguistics / Suid-
Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Taalkunde SAMLA-ADS South-
Atlantic Modern Language Association, American Dialect
Society.
SBAW Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophischhistorische
Abteilung. München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften.
SBS Slaviska och baltiska studier. Lund: Slaviska
Institutionen vid Lunds Universitet.
SCCS Smith College Classical Studies.
Northampton, MA.
ScNQ Scottish Notes and Queries SDNQ
Somerset & Dorset Notes & Queries
SDSÖ Schriften zur deutschen Sprache in
Österreich. Wien: Wilhelm Braunmüller.
SEC Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia
SEP Studien zur englischen Philologie. Halle (Saale):
Max Niemeyer.
SFR Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints. Delmar, New
York.
SG Studi Germanici
SGEH Sammlung germanischer Elementar- und
Handbücher. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's
Universitätsbuchhandlung.
SGLH Sammlung germanischer Lehr- und
Handbücher. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's
Universitätsbuchhandlung.
 SGP Schriften zur germanischen Philologie. Berlin:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.
SHAW Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger
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Klasse. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's
Universitätsbuchhandlung.
SIScripta Islandica
SID Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis. Publ by
The Donner Institute for Research in
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SIDS Schriften des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache.
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Schwann.
SILH Sammlung indogermanischer Lehr- und
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SINS Skrifter utgivna av Institutionen för nordiska spräk
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SK Sprog og kultur
SKAW Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-
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SKS Sprog og Kulturs Skriftraekke, udgivet af Institut
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SLG Studia Linguistica Germanica. Berlin, New York:
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SM S0nderjydsk maanedsskrift
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SN Studia Neophilologica
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SP Studies in Philology
SPE Society for Pure English. [Oxford]: At the
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SR The Saturday Review
SS Scandinavian Studies
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SSL Skrifter utgivna av Svenska Litteratursällskapet i
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SSp Saecula Spiritualia. Baden-Baden: Verlag
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SSUF Spräkvetenskapets Sällskaps i Uppsala
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ST Studia Transylvanica. Köln, Wien: Böhlau.
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TAPS Transactions of the American Philological
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TB Taalkundige Bijdragen
TBL Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik. Tübingen:
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TCPS Transactions of the Cambridge Philological
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THLTheory and History of Folklore. Minneapolis:
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TLb De Taal- en Letterbode
TLS The Times Literary Supplement
TLSM Trends in Linguistics. Studies and
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TM Taalkundig Magazin
TNTL Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal- en
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TODL Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury.
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TPS Transactions of the Philological Society
TT Taal en Tongval
TVUB Tijdschrift van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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UGDS Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der
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UW Us Wurk
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Ghosts. In The Manly Anniversary Studies in
 Languages and Literature, 328-39. Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press.
____. 1926. Post-Consonantal W in Indo-
European. LangM 3.
____. 1931. Prothetic Vowels in Sanskrit,
Greek, Latin, and Germanic. AJP 52, 105-44.
Worcester, Joseph E. 1860. A Dictionary of
the English Language Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott. Wordell, Charles B. See Maurer, David W.
Wotherspoon, Irene. See Hough, Carole. Wortmann,
Felix. 1964. Kibbe (Bezeichnung
für kleine Tiere) und verwandte Bildungen.
Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Studie. NW 4,
53-76.
See also Kruppa-Kusch, Veronika, and Felix
Wortmann.
Woty, William. 1786. Fugitive and Original Poems.
Derby: Printed for the author by J. Drewry. WP =
Alois Walde, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der
indogermanischen Sprachen. Julius Pokorny, ed.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1927-32. Repr 1973. WPP
= Thomas Wright, ed., The Vision and Creed
of Piers Ploughman. 2nd ed. London: Reeves
and Turner, 1883. WPW = Thomas Wright, ed., The
Poetical Works
of Geoffrey Chaucer. A New Text, with Illustrative
Notes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co,
 1880.
Wright, Elizabeth M. See Wright, Joseph, and
Elizabeth M. Wright.
Wright, Herbert G. See TC-W.
Wright, Joseph. 1954. Grammar of the Gothic
Language.... 2nd ed. with a Supplement to
the Grammar by O.L. Sayce. Oxford: At the
Clarendon Press.
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See also EDD.
Wright, Joseph, and Elizabeth M. Wright. 1914. Old
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Milford Oxford University Press.
Wright, Thomas. See DOPE; Nares, Robert;
WPP; and WPW.
Wright, William A., ed. 1877. King Lear.
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Wuttke, Dieter, ed. 1994. Sebastian Brant, Das
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 W.W.E.T. 1852. Sir Hobbard de Hoy. NQ I/5,
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Zabel, Hartie E. 1922. The Semantic Development of
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 Zehetmayr, Seb. 1879. Analogisch-vergleichendes
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INDEX OF SUBJECTS
a~o
next to r (English), 104b, 178, 179a, 209a; for
unexplained reasons (English, Scandinavian), 141b
Ablaut (Germanic), 26a, 55, 56b, 58, 60b, 61b, 62a, 75a,
85b, 96a, 100a, 116b, 118, 122b, 135b, 152a, 198a, 211a,
138a, 141b, 192b, 199b, 200a, 208a, 214a, 220b, 221b,
223b, 227b a incompatible with ai, 101a, 128b-129a,
129b-130, 174b; with au, 6b *a possibly alternating
with *ai, 29, 66a a : e incompatible in the 3rd class of
strong
verbs, 55b-56a *ai incompatible with *eu, 27b; with u,
206a au alternating with u, 116b; alternating with 0, 4b
*au (Gmc) versus u (Latin), 6a
e presumably alternating with 0, 11a;
 irregular, 59b u incompatible with ai, TOAD (205b) See
also False ablaut Always, words for, EVER Animals, words
for, BIRD, COB, CUB, HEIFER, RABBIT, ROBIN, TOAD See also
Children, etc. Aphesis in Anglo-French, 9a; in English,
37b; in
German, 42a; in Italian, 92b Assimilation, 32b
Augmented forms. See Streckformen Averting magic,
etc., 5b, 220b Ax(e), words for, ADZ(E) *b ~ *bh (Indo-
European), PIMP Back formation, 11a, 24, 33b, 175b, 184a
Bahuvrihi, 102a, 164a, 182b Birds, words for, BIRD,
FIELDFARE, ROBIN, see also 7a, 42a
Blends, 1b, 2, 3a, 5a, 8a, 44a, 90a, 103a, 108b, 118a,
120a, 122b, 139a, 166a, 182b, 187-188b, 189b, 194a,
215a
Boast, words for, 14b
Boy, words for, BOY, LAD, PIMP, see also 17a.
See also Child, words for. Breaking in Old English,
12b, 49b, 71b, 105a,
227a; in West Germanic, 11a Brother, words for, 15-
18
Celtic words allegedly borrowed from English,
DRAB, RAGAMUFFIN Child, words for, BOY, GIRL, PIMP
Child/block of wood syncretism, 42b, 51,
132b-133a, 138b, 139b, 153b, 176; -/bundle
syncretism, 51; -/woman syncretism, TROT; Children,
animals, and worthless adults
 designated by the same word, GIRL, TROT Clothes, its
name transferred to the bearer
(especially children and women), GIRL, LAD,
LASS, especially 97a-99a Coinage by known individuals,
JEEP,
LILLIPUTIAN Comparative degree of adjectives and
adverbs,
66
Compounds, 28a, 31, 43, 50a, 140a, 141a, 142a,
216b, 226b, 228a;
See also Bahuvrihi, Disguised compounds, and
Tautological compounds Consonants. See
Assimilation; First
Consonant Shift; Gemination; Metanalysis;
Palatalization; Prothetic: f, s; Rhotacism; s;
Second Consonant Shift; Verner's Law Copulate,
words for, FUCK Counting out rhymes, EENA Cricket
(insect), German words for, 109b, 159a Deceit, words
for, 79b, 80 Devil, words for, 13a, 16a Diminutives, 146b,
184b-185a Diseases, names of, 52a Disguised compounds,
CLOVER, EVER,
FIELDFARE, HEIFER, HEMLOCK, YET
Doublets, 23a, 46a, 62a, 66b, 71b, 75a, 80a, 84a,
89b, 90b, 100a, 103b, 104b, 107b, 109b, 110a, 121a,
132a, 139a, 143a, 146a, 158a, 163a, 164b, 166, 172a,
188b, 193b, 202b, 204a, 208b, 213b,
217b, 230a
 Enantiosemy, 116
Enclitics, 228a
English word
(allegedly) borrowed from Arabic, LAD; Celtic, CUSHAT,
MOOCH; Danish, FUCK, SKEDADDLE; Dutch, COCKNEY, FILCH,
MOOCH, STRUMPET; French, ADZ(E), BOY, FAG, FILCH,
FLATTER, KITTY-CORNER, MOOCH, PIMP, RAGAMUFFIN,
STUBBORN, STRUMPET, TRAIPSE; French-Canadian, EENA;
Frisian, BOY; Gaelic, RAGAMUFFIN; German, RAGAMUFFIN;
Greek, WITCH; Hebrew, LAD, RABBIT; Irish, CUB, SKEDADDLE,
STRUMPET; Italian, LILLIPUTIAN, PIMP, RAGAMUFFIN; Latin, CUB,
FILCH, LILLIPUTIAN, MOOCH, RABBIT, ROBIN, STRUMPET; Low
German, DOXY, FUCK, STRUMPET; Native American, EENA; Old
Norse, HEATHER; Romany, FILCH; Scandinavian (language
unspecified), FUCK, HEATHER, KITTY-CORNER, LAD, STRUMPET;
Spanish, RAGAMUFFIN; Swedish, COCKNEY, LILLIPUTIAN,
RAGAMUFFIN, SKEDADDLE; Walloon, RABBIT; Welsh, COB,
SKEDADDLE
(allegedly) going back to a borrowing in Indo-
European, CUB; a prepositional phrase, EVER
(allegedly) related to a word in Avestan, DWARF;
Bretonic, GIRL; Celtic, DWARF, KEY, MOOCH; Danish, FILCH;
Dutch, BIRD, CHIDE, FILCH, FLATTER, ROBIN, WITCH; Egyptian,
DWARF; Finnish, CHIDE; French, COCKNEY, CUB, FILCH, FLATTER;
Flemish, RABBIT; Frisian, CLOVER, KEY, ROBIN; Gaelic, BIRD,
CUB, FAG, FLATTER, PIMP, SKEDADDLE; German, ADZ(E), CHIDE,
CLOVER, COCKNEY, DRAB, DWARF, FILCH, KEY, LAD, MOOCH, PIMP,
TROT; Gothic, DWARF, FILCH, KEY, LAD; Greek, ADZ(E), BIRD,
CHIDE, COCKNEY, DWARF, FILCH, FUCK, IVY, KEY, LAD, PIMP,
SKEDADDLE, STRUMPET, STUBBORN, TOAD, YET; Hebrew, YET;
Hittite, ADZ(E); Icelandic, CHIDE, DWARF, KEY; Irish, CUB, LAD,
RABBIT; Italian, ADZ(E); Latin, ADZ(E), CHIDE, DWARF, FILCH,
FUCK, IVY, KEY, LAD, WITCH, YET; Latvian, DWARF; Low
German, STRUMPET, WITCH; Modern Icelandic, STUBBORN;
Norwegian, GIRL, SLANG; Old Icelandic, CUB, FILCH, FLATTER,
GIRL, IVY; other Germanic languages, BEACON, CLOVER,
DWARF, ROBIN; Polish, GIRL; Portuguese, RABBIT; Sanskrit,
CHIDE, FLATTER, IVY; Scandinavian (entire), DWARF, LASS,
TOAD; Semitic, HEIFER; Spanish, ADZ(E),
RABBIT; Swedish, GIRL; Welsh, ADZ(E), CUB, LAD, YET;
West Germanic, CLOVER first recorded in the 8th century,
th
CUSHAT, DWARF, HEMLOCK; the 9 century, ADZ(E), BEACON,
th
BIRD, IVY, UNDERSTAND, WITCH, YET; the 10 century, HEIFER;
the 11th century, CHIDE, CLOVER, EVER, HOREHOUND, KEY, TOAD,
th th
WITCH; the 12 century, FIELDFARE; the 13 century, BOY,
th
GIRL, HENBANE; the 14 century, COCKNEY, FAG, FLATTER, GIRL,
HEATHER, LAD, LASS, RABBIT, STRUMPET, STUBBORN, TROT; the
15th century, COB, MOOCH, TRAIPSE, WITCH; the 16th century,
CUB, DOXY, DRAB, FILCH, FUCK, KITTY-CORNER, ROBIN, TRAIPSE;
the 17th century, NUDGE, PIMP, TRAIPSE; the 18th century,
th
FAG, HEATHER, LILLIPUTIAN, SLANG; the 19 century, EENA,
th
SKEDADDLE, TROT; the 20 century, JEEP, KITTY-CORNER
Enlargements, 25a, 43a, 161a, 168, 199b, 207a
-er (verbal suffix), 76
 Etymology, methods, 9a, 23a, 52b, 53b, 54a, 55b,
100a, 125b, 149a
See also Folk etymology Expressive forms and words,
23a, 32a, 42a, 85b,
168b, 169a, 179b, 188, 209b Expressive gemination,
10b, 32b, 132a, 139a,
140b, 142a, 155b, 204a, 206a, 217a, 221b Extended
forms. See Streckformen False ablaut, 42b, 46b, 77b-78a,
167a, 168b,
189b,192b First Consonant Shift, 32a, 167a
Folk etymology, 26a, 29b, 30a, 36a, 42a, 43b,
44a, 45a, 58b, 59a, 71, 72a, 73b, 79b, 83b, 86b, 89a,
101a, 103, 105, 106b, 108, 110a, 111b, 112b, 117a, 118,
120a, 124a, 133, 135a, 142b, 159a, 162b, 175a, 180a,
181, 184b, 188a, 196a, 198b, 200a, 201b, 202a, 204a,
223b, 227a, 230b
French suffix added to (an allegedly) Germanic noun,
178b, 203b
Gap of several centuries in documentation, 33a, 68b,
73a, 74a, 75a, 158a, 165, 180a
Gemination. See Expressive gemination, West
Germanic gemination.
Genitals, words for, 33b, 143a, 144a, 175b
Germanic words (allegedly) borrowed into Romance,
FUCK, LASS; into Slavic, FUCK
Ghost words, 39a, 87b, 103a, 116a, 127a, 138a,
197a, 206a, 220a
 Girl, words for, GIRL, LASS
Glosses, 10a, 12a, 33b, 43b, 44b, 57b, 58a, 59b,
60a, 70a, 71a, 94a, 103a, 108b, 115b, 144b, 171a,
221a, 222b, 223b Hermaphrodite, words for, 59,
183a Homonymy in English, COB, FILCH; in Old
French, FLATTER;
or polysemy, FAG, PIMP Homosexuals, words for, FAG
Hook, words for, 129
Hypocoristic names, 10a, 12b, 14a, 42a, 138a,
180a
Iconicity in word formation, 56a
Ideophones. See Onomatopoeia
Imprecations, 17b-18a, 180b
Intrusive consonants, 84a
Intrusive vowel. See Streckformen
-k (suffix), 74b, 88b, 94a
Kennings, 102b
Left hand, words for, 89a, 131
Lengthening of vowels
compensatory, 118a; expressive, 116b, 174b; before
homorganic groups, 73b; after the loss of h in Old
English, 118a; in open syllables, 115a
Male and female designated by the same word, GIRL,
STRUMPET, especially 94b
Metanalysis, 38b, 39b, 193a
Metathesis, 10a, 12b, 21b, 58b, 71b, 112a, 181b
Migratory words, 3a, 17a, 32a, 43a, 104a, 117a,
 119b, 133a, 173b, 179b, 208a Misdivision. See
Metanalysis Monsters, words for, 6b, 16a, 25a, 46b, 48b,
51b-52, 55a, 56b, 57a, 58b, 116b, 154a, 155a, 157a
Names (personal), 14b-16a, 18a, 80b, 87b, 142,
163b, 180a, 148, 194b, 208b, 209a
See also Words from names Nicknames, 15a, 18a,
58a, 61a, 142 Omens, words for, 7b, 8, 14b, 17a, 25a,
33a, 34,
44a
Onomatopoeia, 53b, 77, 81b, 88b, 90a, 91a, 92, 93,
94a, 107a, 157a
Pet names. See Hypocoristic names Pigeon, words
for, 44b, 45b Phonosemantics. See Onomatopoeia,
Sound symbolism.
Placenames, 15a, 22b, 25b, 35a, 36a, 104a Plant
names, CLOVER, HEATHER, HEMLOCK,
HENBANE, HOREHOUND, OAT Primitive creation, 34b, 42b,
56b, 58a Prothetic: /, 76; s, 23b, 32b, 33a, 193b, 196a,
197b,
202a, 204, 209
Restformen, 167a
Rhotacism, 54b-55a, 56b-57a, 57b, 101a, 138a River
names, 36a, 122b-123a Romance word (allegedly) borrowed
from Germanic, FAG, FLATTER, HENBANE,
RAGAMUFFIN Root etymology. See Enlargements s-
stem, 28a, 29a, 48b, 101a Scandinavian elements
reshaped in English,
 KEY, KITTY-CORNER, LAD, LASS, SLANG Second Consonant
Shift, 80a, 175b Secondary ablaut. See False ablaut
Secret dealings, words for, MOOCH Servant, words for,
BOY, FAG, LAD, PIMP Shortening of vowels (English), 27,
66b, 173b,
218b-219, 223a
Slang, cant, and jargon, 10b, 13, 23a, 24b,
39b-40a, 45a, 58a, 67a, 77a, 98b, 126a, 140b,
145a, 160b, 165a, 166b, 169a, 182b, 186b, 189a,
189b-196b, 200b s-mobile. See Prothetic s
Sound symbolism, 17a, 32a, 34, 57b, 166b, 199a
See also Onomatopoeia Spider, words for, 32b, 133a
Stall (for animals), words for, 104b-105a Steal, words for,
FILCH Sticks, words for, 170a Streckformen, 39b, 114, 183,
188b-189 Supernatural creatures, grammatical gender of,
48, 51b
Substrate, 27b, 49b, 50b, 56a, 119b, 120b, 121b,
123b,174a, 183b-184a Swear words. See Imprecations
Syncope, 1, 70a, 71, 89a, 96b, 105a
See also West Germanic syncope Taboo, 56a, 84b,
87a, 109b, 116a, 119b, 152a Tautological compounds and
phrases, 8a, 23a,
25b, 58a, 60a, 109b, 120b, 135b, 183b, 200,
205b, 206b, 209a
Umlaut, (allegedly) violated, 15a; palatal, 27a,
29a, 30b, 58a, 60b, 65, 66, 71a, 98b, 126b-127a,
 128, 132a, 138b, 204a, 219a, 221b, 227a; velar, 1a,
225a
Urschöpfung. See Primitive creation. Verbs of
motion, DRAB, SKEDADDLE, TRAIPSE, TROT
Verner's Law, 3a, 26a, 72b, 118b, 121a, 198a,
210a, 217, 218a, 220b, 223b
Vowels. See Ablaut; Breaking; Lengthening;
Metathesis; Syncope; Shortening; Umlaut
Wanderwörter. See Migratory words
Subject Index

West Germanic: gemination, 10a, 221b; syncope,

70a, 71a, 72a Worter und Sachen, 211b Woman, and
clothes, 46b, 145b; disparaging
words for, DRAB, TRAIPSE, TROT; ~/vessel
syncretism, 203
See also child/woman syncretism Words from
names, 124a-126b, 180a, 184, 186, 194b, 208b, 209a

1281
 INDEX OF WORDS

The index contains over 6000 words in over eighty

languages and periods from nearly the whole world.
Below, they are classified by family, group, language,
and period. The languages represented by fewer than
three words have not been included. It has also been
considered unnecessary to include such multiple forms
as stroumpat, strompette, strompott, and three more
('strumpet'), all of which occur on the same page in the
text and would have followed one another in the index.
The summaries of the entries also have not been
indexed. Although every word has been checked in the
best dictionaries available, a few suspect forms remain.
Rather frequently a reliable author would cite a word
from Old Irish or Frisian (to give the most characteristic
examples) that does not appear in any dictionary
consulted. Some such words remain in the text but do
not show up in the index. Obviously, I had minimal
control over regional (dialectal) words, even in English;
my main source for English was EDD. The orthography of
some languages has changed (occasionally more than
once) since the time they became the object of
etymological research, and Sanskrit is now transliterated
differently from how it was done in the 19th century.
Except in quotations from dictionaries, all words are
1282
given in the form familiar today. Only ft in German
words is spelled according to the pre-reform norm.
References to the order of letters in the alphabet of
some languages, to the extent that this order is specific,
appear at the beginning of the lists.

Contents
Indo-European
GERMANIC
West Germanic
English
Modern English318
Middle English 325
Old English 326
Dutch
Modern Dutch 330
Middle Dutch 331
Flemish 331
Frisian 331
German
Modern German 331
Middle High German 335
Middle Low German 335
Old High German 336
Old Saxon 337
North Germanic
Danish
1283
 Modern Danish 337
Old Danish 337
Faroese 337
Icelandic337
Norwegian
Bokmdl 340
Nynorsk 340
Swedish
Modern Swedish 340
Old Swedish 341
East Germanic
Gothic 341
ANATOLIAN
Hittite 342
ARMENIAN 342
BALTIC
Latvian 342
Lithuanian 342
CELTIC
Breton 342
Cornish 342
Irish
Modern Irish 342
Old Irish 342
Scottish Gaelic 342
Welsh 343
HELLENIC
1284
 Greek 343
INDO-IRANIAN
Avestan 344
Ossetic 344
Persian 344
Sanskrit 344
ROMANCE AND ITALIC French
Modern French 344
Old French 345
Italian 345
Latin 345
Portuguese 347
Spanish 347
SLAVIC
Old Slavic 347
Polish 347
Russian 347

Non-Indo-European
BASQUE 348
FINNO-UGRIC
Finnish 348
SEMITIC
Arabic 348
Classical Hebrew 348

1285
Word Index MODERN

ENGLISH
(Includes early modern and obsolete words; regional words
given in italics. Head words of the entries are given in
small caps)

bsquatulate, 187b acorn, 174b across, 51b addice, 1a

ADZ(E), 1a-3a after, 66b akimbo, 133a alehoof, 120a
Arkansas chicken,
180b
asparagus, 109a atch, 1b
at(t)aboy, 17b-18a attorney, 37a, 38a auburn, 204b
avoirdupois, 114b awkward, 90, 134a ax(e), 1b, 2a ay,
66a aye, 64b
babble, 17b babe, 13b, 19b
baby, 13b, 19b back, 7a, b bacon, 7a
bad, 59b
bag, 7a, 8a, 192b
baggage, 46a ballack, 94a ballock, 94a bang, 86a
Bantam, 124b bantling, 145b bar, 130a barley, 108a,
172a bassoon, 5b bastard, 145b bat 'animal', 7a bavin,
176a BEACON, 3a-9b, 18b,
168b,192b beagle, 13b bean, 109a bear (v), 11b beck
(sb), 4a beck (v), 6a beckon, 4a, 6b
beefing 'biffin', 185a
bellboy, 16b
bellflower, 108b beseech, 82a
(be)witched, 220a
biffin, 185a
1286
 big, 7a, 7b, 8a, 192b bight, 6b billow, 195b
BIRD, 9b-13a birky, 12
bittern, 204b
blackamoor, 39a, 92b,
183b
black-a-top, 183b black-a-vised, 183b blather, 78a
blatter, 78a bleak, 127a
blindworm, 197a blouze, 46b blowze, 46b
bluebell, 108b blush, 204 bo, 16b
board, 12a bob, 7a bob, 185b
bobbin, 7a, 185a body, 7a bog, 7a
bogey, 7a, b; 8a; 9b; 17;
18a
bogeyman, 17a boggard, 17a boggle, 7a, 8a, 17a
boh, 16b Bois, 15b bolt, 130a
bonfire, 162b boo, 9a, 16b, 17a booby, 93b
boodyman, 17 booman, 17a
Boots, 140a, 142b
bo-peep, 16b bottle, 7a

bound, 115a bow (sb, v), 6b BOY, 7b, 8b, 9a, 13a-
20b, 57, 97, 99b,

109b, 1142b, 157a, 162a, 175a, 184a

Boycott, 15b Boye, 14b Boys, 15
1287
 brag, 21b
bragget, 21b BRAIN, 20b-24b,
200b
bran, 23a
brat, 139b, 145b
bratchart, 145b
Bray, 22b bread, 11a, 172b
breath, 12a
breed, 11, 12a
brethren, 155b brew, 11a
bride, 12b
bridge, 82a broad (adj), 12a broad (sb), 46a brochan,
21b brood, 11, 12a
broth, 11a brother, 15b Bruin, 15a bubble, 7a buck,
7a, 81a bud, 7a
buddy, 142b budge, 166, 170a bug (sb), 7a, 17, 28,
185a, 192b
bug (v), 7 bugaboo, 17a bugger, 86a buggin, 185a
bullock, 89a
bumblebee, 107a bung, 176b bunny, 177b buoy, 8, 9,
18b
burden, 204a buttock, 7a button, 7a cack, 131b
cack-handed, 90b, 131 cadge, 132a
cadlock, 107b
cag, 128a cage, 127a cag(gy)-handed, 131 cahoots,
164a calico, 98b cap-a-pie, 183a cap-a-barre, 39b Cape
Cod turkey,
1288
 180b
carlick, 107b carlock, 107b cast, 191b
cater 'four', 133b cater (v), 133b, 135a cater-a-fran,
114b cater-cornelled, 133b cater-corner(ed),
133b-134
cater-cousin, 134a-
135a
cater-de-flamp, 114b cater-flampered, 133b
caterpillar, 134a cater-slant, 133b caterwaul, 134a, 183b
caterways, 133b cat-handed, 131b cat-o'-nine-tails, 183a
catty-cornered, 135 cauf-crib, 104b cauf-kit, 104b cay,
132b ceggy, 131a chag, 128 chalk, 89a
chamois, 121b chap, 42b charlatan, 195b
charlock, 107b, 108a
charlotte, 186a chicane, 26b chicanery, 26b
chickabiddy, 39b
chicken, 39a, 184b
chicken weed, 109a chidden, 24b CHIDE, 24b-26b, 43a,
129b chided, 24b chine, 129b

1289
 Word Index

chink, 129b chip, 42b chippy, 46a chit, 176a chode,

24b chop,42b chump, 167b church, 204a churl, 100a,
204b clandestine, 200b clap (v), 86a Clarendon, 31a
claver, 28a, 31b
clay, 29a
cleave 'adhere', 28b,
29b, 30b
cleave 'split', 27b cliff, 167a
CLOVER, 26b-31b, 66,
100b, 101b, 103a, 128b
club 'stick', 28a clumsy, 134a
clutch, 169a, 204a
COB (sb), 31b-35b, 41b,
42, 43a, 67a, 68b, 75b, 95b, 185a, 192b cob (v), 33,
34a, 35b
Cob Hall, 33a Cobb, 35a Cobbald, 35a Cobbe, 35
cobber, 33b cobblestone, 35a Cobbold, 35a Cobhall, 35a
Cobham, 35a cobhouse, 31b cobloaf, 42a cobswan, 42a
cobweb, 32
cock, 37b, 38b
Cock Beck, 36a cock-a-bendy, 39b cock-a-bondy, 39b
cock-a-doodle-doo,
39b
cockagrice, 39b cock-a-hoop, 39b, 40a Cockaigne,
36b, 38a,
40b
cock-a-leekie, 39b,
1290
 Word Index

183b
cockalorum, 39b cockamamie, 39b cock-a-rouse, 39b
cockatiel, 39b cockatoo, 39b cockatrice, 39b
cockedecosie, 113b Cocken, 36a cocker, 36b, 37a Cocker,
36a cockerdehoy, 113b Cocknei, 36
cocknel(l), 37b, 40a
COCKNEY, 35b^0, 148b,
183
cockroach, 40a, 92b cock's egg, 38a cocktail, 40a cod,
7a Cofa, 35a
cog, 128a
cokeney, 35b, 37, 39b, 40a
Coker, 37a con(e)y, 177a coo, 44a
cook, 36b, 37b, 39b
coo-me-door, 44b Cooper, 43a cop, 32a cope, 86a
Copp, 35a cormullion, 163a cornmudgeon, 163a cot, 35a
cottage, 35a country, 37a courtyard, 200a cove, 32b
Coventry, 35a coward, 177b cowbane, 106a, 109a
cowbird, 44b cowboy, 16b cowscott, 43b cowshot, 43b
cowshut, 43b cowslip, 115b coxcomb, 40a crazy, 55a
cross, 51a
CUB, 32b, 33a, 34a, 35b,
41-43a, 51a, 95b,
176b, 184b, 185b, 192 cubbe, 41a
cuckoo, 88b, 90a
cud, 31b cuddy, 42a cuddy-handed, 131b
cudgel, 127b, 170a
1291
 Word Index

cullion, 34a
culver, 44b, 73b
cup, 32a, 33a, 34b, 43a
cur, 34a, 162b, 164a
curfuffle, 164a curmudgeon, 162b-
164a, 165a curmullyit, 163a curmurring, 163a, 164a

CUSHAT, 43a^5b, 193a

Cuthbert, 42a daddle, 187b
daft, 55a dally, 61a dandelion, 113b dandiprat, 113b,
114a dandy, 114 darling, 100a
daw, 184b
daze, 55b, 56a De Bois, 15b De Bosco, 15b deft, 55a
dirt, 10a
dive, 44a
dizzy, 55, 56a, 62a,
178b Dob, 185a
dobbin, 185a dock, 45a dod(d), 166a
dodder, 29b, 166b,
187b,207a
doddle, 206b
dodge, 166 dog, 10a dogbane, 109b dogberry, 115b
dog poison, 115b dogrose, 115b dogtree, 115b dogwood,
115a
dold, 61b dolt, 61b doul, 68a dove, 44a, 45a DOXY,
45a^6a doze, 55b, 56a, 62a drab (adj), 45b, 208,
209
DRAB (sb), 45b

1292
 Word Index

drabbit, 180b
draff, 46a draggletail, 46a drape, 46b
drat, 180b
dream, 54a dredge, 166a dreg, 166a drivel, 46a
dross, 46a drudge, 166a
dry, 52b
Dubosc, 15b duck, 45b dud, 145b
dull, 56b, 60b, 61a, 62a Dutch wife, 146b dwable,
57b DWARF, 45a, 47b-62b, 99a, 155a, 157a, 178b,
183a
dwarg, 58b dweeb, 57b-58a
dwell, 60b, 61a
dwerk, 49b dwine, 57b dwinge, 57b dwingle, 57b
dwizzen, 57b dwub, 57b earthern, 204b eastern, 204b
eat, 1b, 173a eatch, 1b ebony, 110a eddish, 174a
edge, 1b eelfare, 73a EENA, 62b-64a eensy-weensy, 64a
eet, 230a
eetch, 1b eitch, 1b either, 127a ekt, 104a
elders, 144b elf, 52 elfshot, 52a elk, 103b, 104a
elver, 73
-en, 184b-185a
end, 172b
enoron, 110a enthusiastic, 52a entrails, 73a ere, 64b
Essex lion, 180b
-et, 178b
EVER,64a-67a, 228b,
231b
1293
 Word Index

every, 64b fab, 83a

faddle, 82b, 83a, 84a fadge, 67b, 82a, 83a, 84a, 166a
FAG, 33a, 67a-70a, 75a,
84a, 176b Fag, 67b
FAG(G)OT, see FAG Fagin, 68b, 69a fagin, 69a fainaigue,
189a
fake (sb), 68b fake (v), 82a, 84a fallow, 70b
fandangle, 188b
fangle, 188b
fare, 84a
farrow, 102b, 103a,
104b father, 19b
fatigued, 68a fatz, 86a feague, 82a feak, 82a, 84a
feal, 74a
feldefare, 70a, 73b felfar, 70a, 73b felfer, 70a fellfaw,
70a fellow, 74b fenagle, 189a
ferk, 83b, 84a
ferry cow, 102b
fetch (sb), 79a
fetch (v), 79a, 82b, 84a, 85a, 87a, 222b, 223a fether,
100b fetlock, 108a fetter, 82b
fib, 83, 84a
fickle, 80b, 84a, 85b,
87b
fiddle (v), 81a, 82b,
83a, 84a, 87a, 93a

1294
 Word Index

fiddle-de-dee, 113b fiddle-de-dee, 82a fiddle-faddle,

82b fiddlesticks, 82b fidge, 82a, 83a fidget, 82a, 84a, 87a
field, 70b
FIELDFARE, 70a-74a,
76, 104b
Fieldfare, 74a fig (sb), 83a, 84a fig (v), 82a figgle,
189a figgle-le-gee, 113b fike, 80a, 82a FILCH, 33a, 68b,
74a-
75b, 88b

filchans, 75b
filching, 74a
filchingly, 74a
filchman, 75b
fildefore, 70a
file 'pickpocket', 74b
file 'tool', 75a
fillip, 74b
filsch, 74a
finagle, 189a
fineney, 188b
finey, 188b
finger, 84b
fipple, 83, 84a
firk, 81b, 83b, 84a, 85b,
87a

1295
 Word Index

fit, 82, 84a fitch, 82a, 84a fitful, 82b flabby, 32a flack,
83b, 84a flacker, 77b flag, 84a flaither, 77b flamock, 94a
flap, 79b, 83b, 84a flapjack, 185b
flappy, 32a flash (sb), 191 flat (adj), 76a FLATTER, 75b-
78a, 79b,

80a, 83b, 84a

fleece, 74b, 75a fleech,77a flether, 77b
flibberdigibbet, 114a flibbertigibbet, 111b flick, 83b, 84a
flicker, 78a, 80a, 83b,
84a
flip, 79b, 83b, 84a, 145b flippant, 83b flipper-de-
flapper,
114a
flirt, 83b flit, 83b
flitter, 78a, 83b, 84a flog, 83b, 84a flop, 79b, 83b,
84b,
145b
flummox, 94a flunk, 84b fluster, 89b flutter, 77b, 78a,
84a
fob, 83a, 84a
focative, 81a
fodge, 82a, 84a
fogger, 83a
fondle, 189a
foolish, 55a fool's parsley, 115b forkin-robin, 185a
foxglove, 115b freak, 84a Freek's, 104a friable, 84a

1296
 Word Index

fribble, 84a frick, 83b frickle, 83b fridge, 83b, 87b frig,
83b frisk, 83b frolic, 170a fub, 83a
FUCK, 67b, 68b, 74b,
78a-87b, 93a, 120b,
145b,168b fucking, 81a fucksail, 81a
fuckster, 81a fuckwind, 87a fucus, 81a fud, 86a
fuddle, 82b, 83a, 84a fudge, 82a, 83a, 84a,
166a fudgy, 82a, 84a fugger, 83a
fumble, 84a, 107b
fundawdle, 189a furze, 204a fustianapes, 183a gaby,
32a gaddle, 189a
gag, 127a
gaga, 93b, 94a
gage, 127a gake, 91a gallack, 94a
gallock, 89a, 90b, 94a
gallows bird, 10b gamawdled, 189a gangway, 200a
gape, 32 garish, 96a
garlic, 108a, 170a
garth, 99a gas, 149a
gaulick, 88, 89a, 94a
gaulish-handed, 88a,
89a
gaul(l)ick-handed, 88,
89a, 94a gaw, 88, 90b
GAWK, 36b, 74b, 87b-
94a, 95b

gawked, 88a
1297
 Word Index

gawky, 88, 90, 134a geck, 91, 93a

gecko, 92a gee-haw, 113a
geek, 92b-93a
gerling, 95a
get, 226a
ghost, 25a, 48b, 52b giddy, 52, 55a, 99a
giggle, 92a, 93a
Gill, 97a
gimmel, 102a gippo, 98b
girdle, 98a, 100a
GIRL, 46b, 50b, 94a-
100a, 145b, 209a
girling, 95a girlopp, 96a girls, 96a girlss, 95a
git, 225a, 228b, 229a, 230, 230a
gixy, 46a gnaw, 167a, 168 gnidge, 169a gnome, 50b
goat, 171b, 172a
gobbledegook, 113b,
114b
gobbledygook, 113b,
114b
goblet, 32a
god, 52b goilk, 89a, 90b golden, 204b golk, 89a, 90b
goose, 93b gorb, 95a gorblin, 95a gore 'clotted
blood',
99a
gore 'piece of cloth',
98a
1298
 Word Index

gorl, 98a gorlin, 95a gorlins, 95a gorr, 94b, 95a gorse,
95a gossoon, 97b Gourock hens, 180b
gowk, 36a, 88, 89, 91a, 93a, 94a
gowry, 96a Gravesend
sweetmeats, 180b green, 99a Greenwich, 82a grilse,
95a grinagog, 114b grizzle-de-mundy,
114b groat, 170b groom, 99a grouch, 166a grow, 99a
grudge, 166b, 170a
grutch, 166a guardian, 183a
guile, 223b gull, 93b
gun, 146b gund, 117a gurr, 94b, 95a
gyp, 98b
gyt, 225a hack, 2b Hackney, 38a hag, 216a hag-a-bag,
183b haggaday, 130a haggerdecash, 114a haggle, 26a
hair, 101a, 177a ham, 107a
hamble, 107b
hamper (v), 107a hamshackle, 107a hamstring, 107a
handiwork, 70a haphazard, 200a hards, 101a hare, 177
harebell, 115b hare's foot, 31a
hark, 88b harlot, 99b, 202b
harns, 24a harp, 82b hash, 2b hasp, 129b hatch, 1b,
2b hatchet, 2b hathe, 101a haven, 172a haver, 171b
havier, 104a
haw, 120a
Haxtead, 104a hay 'dance', 114a hay 'dry grass', 105a
haydegines, 114b (h)ayfer, 101b hayhove, 120a
heahfodro, 103a hearken, 74b
1299
 Word Index

heath, 100b, 174b

HEATHER, 29b, 100b-101b, 121a, 128b, 174b heave, 172a
hebenon, 110a-111a
hebon, 110
hebona, 110
hecfurthe, 103
heck, 103a Heckfeld, 104a
heckfer, 104a
heckfor, 103b
heckfordes, 103a heckfore, 101b heckforthes, 103a
hedder-faced, 101a heddery, 101a heicfar, 102
heiedegynes, 114b HEIFER, 28a, 71b, 73a,
101b-105b, 171b, 179a, 209a
heifker, 103a hellebore, 115b
helter-skelter, 189b hem, 107a
HEMLOCK, 105b-108b,
109, 117a, 123b HENBANE, 105b, 107a,
108b-111a, 116a, 117a, 159a, 200a
Henry, 107a
herpet, 177a
Hickstead, 104a
higgledy-piggledy, 161a
higgs, 102b
hillock, 89a
hip 'plant', 120b
hit, 86a
hive, 107b
1300
 Word Index

hob, 112b
Hob, 113a
Hobart, 113a
hobberd, 111b
hobbididance, 111b
hobble, 111b
HOBBLEDEHOY, 88a,
111a-114b, 184a,
185b,188b,189a hobble-de-poise, 111a,
113a, 114b
hobbledigee, 111b hobbledygee, 111b hobbledygee,
113a
hobbletyhoy, 112b hobby, 42b
hoberdehoy, 112b Hoberdidance, 111b
hobgoblin, 112b, 185b
hobidy-booby, 111b hock 'sort of wine',
103b
hockamore, 103b hocus-pocus, 161a hodgepodge,
82a,
161a
hoggin, 185a hogging, 185a hogshead, 33a, 185a
hoicks a boy!, 18a hoit, 113a hoity-toity, 113a
honeysuck, 30b honeysuckle, 30b
hook, 129 hoop, 129b hop 'plant', 120b
HOREHOUND, 114b-
117b, 118a, 120a

hotchpot, 166a hotchpotch, 166a hound, 41b

1301
 Word Index

hove, 120a hoy, 112a, 113a

hoyden, 112a
hoyt, 112a
hubble-bubble, 162b
hubbleshoo, 112a hubbleshow, 112a hubble-te-
shives, 112a,
114a hubby, 90a
huckaback, 183b hucker-mocker, 161a hucker-
mucker, 161a hudder-mudder, 161a huddledy-puddledy,
161a
hudgemudge, 162a hugaback, 183b hugger-
muggans, 162a hugger-mugger, 158b, 160b,161-162b,
165a huggrie-muggrie, 162a hullack, 94a hullock, 94a
humble, 107a humble-bee, 107 hunbarrow, 116
hurdle, 130b hurds, 101a hussy, 45b idiot, 55a if, 227b,
230a ilk, 227b imbecile, 55a imp, 113b, 176a -in, 185a
innards, 73a Irish apricots, 180b Irish lemons, 180b
it, 225b, 230a
its, 1b, 2
itt, 230a itty-bitty, 64a
ivery, 118b
IVY, 101b, 108a, 115a, 117b-123b, 171a, 219b
jab, 166b
jabble, 187b
Jack, 184b, 185b
jack, 96b

1302
 Word Index

Jack-a-dandy, 183a jackanapes, 39b, 183a jackass,

184b jackdaw, 184b Jacobs, 35a jag, 166b jailbird, 10b
jake, 201a jam, 166b jape, 80b, 81a jaunt, 166b JEEP,
123b-126a jeepers creepers, 125a,
126a
jeeps, 126a jenny, 130a Jenny wren, 184b jeopardy,
32a jerk, 166b
jib, 166b
jig, 93b jink, 166b
jit, 230a
jitter, 166b
job (v), 166b, 185a
jobbin, 185a jog, 166b
John o'Groats, 183a
joke, 92b jolt, 166b
jounce, 166b judge, 166a jumble, 166b jump, 166b
kack-handed, 131b kaggy-handed, 131b Kansas City fish,
180b katy-handed, 131a Katyusha, 146b
kay, 130b
kay-handed, 131b kay-reived, 131b keb 'rejected
sheep',
42b, 192b
keb 'villain', 34a
kebb, 42b kebbe, 42b kebber, 42b keck, 131a kecker,
131a keck-fisted, 131a keck-handed, 131 keck-handed,
90b kedge, 132a
kedlock, 107b
1303
 Word Index

keep, 32a
keg, 127a, 128a
keggle, 131a
keggy, 131a
keggy-handed, 131b
keigh, 130b keld, 195b kellock, 107b
kerfuffle, 164a kerlock, 107b kerslash, 164a
key (adj), 130b-131,
132a key (v), 131a Key, 132b
KEY, 25b, 43a, 50a,
101a, 126b-133a, 134a, 135, 174b
key-leg(ged), 131a
kib, 32b kibble, 32b
kibble, 42b
kick, 131a kid crew, 104b
kid, 26b
kiddy-corner, 133b kidnap, 32a kidney, 39a kiggle,
131a
kilk, 107b
kink, 133a kip, 34a
kitchen, 136b, 201b
kithogue, 134a kittaghy, 131b kitten, 184b
KITTY-CORNER, 24b,
90b, 133a-135b
knave, 167b
knife, 169b knob, 167b, 168
knobble, 168a
1304
 Word Index

knock, 85a, 167a, 168, 169b

knop, 167b
knot, 168 knub, 167b, 170a knubble, 168b, 169a
knuckle, 168b lackadaisical, 183b lack-a-day, 183b
LAD, 135a, 135b-144a, 144b, 145b, 162b,
203b
lad-bairn, 200b Ladgate, 142b Ladhill, 142b la-di-da,
113b lady, 138a landimere, 70a language, 196a
Laputa, 146b, 148b, 149a
larrikin, 138a lash, 145a
LASS, 46b, 96b, 135a,
137a, 144a-146b
lassikie, 146b lass-quean, 200b
latch, 130a
lath, 138a, 139, 142a,
143a lea, 127a lead (v), 136a
led, 138a leek, 108a left, 131a
Leister, 104a leisure, 104a
let (v), 137b, 145a
lettuce, 1a
lewd, 137b ley, 127a
LILLIPUTIAN, 142b,
146b-149a linger, 194b lingo, 193a
lither, 138b
loach, 69a
lobbe, 32b
lobster, 32a
1305
 Word Index

-lock, 107b, 108a loiter, 138b

loose, 89b lord, 138a
lour, 74b lud, 143b
luddock, 140b
lug, 197b
lugworm, 197b lump, 167a
lurk, 74b, 88b
lynx, 179b mad, 55a madder (sb), 99b mads, 1b Mag,
184b magpie, 184b maid, 96b maiden, 16b malicho, 158a
MAN, 59b, 149b-157b mane, 24a man-o'-war, 183a -mans,
74a marrow, 21b marten, 204b martinet, 194b mast
'food for pigs',
23b
mastrupation, 202a masturbation, 202a maund,
154b mealtime, 200a meech, 158a meecher, 159a
meena, 63b, 64a messigate, 70a mich, 158a, 159b,
160b, 164b
miche, 158, 159, 160b,
161a, 165a micher, 158, 159a miching, 158a, 159b,
160b
milch, 74b milk, 74b milksop, 37a mina, 63b mine,
155b mitch(e), 158a, 159 mo, 63b, 64a moach, 158a
moche, 158a mock, 164b, 165a modge, 158a, 166a
moldewarp, 39a molly, 203b
MOOCH, 68b, 93a, 109b, 157b-165a, 166a,
168b,169b,181a
mooche, 158a
1306
 Word Index

moocher, 158a
mooching, 158a
mootch, 158a
morfrodite, 183a
moron, 55a
match, 163b
mouch, 158a
mouche, 159b
mowche, 158a
muck-a-muck, 184a
mucker (v), 158b, 162a
mucker, 162a
mud, 158b
muff, 182, 183a
muffin, 182b
Muffy, 183a
mug (sb), 158a, 164a,
165a
mug (v), 164b, 165a mum, 160 murk, 161a muzzle,
164b, 165a my, 155b nab, 32a naddle, 168b nadge, 1b
nads, 1b
nag (sb), 169 nag (v), 167b, 168b
nap 'doze', 166b, 167b neck, 166b nedlins, 185a
neif, 168a, 170a neither, 127a netlins, 185a never,
64a newfangled, 188b
nib, 169b, 178a nibble, 167b, 168, 170a niblick, 170a
nick, 167b, 169
1307
 Word Index

nickie, 79b nidge, 166a nidget, 166a niggard, 166b,

168b,
169b niggle, 168b, 169
niggling, 169b nightmare, 55a
nimble, 107b nip, 167a, 169b nod, 168b, 169b
noddle, 168b nog, 167b
noggin, 168b, 169b,
185a
nonpareil, 104a noodle, 185a
nook, 167b
Norfolk capons, 180b
northern, 204b
notch, 167b
nub, 168b
nubble, 168a
nud, 165b, 166a, 168b, 169a
nuddle, 165b, 168b,
169a
NUDGE, 68b, 82a, 160b,
165a-170a nudgel, 168b, 170a
nudlens, 185a
nug, 168b, 169a
nugget, 167b, 168b, 169
nut, 169b
nutjobber, 185b nylon, 98b
oak, 174b
OAT, 101a, 128b, 170a-

1308
 Word Index

174b
oat grass, 170b oatcake, 170b oatmeal, 170b
oats, 170b oatty, 170b
oh, boy!, 17b, 109b one, 64a
orchard, 218b, 219
orvet, 197a other, 166b outstrip, 195a over, 66b
overlook, 213b oversee, 213b pack, 7a
pad 'toad', 7a, 205b padding, 7a paddock, 7a
paddock 'toad', 205b page 'knight's servant', 13b
pamper, 175b pap, 7a, 30b parrot, 184b pash, 24a pate,
7a, 7b pathway, 200a pebble, 32a peek-a-boo, 16b peel,
75a pelf, 75a
pettifogger, 83a, 84a
phit, 82b phut, 82b
pickaback, 183b
pie, 184b
pig, 7, 8a, 10a, 185a
pigeon, 45a piggin, 185a piggyback, 183b pilch (sb),
75a pilch (v), 74b, 75
pilfer, 75a pilk, 75a pillage, 75a PIMP, 50a, 69a-70a
pimper, 75b pimpernel, 175a pimpersheen, 175a
pimping, 175b
pimple, 175b pimpy, 175b pin, 130a pinkanye, 39a
pintle, 175b pitch, 19a pitter-patter, 162b pluck, 75a
pock, 7a pocket, 7a pod, 7a
podge, 7a, 166a podgy, 7a poke, 7a
policeman's beat,
1309
 Word Index

195a
poodle, 7a
pot, 7a, 201a
potatoes, 170b potboy, 16b poteen, 147a pout, 7a
Prarie oyster, 180b prat, 114a prate, 114a prattle,
114a pretty, 147b prick, 68a, 85a proved, 155b proven,
155b
Puck, 7a, 17, 9b, 20a
pucker, 7a pud, 7a pudge, 7a pudgy, 7a pudsey, 7a
puff, 7b
puffed up, 7b puff-puff, 7b pug, 7a, 13b puppy, 10a
put(t) 'blockhead', 147 quack, 195a quacksalver,
195a quartz, 58b quater, 133b
quay, 92, 132a
quean, 45b queece, 44b Rab, 180a Rabbet(ts), 180
RABBIT, 42a, 104b,
176b-184a, 185a, 209a
Rabbitt, 180a Rabet, 180a
Rabut, 180a Radbod, 180b
rag (sb), 181a rag (v), 181a ragabash, 182a ragabush,
181a Ragamoffyn, 181a,
182b
Ragamofin, 182b RAGAMUFFIN, 17b,
18b, 39b, 113b, 114a, 134a, 140b, 148b,
181a-184a, 188b,
189a, 200b
raggabrash, 182a
1310
 Word Index

ragged, 181, 182a

ragman, 181b ragtag, 140b
rakell, 182a
rapscallion, 181a rarebit, 181a rasp, 177 rat it!, 180b
rat, 177 Ratperth, 180a Ratpet, 180a
raven, 180a
rebuff, 26b
rebuke, 26b redbreast, 184b
Redpath, 180a reiskie, 203a ribald, 16b rib(b)and,
186a ribbon, 186a ribes, 119b rigmarole, 181b
rip, 179b
roach, 40a
Rob Goblin, 185b Rob, 112b
roband, 186a robbin, 186a
Robert, 180a
ROBIN, 42a, 112b, 179a,
180a, 184a-186a Robinet, 185b Roblet, 185b
rough, 103b round robin, 185b-
186a rub, 177b, 179

ruband, 186a
ruddock, 184b, 185a rum (adj), 190b sard, 80b, 81a
scaddle, 185b, 189b
scadoodle, 189b scamper, 189b Scavenger's
daughter,
146b
scion, 176a scold, 25a
scoot, 189b
1311
 Word Index

Scotch capon, 180b

Scotch rabbit, 180b
Scotch woodcock, 180b scour, 189b scout, 68b screw
(v), 80 scud, 189a scuddle, 189b scutter, 189b scuttle,
189b
Sea Cob, 35a sea-loch, 200b seek, 82a
selk, 104a
semper-de-cocket,
113b
shamrock, 29b sheaf, 32b
shed, 189b
shog, 166b
Shotley, 45a shout, 44b shut, 127a, 204a shuttle,
131b, 204a
silly, 55a skaddle, 189b skail, 187b
SKEDADDLE, 114a, 184a,
186a-189b
skedaddler, 186b Skedaddlers Ridge,
186b skee(t), 187b
skeindaddle, 188a
sket, 187b
sketch, 1b skid, 187b
skidaddle, 186b skiddle, 187b, 188b
skip, 189b skirt, 98b sky, 187b
slabberdegullion, 183a slam, 193b SLANG, 67b, 135a,
189b-196b

1312
 Word Index

slanger, 194b slanget, 190a slanging, 192b slanket,

190a slat, 143a
slattern, 143a, 204b
sledge, 199a sledgehammer, 200a
sleek, 198a
sleep, 7b
slick, 198a
sling (sb), 190a, 192a
sling (v), 191b, 192,
193a slinget, 190a, 195a slinket, 190a, 195a
slip (sb), 76a sloat, 131b
slock, 193b
slogan, 194a
slot, 131b slot(e), 131b slow, 197b, 198a
SLOWWORM, 110a,
184a, 196b-200b
sludge, 166
slug, 197b
slugworm, 197b slush, 166 slutch, 166 smeer, 28b
smile, 30a Smith, 83a smooch, 164b smouch (sb), 158b,
164b
smouch (v), 158b,
164b,165a smudge, 166 smug, 166b
smuggle, 158b, 160b, 162a, 165a smutch, 166a snag,
167b snip, 167a, 169b snipe, 169b snug, 169
soon, 226b

1313
 Word Index

sound 'tone', 115a southern, 204b sparrow grass,

109a spokesman, 211b spook, 7a, 17 squabble, 25a
stag, 10b stalk, 74b, 88b stall, 104b stallion, 104b
steal, 74b stiff, 204b, 205a still (adj), 224b, 226a
stodge, 166
stool, 207b
stoop, 89b stradle-bob, 185b stricken, 155b strike,
86a strip, 195a
stripe, 191b, 195a stripling, 139b, 176a stroll, 46b
struck, 155b STRUMPET, 140a, 178b,
201a-203b, 208b,
209b strunt, 201b strut (v), 201b stub, 204a
STUBBORN, 169a, 203b-
205a
stud, 155a stuff, 166a suck, 86a Summerlad, 137b
swabble, 25a
swive, 78b, 80b, 81a
swivel, 78b
tad, 206b, 207a
tadpole, 205a
tale, 88b
talk, 74b, 88b, 89a
Tam o'Shanter, 183a tare, 171a tart, 46a
tat, 192b, 206b tatter, 207a
tatterdemal(l)ion, 183a
tatting, 207a tattle, 207a teat, 207a ted, 206b tell,
74b
1314
 Word Index

Temese, 1a temize, 1a
tet, 206b
Thames, 1a
theodolite, 149a Thetford, 103a
theurgy, 50a
thirty, 10a
thixel, 2a
though, 228a thrust, 85a, 204a
thump, 86a thwart, 50a
tid, 206b, 207a tidbit, 206b tit, 192b, 206b, 207a
titbit, 206b
titmouse, 206b
tittle, 207a tittle-tattle, 207a
TOAD, 168b, 174b,192b,
205a-207b toadstool, 207b tod, 206b, 207b toddie,
206b, 207a toddle, 206b todie, 206b token, 8, 9b
Tom Thumb, 50b
Tom, 184b tot, 192b, 207a
totter grass, 172a
totter, 206b, 207a tottle, 206b, 207a
TRAIPSE, 46a, 207b-
208b tramp, 208b trape, 208 trapes, 208 travail, 208a

travel, 208a
tread, 166a tredge, 166a trellis, 1a
trespass, 208a tridge, 166a trip, 208a troll (sb), 46b
troll (v), 46b trollop, 203b, 209a TROT (sb), 46b, 194b,

1315
 Word Index

203b,208b-210a trot (v), 208b, 209b trounce, 26b, 202b

trudge, 166, 170a trull, 46b, 203b, 209b
truncate, 202b
truncheon, 26b, 202b
trust, 89b
tud, 206b ruffle, 164a turbot, 7a
tut, 207a
tut-tut, 207a twaddle, 77a twerp, 57b twinter, 102a
under, 210b, 213b
underappreciate, 210b underestimate, 210b
undergo, 210b, 213b
UNDERSTAND, 210a-
215b
upbraid, 26b valet, 16b valley, 37a vamo(o)se, 187b
varlet, 16b vildéver, 70a viola, 83a vis-à-vis, 39b, 183a
wag, 22a wages, 127a
waggle, 228b
wake, 221b walk, 88b, 89a, 93b wallow, 217b
warden, 183a
weak, 127a, 223
wedlock, 108a Welsh rabbit, 180b,
181a wench, 94b, 96b western, 204b
what, 228a
whatever, 67a
whelp, 41a whether, 66b
whit, 223b
whoever, 67a whore, 45b
1316
 Word Index

wick, 218b wicked, 218a, 220a, 223a

wicker, 216b wife, 99a, 155a
wiggle, 217b, 218a,
220b wight, 223b, 224a wile, 223b willgill, 59b willjill,
59b
will-o'-the-wisp, 183b willow, 217b Willys, 124b
windfucker, 86b, 87 windlass, 146b wisdom, 223b wise,
218a

MIDDLE ENGLISH
aborne, 204b alborne, 204b alfin, 60a alphin, 60a
babi, 179b
backe, 7a bagle, 74a baudstrot, 208b
beekne, 6a
birle, 96b boi, 9b, 13b, 17b
boy, 16a boye, 18b brein, 22a
burd, 12b byrd, 10b
cagge, 132a cakken, 131b
cite-toun, 200b
claevere, 27b claver, 27a clerken-, 38b cleure, 27a
clouere, 27a cobbe, 33a coppeweb(be), 32a
wiseacre, 218b, 223a wit, 218, 223a
WITCH, 56a,215b-224a
witty, 218b
wizard, 218, 223b wolf's bane, 109a wooden, 204a
woolen, 204a wren, 184b
wretch, 97b, 222b
1317
 Word Index

wretched, 223a
yard, 99a, 219a yea, 227a yeke, 88b, 93a
yellowhammer, 71a
yes, 227b
YET, 224a-231b yew, 110b, 119
yit, 225b, 230a
yoicks a Bewmont, 18a
yon, 227b, 229b yond, 227b yut, 230a

cubbel, 42a Curmegen, 162b, 181a

dalk, 146b doder (sb), 29b
drabben, 46a
drit, 10a
drugge, 166a
dwale, 108b dwerg(h), 49b ellebre, 115b emere, 73b
erende, 73b evre, 67a farrow, 102b fecchen, 222b feie,
38a
feldefare, 70a, 71 ffylche, 74a fike, 80a filchid, 74a
flickeren, 76b Foker, 80a Foucar, 80b frover, 102a
Fucher, 80b Fucker, 80b, 87b
fukma micher, 160b mokere, 162a OLD are not
martern, 204b

st, 87a ENGLISH differentia

fuksail, (a is ted,
87a equal to
Fulcher, ae; p and d
1318
 Word Index

80b and follow

muster t)
gare, 96a

devillers,
113b
gaure( -orn, a, 64b, atorlaS
n), 96a 204b 65b, 66a, e, 116a
226b,
gerle, otes, 227a- attor,
94b, 96b, 170b 173a, 174a
228b

98a,
99a pad,205 (a)cenn attorco
b an, 9b pa, 32a
girle, pigge, ad, 1b, aw, 6b
94b, 96b, 10a 122a
98, 99a
gorrel, piggesn adesa, awa,
94b ie, 38b 1a, 2, 3a 64b, 65a,
66
gowre polke, adese,
băddel, 59b

n, 96a 146b 1a
gurle, rabet(te adl, 1b beacen
94b, 96b, ), 178, 179a , 3b, 6a, 6b
98a,
99a rabit, adle, beacen
179a 115b fyr, 4a
hadde ragema beacen
adosa, 1a, 3a

r, 100b, n, 181b stan, 4a

1319
 Word Index

101b
haddir ratte, adsan, beag,5
, 100b 179a 1a b
haddy ribald, adusa, beam,
r, 100b, 16b 1a 5a
101b
hadyr, robinet, ae, 4b, bearn,
100b 185a 67a, 228b 12b
rotte, beatan
hœrnes, 24b abre, 65a, 66b

179a , 17b
Haken scarn, beaw,
adre, 66a

ei, 38a 104b 20a

harnes scorn, Beawa
afra, 66a

, 24a 104b , 19b, 20a

hather stew, becna
afre alc, 64b

, 100b 201b n, 4a
hathir, stibour afre beficia
100b, ne, 204a glet, 230b n, 80
101b
hedde stoburn aeftan, belene
r, 100b, (e), 204a 229b , 108b
101b
heepe, stromp aeldra, beorSo
120b ett(e), 201a 66b r, 13a
hekfer strot, alf, beow,
, 105a 208b, 209a 52a, 58a 20a
heme, strumpi alfen, Beow,
1320
 Word Index

106 t, 201a 58a 20a

hemel tade, amerge Beowu
uc, 106a 174b, 205a , 73b lf, 17a
hend temse, aeppel beran,
wale, 1a tre, 29b 11b, 12b
108b
heppe thritty, aeppel blegan
, 120b 10a treow, 29b , 219a
herlot, ticchen, arende bird,
137b 184b , 65, 67b 10a, 12
hernes trat(e), at, birdas,
, 24b 208b 172a 10a, 12b
hether tratt(e), ate, birnan,
, 100b 208b, 209b 170b 12b
hoarh ulateri, atter- boc,
unde, see vlateri coppe, 32a 3a, 4b, 5b
114b
hoder, ulatour, atter- bodig,
162a see vlatour loppe, 32b 118a,
205b, 206b
hor(e) vlateri, attor- bogan,
cop, 32b 76b cobbe, 42a 14b, 17a
horeh vlatour, a5ele, Boi,
oun, 117b 76b 1b 15a
houn( wicche, a(w), 18a, 19
Boia, 15a, 17a,

e), 115a 218b 64b, 66

ive, wichche awe, Boi(a),
1321
 Word Index

119b , 218b 64b 14b

jobard wiche, ax, 1b boian,
y, 32a 218b 14b, 17a
kibber wicke, afora, Boiwici
, 42b 218b, 223a 65a , 15b
kible, wicked, ald, -bora,
42b 218b 66b 12b
kid(e), wikke, altile, brad,
41a 218b, 223b 103a 66b
knave, wikked, amer,
brădan, 12a

97a 218b 71a

ladde, windle, ampre,
brădra, 66b

136b, 146b 29b, 122b

140a,
141b,1 antile, 24b
Winterlad, 137b brăgen, 21, 22a,

62 103a
Ladde witche, apuldr Brafeld
dale, 142b 218b e, 29b , 22b
lasce, wite, asce, bragen
144b, 146 222b 24a , 22b, 24b
lass, witie, atan, Bragen
145a 219b, 222b 170b, feld, 22b
172b, 173a
lodder wonder ate,
Brahefeld, 22b

, 138b, -mervaille, 70b, 171,

139b 172, 174
love- 200b atih, Bramf
1322
 Word Index

amour, 170b eld, 22b

200b
marte a to Braufel
r, 204b feare, 65a d, 22b
ator, brecan
116a, 206a , 11b

bred, 12a bredan, 10b, 11 breg, 22b brego, 22

brid(d), 10, 11b, 12 briddas, 10a broc, 11b
brod, 11b
büan, 15b büc, 5b
bügan, 5b, 6a, 8a, 15b, 219a
bundenheord, 101a byl(e), 8a byre, 12b, 65a
byr(e)le, 96b
byrSen, 11b
caebis, 34a
cœg, 126b, 128b, 129,
130, 131b cœga, 126b, 132a cœge, 126b, 132a cœlf,
104a caf, 25a ceacga, 128a cebisae, 34a cebisse, 34a
cedelc, 107b
cen, 129b
ceorl, 99b, 154a, 155b
cldan, 24b, 25, 26a Clfa, 25a cild, 144a
clnan, 26a, 129b, 130a cipp, 42b circe, 96b citelian,
25a ciS, 129b, 176a clabre, 27a clœfere, 27b clœfra, 27a
clœfre, 27, 28a, 29b, 31 clafra, 29a
clafre, 27, 28a, 29b, 31,
1323
 Word Index

102a, 103a cleofan, 27b cleofian, 28b

clibbor, 204b
clifian, 28b clodhamer, 71a clüstor, 130a
cnafa, 16b cnocian, 169a cnücian, 169a cofa, 35a
crœfca, 223a crœftca, 223a crœftga, 223a crœftiga, 223a
cü, 43b, 44b
cüc, 44a cülfre, 105a cünelle, 115b cünille, 115b cüsc,
43b
cüsceote, 43b, 44, 45a cüscote, 43b cüscüte, 43b
CüSbeald, 35a cwene, 45b cweSan, 25b cwic, 44a
cydilc, 107b cyf, 34a
cyfes, 34a cyp, 42b cyrlic, 107b
darian, 56a deofülwitga, 218b derne, 56a docga, 10a
dol, 62a
dryge, 52b dwœs, 55a, 56a, 58b dwœscan, 56a
dwellan, 60b
dweorg, 48b, 49a, 52b, 56a, 57b, 58a
dweorgdoste, 58a dweorgdwost(l)e, 58a dwina, 55b
dysig, 55a eadesa, 1a eald, 66b earban, 173a earfe, 173
eax, 1b ece, 65a edisc, 174 eldra, 66b
ent, 172b
e(o)dor, 2b, 3a
eofer, 104a
eolh, 103b, 104a eow, 110b, 119a etan, 171b ex(e),
24a facen, 80, 85a
facian, 80b, 222b

1324
 Word Index

fœc, 80a fœcan, 80b fœcne, 80a, 81b fœt, 82b fœSel,
83a
fag, 85b
fagness, 85b -fara, 73 fara, 102a
faran, 70b, 102a
fealefor, 7a fealfor, 7a fealü, 70b, 71a fearh, 102b
fear(r), 102, 103b fecc(e)an, 82b, 222b
fegan, 219a
fela, 228b
felofor, 70a, 71, 73b,
104b felüfor, 70a, 73b feol, 75a
feorh, 65 fercian, 84a fersc, 12b
fetian, 82b, 222b
ficol, 80a, 85a fil, 75 fîras, 65 fipele, 82b fitt, 82b
flocan, 75a fodderhec, 105a
for-, 215a for, 102b
-for(a), 73a
-fore, 28a, 102, 103a,
104b,105b
fore, 73
forescyttels, 131b (for)gœgan, 92a forgietan, 212b
forgitan, 213b Fornetes folm, 110a
forst, 12b
forstandan, 211, 212a,
213a, 214a, 215 fraam, 206b
frec, 83b fricca, 217 fricgan, 217b frician, 83
friclan, 217b
1325
 Word Index

frignan, 217a friSobeacen, 4a friSotacn, 8b

frofer, 102a frofor, 102a fügol, 10 fyrhSe, 104a fyrs,
204a gœrs, 12b gœst, 48b gagol, 90b
gal, 90b
galdor-, 216a galsmœre, 30 gang, 200a gangewifre,
32b
gast, 48b gat, 171b, 172b ge, 226b
geac, 88b, 90a, 91a geara, 226b, 228b
geard, 219a gearo, 98a gearü, 98a gebeacen, 3b
gebeacnüng, 4a
gebedgiht, 226
gebrücan, 85
gebyrd, 11b, 12b
gecid, 24b, 26b gedreog, 58b gedwœscan, 55b
gedwœsmann, 55a gedwœsnes, 55a gefic, 80a gefylcian,
75a geger(e)la, 99a gegerwan, 99a gegierwan, 99a
gegirla, 98a gegnünga, 228b gegyrela, 98a
gegyrwan, 99a -gen, 228a
gen, 224b, 225b,230b gena, 224b, 225, 226b,
227a, 228a, 229b,
230b,231a genealœcan, 85a geo, 227a geon, 227a
geona, 225a, 230a geong, 66b geostra, 229b geot, 227a
get, 224b, 229b, 230b
geta, 224b, 225, 226, 227, 228a, 229, 230a, 231a
gett, 225b
gewlglung, 216b gidig, 52a, 55a gle-, 230b
glen, 224b, 225a, 227a,
1326
 Word Index

230b
glena, 224b, 225a,
228b, 229b, 230b
gier(e)la, 98, 99a gierelu, 98a gierlgyden, 94a giestra,
226b -giht, 226a
glet, 224b, 225a, 227a geta, 224b, 225, 228b,
230a
gif, 230a
gingra, 66b
git, 224b, 225, 226a,
230a
gnagan, 168b gOian*, 14b goor, 206 gor, 99a
gorettan, 96b gorian, 96b great, 66b gri(e)tra, 66b
grindel, 132a grytra, 66b gryttra, 66b gumman, 155a,
156a gund, 117a gung, 66b
gyb, 230a gyrela, 94b gyrlan, 94b gyrlgyden, 94a
gyr(r), 95a gyrwan, 99a gyt, 225, 230, 231
gyta, 225b, 226b, 227a, 229, 230a
haam, 206b hadder, 100b hadswœpe, 101a hœf,
172a hœfer, 104a, 171b hœgtesse, 56a, 216a hœleS,
154a hœrn, 24a hœteru, 74b hœttian, 34b hœp, 101a
hal, 46b
halor, 46b hamelian, 107b handgeweorc, 70a
har, 114b, 117a
hare hune, 114b, 115,
116a, 117a
harewyrt, 117a harhune, 115b, 117a
1327
 Word Index

heaf(a)re, 101b
heafre, 103 heagorun, 221b
heah, 66b, 109b
heahdeor, 102b
heahfore, 28a, 73b,
101b, 102, 103b, 105 heahfre, 28a
heahfru, 101b, 103a
heahrun, 102b
heahseld, 102b heahsetl, 102b
heahsynn, 102b healm, 106a hean-, 116a heaSo-
liSende, 101a heaSor, 101a heaSu-, 100b hecen, 104a
heg, 105a
hegra, 66b
heh, 66b
hehfore, 101b
hellerune, 222
hellirune, 222b hemlic, 105b, 106a,
107b,108a hemming, 106a hengest, 104b
hennebelle, 108b, 110a
heofonbeacen, 4a
heope, 120b
-heord, 101a hieg, 105a hi(e)r(r)a, 66b
hig, 105a hindan, 229b
hindberige, 110a
hine, 227a hlœd, 138a hlafœta, 138, 144b hlafdige,
138a hlaford, 138a hland, 138a
hlos(e), 104b
1328
 Word Index

hlutre, 66a hnappian, 166a hnecca, 166a hnigelan,

169a hnygelan, 169a hœcen, 104a
hofe, 120a
hogian, 161a holegn, 121a holtwudu, 200a hohsinu,
104a hrœfn, 180a hream, 4b, 116b hreremus, 7a
hruse, 170b
-hun, 115b hun, 115b hund, 10a, 115a hundes tunge,
115a hunig, 118a hunta, 32b
-hwega, 228b
hycgan, 161a
hymblic, 108b
hymblicœ, 105b, 106, 107b,108b
hymele, 106b, 108b hymlic, 107b, 108b
hynan, 116b hyrra, 66b hyse, 176a
ides, 122a, 152b idig, 122a i(e)ldra, 66b, 144b ielf,
52a ifeg, 118a
"ifegn, 118a, 121a, 123a ifig, 108a, 118a, 119a,
121a, 122, 123a, 171a, 219b innan, 229b
innefaran, 73a innefora, 73a inneforan, 73a innelfe,
73a innifli, 73a innoS, 73a innylfe, 73a irnan, 12b
iw, 111b, 119a
Ladda, 136b, 137, 142,
144a, 165b
lœdan, 136b, 138b landgemœre, 70a lœs, 145a lœtt,
139b Landberht, 142b LandfriS, 142b
laS, 116a leac, 108a leactun, 108a leah, 141a
leod, 136b, 137, 138b, 139b,155a
1329
 Word Index

leodan, 138b, 139b

licettan, 77a licgan, 85a
loddere, 138b, 139b
loppestre, 32a
loSa, 139
ludgœt, 140b, 143b
lybb, 116a
lybcorn, 116a lyffettan, 77a lyt, 136b lySre, 138b
mœdere, 29b mœgencrœft, 200a mœgenstrengo,
200a mœgenstrengSo, 200a mœl, 200a man, 154a mand,
154b
manig, 118a mann, 149b manna, 155a manslieht,
150b mapuldre, 29b ma5a, 154a ma5um, 154a mearg,
21b, 22a, 23b meltan, 201b mieltan, 201b mihteleas, 71b
miltestre, 201b
Mocca, 138 mod, 154b mona, 154a monn, 149b
mund, 152a murcnian, 163a murcnung, 163a myltenhUs,
201b myltestre, 201b -na, 229b, 230b neebre, 66b
naebre, 65a neefra, 65a neefre giet, 230b
ofer-, 216b ofergitan, 213, 215b oft, 228a ofta, 226b
oleccan, 77a ongi(e)tan, 213b, 214a
orcgeard, 218b, 219
orcneas, 48b
ortgeard, 218b, 219a
op-, 214a papolstan, 32a pîl, 75b pintel, 175b
pundur, 64b racenteag, 200a radbodo, 180a
rador, 104b, 123a
1330
 Word Index

raedic, 108a -re, 64b, 66 regn, 21a reofan, 179a

rodor, 104b rudduc, 184b
ruh, 103b
run, 216a
salthaga, 184b
sceadan, 189b Sceaf, 20a scealf, 71b
scealfor, 71b, 72b, 73b scealfra, 71b sceap,104b
scearn, 23b sceort, 66b sceot, 189b sceota, 44a sceotan,
44b, 131b
scin-, 216a scOgan, 14b scO (h), 14b scOian*, 14b
scrœb, 71b, 73b scritta, 59b scüfan, 116b scyrtra, 66b
scyttel(s), 131b sealh, 121a seolh, 104a sibfœc, 134b
sifeSa, 171a sige-, 216a sigebeacen, 4a
singala, 228b
skyrtra, 66b slawerm, 197a slawyrm, 197, 200 slean,
199a slecg, 199a
slic, 199a
slingan, 195a, 199a smœre, 30b smœras, 30a
smerüm, 30b smügan, 160a
sona, 226b, 228b
splpra, 32b standan, 214b stlf, 205a
stod, 211b stübb, 204a stybb, 204a
Sümerled(a), 137b Sümerlüda, 137b swegel, 221a
swegle, 221a swln, 10a swincan, 221a symmeringwyrt,
30a
-ta, 229b, 230b tacen, 8, 205b tadige, 205, 206a,
207b tadde, 205, 206a, 207 taperaex, 2b tela, 228b teon,
1331
 Word Index

205b tld, 230b to-, 212a to, 229a tocsa, 205a tosca, 205,
206a trU5, 209b twaddling, 77a twaedding, 77a tysse,
216b pat, 229b peah,228a, 229b
peana, 229b
pird(d)a, 10a, 12b pirde, 10a pridda, 10a pry3, 209a
punorclăefre, 31a pweorh, 51a pweran, 51b
pyrl, 96b
pyrs, 51b under-, 210, 212a,
213b, 214, 215 undercuman, 210b undergan, 210b
undergi(e)tan, 211a,
212, 213, 214, 215 underhlystan, 210b underniman,
210b,
211a
understandan, 210a,
212, 213, 214, 215 understondan, 210a underpencan,
211a,
212a
unlybwyrhta, 216a
untela, 229b
unwaestm, 171a
utan, 229b up-, 214a
wacan, 221b wacian, 221 wăegbora, 12b waelcyrie,
221a, 222a wăepenwlfestre, 59b
waepnedmann, 155a waSum(a), 72b, 79b wealh,
211b wealhstod, 211b weccan, 221a weg, 200a wegan,
224a wel, 206b weod, 171a weofod, 217a weofud, 217a
wlcan, 220 wicca, 216, 217, 218b,
1332
 Word Index

219b, 220, 221, 222,

223
wiccan, 218b, 221a, 222a
wicce, 216a, 217b, 218, 219a, 220b, 221, 222, 223a
wiccecraeft, 221a wicci, 223a
wiccian, 216b, 217, 218,
219, 220, 221, 223b wldl, 59a wlf, 99a, 155a
wifmann, 155 wig, 217a, 218b, 220a wigbed, 217a wigle,
220, 223b wiglere, 216b, 219b wiglian, 2116b, 217,
218, 219a, 220, 221b,
223b
wiglung, 216b wigol, 220b wih, 218b
wiht, 223b
wil, 223b wilung, 223b wiobud, 217b wiohbed, 217b
wita, 222b witan, 218b, 223a
witega, 218, 222b witga, 218b, 219a, 220b
witig, 218b
witiga, 218b, 219a, 222b
witt, 223a
Wodan, 105b, 182a wodewistle, 105b wordcwide,
200a
wraec ylfa pimpe
Hoog
Moogende, 161b

ca, 222b gesceot, l, 175b

52a
wrecc ylfagesc horzel, pint,
a, 97b oten, 44b 23b 175b
wullm ylfe, hunenb plat,
1333
 Word Index

od, 154b 52a ere, 109 167

yldra, ylfig, hunsch ragge
66b 52a kraut, n, 181b
109b
ylf, ylfin, ie, rakke
52a 55a 230b ifte, n, 181b
119a ravotten,
179a
MODE ijf, ribe,
RN DUTCH 119a 178b
(Includes early ijver, rips,
modern and obsolete 122b 179a
words; regional words kabbe, 42b risp(e),
given in italics) kabbeken, 179a
42b rob,
179a
aait, kabbel rob,
fielt, 74a

230b en, 42b 178

aar, fiets, kater, robbe
71b 82b 183b , 178
altit, fikkelen Katwijk robbe
230b , 78b, 79b , 135 does,
177b
baak, fikken, kebbe, Robbe
5b, 6a, 8a 78b, 79b 42b knot,
178b
bedar flikflooi keg,
robben,
178b,179a

1334
 Word Index

en, 54b-55a en, 77b, 128

79b
bedee flikken, kegge, robbe
sd, 54b 79b 128 nknol,
178b
(be)kni flip, kei, robijn
bbelen, 79b 129a tje, 184a
167a
biel, fok, kerel, robijn,
74b 86b, 87a 99b 185b
big, 7b fokkem kibbe, rups,
ast, 86b 42b 179
blutse fokken, kiem, scholl
n, 84a 85b, 87 129b evaar,
71b, 72a
bode, 83a, kiezel, scholv
foppen, 79b, 80a,

9a, 19a 129a er, 73b

boden, 84a kijven, schud
19a 24b, 25a den, 189b
boef, fotte, klaver, slaaw
13b, 15, 86b 27a, 28b, orm, 199b
16a, 19b 29a
boetse futsele klavere slang,
n, 84a n, 79b n, 28a 190a, 192,
194b
bok, garl, klei, sleute
81a 95b 29a l, 130a
1335
 Word Index

booi, garldeg klieven sluite

19a ooi, 95b , 27b n, 130b
booien garlem klimop, smed
, 19a ent, 95b 120, 121b en, 51b
botsen garlgoe klomp, smikk
, 84a d, 95b 167a el, 164b
brein, gek, knijpen smoel
21, 22a 91a, 93a, , 167a , 164b
94a
broed geur, kobbe, stront
en, 10b 99b 31b, 33a pot, 202b
bui, 9, giechel konijn, struik,
17a n, 92a 177b 202b
butsen gierelg koog, tarwe,
, 84a ooiig, 95b 28b 171a
dazen, gierleg kween, ter
55b oi, 95b 105a kaap
varen,
39b
dissel, goor, leutere trillen
2a 95b n, 138b , 46b
does, gorre, loof, trut,
178b 95a 118a, 122b 209b
domp gorrel, loot, vaak,
elaar, 71b 95b 139b 80a
domp gorrele lot, vaark
elen, 71b n, 95b 140b oe, 102a
1336
 Word Index

doode guig, luier, vaars,

bezen, 92a, 93a 139a 102a
109b
drab, haonbl maar, vange
46a om, 109b 66b rtje, 70a
drill(e) haver, mand, vedel,
, 46 171a 154b 82b
drillen hede, nie, veil,
, 46b 101a 230b 120b
duizel heilöve nikken, vijl,
n, 55b r, 72a 169a 75a
dwaas henneb nooint, vitten,
, 54b, 55a ldmen, 230b 82b
109a
dwerg, hersen nooit, vleien
50a en, 23b 230 , 76b
egel, hersens onderh vocke
18a , 24 aaf, 117a, n, 79a,
120a 81a
ei-, hok, ooieva vos,
122b 103b, 104b ar, 72, 73b 79b
eiloof, hokkeli ooint, vosse
118a, ng, 103b, 230b n, 79b
120a, 122b 104b
eppe, holder ooit, wichel
119b de bolder, 230 aar, 218a
114b
1337
 Word Index

ergens homme oor, wichel

, 230b l, 107b 72b en, 217b,
219b
erwt, honde oot, wicht,
173b, 174a miegersholt 170b 223b
, 117a
es, hondsd date, wikke
174a raf, 117a, 170b n, 217b
120a

MIDD
LE DUTCH
alfsge ifflöf,
dwas, 55a 118a
baec-, iloof,
5b, 6b, 8a 118a
bake, inster,
8a 73a
baken iwlöf,
, 8a 118a
boei, käke,
9a 128a
boeve kaag,
, 13b, 16a 128b
boey, kaek,
9b 128a
1338
 Word Index

bo(e) keggh
ye, 9a e, 128a
Boeye keige,
, 15a 129b
Boidi keuke
n, 15a len, 36b
boie, kokel
8b, 9a en, 36b
boken latte,
e, 4a 39a
boye, lodwo
8b, 18a, rt, 141a
19a
brued lote,
en, 11b 139b
bui, lötere
9b n, 138b,
139a
daes, moffe
54b l, 182a
dasen neggh
, 55b e, 169a
dissel, newär
2a e, 66b
dosic onder
h, 55b have, 117,
120
1339
 Word Index

drave onder
n, 207b staen,
211a
dribb reus,
e, 46b 51b
dribb robbe
en, 46b , 177b,
178a
scolfa
düselen, 55b,
56a

ren, 71b
dwae scolfe
s, 50a, rn, 71b
55a
dwerc slange
h, 49b, , 190a
51b
egelle strom
ntier, 18a pelen,
202a
eiglof, strom
118a pen, 202a
verse,
flatteren, 77a

102a,
104b
gedw versta
as, 55a en, 211a
wiche
gondräve,
117a

1340
 Word Index

len, 216,
218
gorleg wicht,
ooi, 95b 223b
heide wigel
n, 113a en, 217b
herse wijch
ne, 23b elen,
216b
iewen wijsse
t, 230b gher,
223b
iewet, wikel
230b en, 217b
FLEMI
SH
ate, ote,
170b 170b
boe, rabbe,
15b 178
fikfak ribbe,
ken, 79a 178a
fikken robbe
, 78b , 177a,
178
Katte robbe
wegel, ken, 177a
1341
 Word Index

135a
kobbe truttel
, 32a en, 209b
koppe vare
, 32, 179b koe, 102b
leiden
, 136b
FRISIA
N
(Old, modern,
and dialectal foms
undiffe
rentiated)
Arbere, ita,
72a 230a
baken, jetta,
3a, 6b 230a
beil, 8a jof,
230a
beken, kaei,
3b, 6b 128b
bel, 8a kai,
127a,
131b
berd, kei,
54b 127a,
130a,
1342
 Word Index

131b
bird, kei,
54b 130b
bobba- klave
, 179b r, 27,
28b, 29b
boike, leat,
18b 139b
brein, loat,
22a 139b
dokke, mann
45b , 149b
donk, monn
146b , 149b
dwerch oat,
, 49, 54b 170b
dwirg, of,
49, 54b 230a
earreb ofte,
arre, 72a 228b
ef, poaik
230a e, 18b
eta, poalk
229a, 230a, e, 18b
231a
fara, robbe
104b , 178a,
1343
 Word Index

179a
fear, robyn
102b derke,
184a
fjildbok robyn
, 71a tsje, 184a
fojke, skolfe
87b r, 71b
fokke, sletel,
87b 131b
fora, stink
104b hout,
117a
forstan tenk,
, 211a 146b
gak, tro(u)
88b wia, 208a
gor, Ur-,
95a, 97 215a
harsen under
s, 24 stan,
211a
hemmi ursta
nge, 106a n, 211a,
213b
herd, werd,
54b 54b
1344
 Word Index

hird, werk,
54b 54b
houne wird,
beishout, 54b
117a
hund, wirk,
115a 54b
ieta,
230a
MODE
RN
GERMAN
(Includes early
modern and obsolete
words;
regional words
are given in italics
and have not
been capitalized.
The words are spelled
according
to the pre-reform
orthography)
Adebar Alp,5
, 72, 73b 5a
Ader, Alptr
1b, 72b aum, 55a
1345
 Word Index

aderba alt,
r, 72a 59b
Ahorn, altwil
121a , 60a
aisse, Amm
173a er, 71a
Alb, Ampf
55a er, 29b
albern,
Andorn, 117

55a

Atem, 72b ätsen, 1b auch, 226a babbeln, 17b Bach,

6a Backe, 7b bäckern, 188b bajäckern, 188b Bak, 5b, 6a
bak(e), 5b, 6b Bake, 6a Bänkling, 145b baok\, 6a bau,
17a Bauch, 5b, 8a baui, 20a Baum, 8a Bausch, 7b bauwi,
17a Bayern, 208 beben, 14a beeken, 3a Beichte, 92b
Beil, 26a Bertha, 146b betrügen, 53a Beule, 8a
bewegen, 217b bihal, 26a
Blindschleiche, 197a, 198, 199b, 200b
Bö, 8a, 9a
boboks, 17a boboz, 17a bögge, 17a bögk, 17a böj(e),
17a Böje, 9b bök, 17a bok, 17a
bokes(mann), 17a bönsel, 146a Boofke, 17b böögk,
17a boppi, 179b Brägen, 21, 24a
brechen, 24a Bregen, 21a
Brei, 21a, 24a breiten, 12a Broden, 21b Brücke, 82a
brüten, 11a
1346
 Word Index

bua, 13b
buah, 14a
bub, 14a, 16a
Bube, 13b, 14a, 15a, 16,
17, 19b
Bubenstreich, 16b Bubenstück, 16b Büberei, 16b
bue, 13b, 14a
büj(e), 17a bullenkop, 33a bunschel, 46a bünsel, 46a
Butz(emann), 7b, 17 butzen, 14a chober, 33b cobbe, 32a
cobbenwebbe, 32a Dachsbeil, 2a Däumling, 50b Dechsel,
2a
Deichsel, 2b Diebstahl, 200a Dietrich, 130a
Dirne, 45b
doch, 22a Docke, 45a dokk, 45b dokke, 45b dokken,
45b dorf, 58b
dort, 229a
dösig, 55b
draben, 207b Drude, 209, 210a
Duckmäuser, 16a, 165a dusper, 56a dwaarg, 51b
dwerch, 51a Eber, 121b
Efeu, 118b, 119a, 120b,
121b Ehe, 67a Eibe, 110b, 119a Eifer, 122b
einprägen, 21b
Eltern, 144b
entfliehen, 213b Epheu, see Efeu Eppich, 119b
Erbse, 173, 174a
ewig, 64b, 119a Fach, 80a, 86a Fächer, 80a
1347
 Word Index

Fackel, 79a fackeln, 79a

fäckli, 79a facksen, 79 fäck(t)en, 79a fakk, 68a
Farre(n), 102a, 104b
Färse, 102a Faß, 82b fassen, 82b
fätscheln, 79b fatzen, 79b fauchen, 7b Faxen, 79
fear, 102b, 103a, 104b Federfuchser, 79 fegen, 78a
Feile, 75a Feinaigle, 189a
Fichte, 84a Fick, 84b Ficke, 83a, 85b Fickel, 78b
Fickelbogen, 78b fickeln, 78b ficken, 78b, 79b, 80b,
81, 82, 83, 84a, 85b, 86a, 87
fickfack, 85b fickfacken, 79a Fickfacker, 85b
Fickmülle, 78b
ficksen, 79b
Fiedel, 82b Fielic, 75b Fielke, 75b Fieltz, 75b Figg, 84b
fikje, 82b fikke, 82b
Filsch, 75 Filtsch, 75b Filz, 75b
filzen, 75b filzig, 74a fippen, 79b
Fips, 83b
fipsen, 79b fitscheln, 79b fitschen, 79b
Fitz(el)chen, 82b Fitze, 82b Fitzel, 82b
fitzen, 79b fiuken, 85a
Fix, 84b
Fixefaxe, 79a flackern, 78a flattern, 76b, 77a, 78a,
79b, 80a
flattieren, 76b fleddern, 78a flehen, 77a flicke, 46b
flicken, 79b, 80a, 83b,
145a Flieder, 29b
1348
 Word Index

flöke, 74b flotschen, 79b

focken, 79a, 80b
Focker, 79a folgern, 204b foppen, 79b, 80a, 83a,
175b
Fotze, 86a Frau, 83b
Freund Hein, 107a Fru Hinn, 107a, 109a Fuchs, 79a
fuchsen, 79a fuchsig, 80a fuchsteufelswild, 79a,
80
Fuchtel, 80a fuchtig, 80a Fuck, 84b fuck, 84b fucke,
84b fuckeln, 79a fuckeln, 79a fucken, 79
Fucker, 79a, 81a, 85a
fuckern, 79a fücksel, 84a fuckseln, 79a fucksen, 79a
fuddeln, 82b Fugger, 83a fuggern, 83a fuschen, 79b
futän, 80b futsch, 79b futschen, 79b Futz, 86b gacken,
91a gäcken, 91a gacks, 91
gagg, 91
gaggeh 91b gagger, 91b gähe, 92a, 93a Gänsebraten,
38b gären, 98b
Gauch, 88b, 90b, 91a,
92b, 93a
Gaukel, 91b, 92a gaukeln, 91b, 92
Gaukler, 91b, 93b
Gaul, 95b
Geck, 90a, 91, 92, 93a
gecken, 91a, 93a geckzen, 91a Gefick, 78b Gehirn,
21b, 24a Gehre, 98a
Geige, 82b, 93a
1349
 Word Index

geigen, 91b, 93a

geil, 90b
Geischel, 2b geiskel, 2b Geist, 25a
gek, 92a gekkan, 91a Gertrude, 209a Geschlinge, 73a
Gestrüpp, 202a gicken, 91a giecheln, 92a
Gier, 98b
gigerl, 92a Girr-Taube, 44a gläsern, 204a glokotzen,
189b glotzen, 189b Gnom, 50b gocheln, 92a Goldammer,
71a Gör(e), 95, 96b, 97a,
98a, 99
Gören, 99a gorig, 98a gorsch, 95a
Groll, 98b
gucken, 90b, 93a Gundelrebe, 117a gurre, 95a gürre,
95a gurreli, 95a gürrli, 95a haber, 171 Hacke, 2b Hader,
100b Hafer, 171a, 172a
Hag, 103b
hagen, 103b hahnenei, 38
Hain, 109b
Hainwurz, 116a
Haken, 129b
hämisch, 107a Hammel, 107a
Harn, 23b Hecke, 103b Hede, 101a hegel, 103b
Heide, 100b Heidekraut, 100b Heilebart, 72a Heimchen,
109b, 159a
heimisch, 107a
heimlich, 200b Heinrich, 109b

1350
 Word Index

helferling, 60a hemer, 106b hemern, 106b hemmen,

107a henbedde, 209b hennekled, 109b
Herne, 109b Heu, 118b
heukalb, 105a heunenbett, 116a heurind, 105a
heute, 227b
Hexe, 52a, 216a, 222a Hexenschuß, 52a
hiaz, 227b hiazunder, 227b hietz, 227b hietza, 227b
hietzen, 227b hietzunder, 227b hiez, 227b
Himbeere, 110a, 117a Himmelloch, 110a
Hinnerloch, 110a Hippe, 2b
Hirn, 22b, 24a
Hochheimer, 103b Hohn, 116a holder-di(e)-polter,
114b Holunder, 29b hölzern, 204b hopptihopp, 112b
horchen, 88b Hornisse, 23b huckeback, 183b Hühnerei,
38b hühnerloch, 110a Hühnerlochkraut, 110a
Hühnertod, 108b, 109a
hullerdebuller, 114a hulter-(de-)fulter, 114a
hulterpulter, 114a Hundsfott, 86a Hüne, 116b hünebett,
116 hünengrab, 116b Hunn, 117a hunnebedde, 116a
hupperling, 112b immer, 64a, 65b, 66a immernoch, 224b
immerzu, 228b, 229a jackern, 188b jadackern, 186a
jäh(e), 92a, 93a jains, 229b, 230a Jakob, 42a
je, 227b Jeck, 91b
jemals, 65a jemand, 155a
jener, 229b jetzo, 227b jetzt, 225b, 226a, 227,
228b, 229a, 230,
231a
1351
 Word Index

jucken, 92a, 93a Jünger, 57a, 144b kabbeln, 25a

käcken, 91a
kag, 128a
Kalmäuser, 164a Kaninchen, 177b Käsepappel, 30b
kater, 183b
katrepel, 135b katschüße, 135b Katthagen, 135a
Katzecke, 135b Katzwinkel, 135 Kebse, 34a kecken, 91a
keef, 25b
Kegel, 128, 129a, 132b, 133a
Kegelmann, 132b
Kegl, 132b Keidel, 26b
keifen, 25a
Keil, 26, 129b, 130a Keim, 129b
keimen, 26a, 43a, 129b Kerl, 50b, 100a, 155b Kettich,
107b Keule, 170a
keusch, 43b
kibbe, 42b
kibbeln, 25a Kibitz, 34a kiden, 25a Kiefer, 28a Kien,
129b Kies, 129a Kiesel, 129a Kind, 178b
kippe, 42b Kipper, 34a
Kitt, 31a
kitzeln, 25a
klabstern, 188b, 189a
kladastern, 188b kladatschen, 189a klammheimlich,
200b klastern, 189b
kleben, 30b
klebrig, 204b
1352
 Word Index

Klee, 27, 28, 29a, 30b,

31b, 103a Klei, 29a
klever, 29a
klieben, 27b Knalle, 168a
Knauf, 168a
Knebel, 18b
Knochen, 168a
Knopf, 168b
Knoten, 168a knuffen, 168a kob, 42a Koben, 33b
Kober, 33b kobern, 34a ködich, 107b Kögel, 132a Kopf,
32a, 33a
Kot, 99a
krabutzen, 189b krade, 203a
Kröte, 205b
krutzen, 189b Kübbe, 34a kübbelken, 41a
Kübel, 32a
Kuchen, 36b kucken, 90a, 93a kucken, 90b
Kugel, 128a, 170a
Kuhstelze, 44b
kydtd, 99a
Laden,139a
laide, 141b
Lasche, 146a
Lasse, 137a
Latte, 138b, 139, 141b,
142a, 143a
Latwerge, 30b Lausbube, 16b läütsch, 46b
1353
 Word Index

ledig, 137b
leischa, 46b leische, 46b
Leute, 137a, 139b, 155a liederlich, 138b lobhudeln,
200a lobpreisen, 200a lod(d)er, 138b
Lode,139b,140b,141a Loden, 139a loderer, 138b
Lote, 139 Lotterbett, 138b
Lotterbube, 138b
lot(t)erig, 138b
luddern, 138b Luder, 143a Lüdtke, 147a Ludwig, 147a
Lump, 140b
Lumpen, 140b lütje, 147a Lütke, 147a lützel, 147a
mahnen, 157a man, 155a
Mann, 151, 155b, 156 Mannen, 155b Männer, 155b
mantelkind, 145b mauchen, 158b mauscheln, 158b
Mausefalle, 38b meder, 26b mehr, 26b
Meise, 206b
Mensch, 156a Meuchelmord, 158b meucheln, 158b,
159a,
161a, 162b, 163a,
164b,165a meuchlings, 158b,
159b,160a Minne, 154b mocke, 42a mof, 182a
mogeln, 164b, 165b Molckendieb, 44b
Molkenstehler, 44b mucheln, 158b müchen, 159a muck,
162a Muckefuck, 84b mucken, 159a mucks, 16a, 165a
Muffel, 183a
muffen, 182a munkeln, 159b murren, 163a
Nachtschwalbe, 44b Nickel, 16b nicken, 169a niemand,
1354
 Word Index

155a rag, 169b

noch, 224b, 228a noch nicht, 229a Nock, 169b
noppe, 179b nucken, 169b nur, 66b Oxhoft, 33a
paanhaas, 180b
pampig, 175b panka, 46a Pappel, 30b Pauke, 6a
Pausbacken, 7b pauschal, 7b
Pelz, 75a
pfauchen, 7b Pfennigfuchser, 79a pfitzen, 79b
pflücken, 75a
Pfote, 7a Pfropf, 175b
pfropfen, 175b pfusten, 7b pfutsch, 79b pfutschen,
79b pfutzen, 79b Pimmel, 175b pimpelig, 175b pimpern,
175b
Pimpf, 175
pochen, 6a Pocke, 7a
pogge, 7a, 205b, 206b pölken, 75a pook, 13b Popanz,
17a Posaune, 5b prägen, 21b pül(e)ken, 75a pümpern,
175b Pumpf, 175a pusten, 7b Quartz, 58b Quendel, 115b
quer, 50b, 58b, 133b raffen, 177b ragen,181b, 182a
Range, 181b
ranzen, 78b, 181b rat, 179a ratte, 179a Raupe, 179b
Recke, 97a regen, 181b
reiben, 78b, 177b Reisig, 118b Riegel, 130a Robbe,
178, 179, 180a,
185b rot, 179a
Rotkelchen, 184b rub, 202a rubank, 178a rubbe,
178a rubbelig, 179a rubben, 179a rubberig, 179a rubel,
1355
 Word Index

202a Rumpf, 202a rumpel-de-pumpel,

114a
Salweide, 200a Saubohne, 109a Sauerampfer, 200a
Schachtel, 202a
Schaub, 32b schawuppen, 188b schelten, 24b, 25a
schief, 131a Schierling, 108a schlagen, 198b, 199a
Schlange, 192
Schlaraffenland, 114 schleichen, 198b schließen,
127a, 130b schlingen, 73a, 192a,
194b,195a Schloss, 131b Schlüssel, 130a schmieden,
50b schmieren, 30b Schnee, 27a Schober, 32b, 33a
Schranz(e), 98b
Schuppen, 33a schurimuri, 162b schwach, 199a
schwank, 199a schwarzwurz, 116a schweben, 18b
slacken, 188b sladacken, 188b slutil, 131b smussla, 158b
Speckmaus, 7a Speidel, 26b
Speil, 26b
Spinne, 133a Spitzbube, 16b steckholt, 130a steigen,
116a steigern, 204b
Stelze, 44b Stöpsel, 176b Storren, 204a
störrisch, 204a strampeln, 202b Strang, 74b
strapantzen, 189a sträuben, 202a Streifen, 195a streifen,
195a
Strick, 74b strobel, 202a strub, 202
Strubbelpeter, 202a strubel, 202 strump, 202a
strumpeling, 202a strumpeln, 202a strumpen, 202a
Strumpf, 140a, 202
1356

MIDDLE LOW GERMAN

 Word Index

strüne, 201b strunz, 201b Strunze, 140a, 201b, 202b,

203
strunzen, 201b
struppig, 140a, 202a Struwwelpeter, 202a Stute,
155a Tell, 61a, 62a Teufel, 18a till, 61a
Tod, 205b
toll, 56b, 60b, 61a, 62a
Trabant, 208a traben, 207b
Träber, 46a tralatschen, 189a trapsen, 207b Treber,
46a Treppe, 208a
Trolle, 46b trollen, 46b Trude, 209a Trulle, 46b Tuch,
45b
Tümpel, 71
tutz(e), 205b
tuutz, 205b übersehen, 213b Unke, 205b
unter, 210b
untergehen, 210b, 13b unterscheiden, 212b
unterstehen, 210b,
211b, 212b Urgicht, 92b
verfilzt, 75b verkat, 135b verlottern, 138b
vernehmen, 213a verschmauchen, 158b Verstand, 211a
verstehen, 211, 212,
213 Vix, 84b Vogel, 83a vögeln, 83a, 87b wägen,
220b
Wahrsager, 223b Wald, 11
Waldteufel, 18a
wegen, 220b
1357
 Word Index

Weib, 155a
weichen, 220b Weichsel, 31a
weigern, 217b, 220b Weisleuchte, 117b wiegen,
217b, 220b wiehen, 220b wikke, 218b wikken, 218b,
220a wild, 11
Wimper, 28a
Wut, 182b, 217b
Wüterich, 116a Zeichen, 9b Ziegenmelker, 44b
zinnern, 204a zwerch, 50b, 51a Zwerchfell, 50b
Zwerg, 49b, 50a, 52b, 53, 58b
Zwergin, 58a
Zwitter, 59b
bouchen, 4a, 9a buobe, 13b, 16b diupstäle, 200a
draben, 207b drumze, 202b drunze, 202b eiz, 172b,
173a, 174
ephöu, 119b ezzich, 174a ficken,83a filzen, 75b
geburt, 11b gehen, 92a, 93a getwäs, 55a, 56b getwerc,
48b, 49a
giege, 92, 93
gieksen, 93a gigen, 93a goukelaere, 216a
gougel, 91b, 92a goukel, 91b, 92a
grunderebe, 117a gurre, 95, 96b
Hagen(e), 103b, 109b hem, 106a, 107a
hemer(e), 106b hemisch, 107a hiune, 116b hurmen,
23b hüt, 34a iä henne, 109b
ie, 226b, 228b iesä, 228b ietzt, 226b
jehen, see gehen jeze, 226b
1358
 Word Index

je zuo, 226, 228b, 229,

230a, 231a karl, 50b, 57b kegel, 132b kidel, 129b
kiusch(e), 43b kle, 27a kleine, 29a
lade(n), 139
lasche, 146a läzze, 137a
lintdrache, 200b
luoder, 143b magenkraft, 200a man, 155a müsen,
160a müzen, 160a notten, 169a nucken, 168b nücken,
168b orke, 48b pfüchen, 7b Quendel, 115b ranken, 78b
slich, 198a
slüderaffe, 114a
strunze, 140a, 201b, 202b, 203a
sumerlat(t)e, 139b swank, 199a
trolle(n), 46b trunze, 202b trunzen, 202b trut(e), 209
twäs, 55a twellen, 60b, 61a twerc, 48b, 56a, 57b
twerch, 56a understän, 212b, 213a
var, 72b
verdespen, 56a verstän, 212b versten, 212b
verwarren, 104b verworren, 104b
vicken, 78b, 81a vut, 86a wicken, 220a wicker, 216b
wigelen, 217b zünrite, 216a
zuo, 226, 228b, 229

MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN

aften, 229b bedespen, 56a
baneken, 78b bewegen, 217b

1359
 Word Index

altvil, 59a-62b boken, 4a de(i)ssel, 2a dessele, 2a dôk,

45b
dvalitha, 61a dwerch, 49b gitto, 227b, 230a gorre,
95a gurre, 95a
hede, 101a heide, 101a jetto, 227b, 230a jutto, 227b
juttonigen, 227b kâk, 39a, 128a kerle, 100a lassce, 146a
lôder, 143b maken,158b mapeldorn, 29b

OLD HIGH GERMAN

abgot, 48b
âdra, 1b affoltra, 29b altâ, 59a Altfil, 61b
altphil, 62b
âmerlîh, 230a
ampfara, 29b, 122b
ampfaro, 29b, 122b,
200a
ant-, 214a antfrist, 211a antfristôn, 211a
apaldr, 29b
araweiz, 173 arliotan, 139b arweiz, 173a *âttuba,
44a bauhnung(a), 4a berd*, 13a -bero, 72a bijichte, 92b
blint(o)slîh(h)o, 198b
-boro, 12b botah, 118a
bouhhan, 3b, 6b bouhnen, 4a boum, 5a boumahi,
118b boununga, 4a bôzan, 17b bruotan, 11a bûh, 5b
bula, 8a
bul(l)a, 8a
Buobo, 13b, 16a, 17a burdin, 11b chebis, 34a
1360
 Word Index

nucken, 168b, 169a nugen, 169a scalvaron, 72a

scholver, 71b schulver, 71b slange, 190a slîk, 198a
swaken, 199a understân, 211a, 212b vocke, 80a vocken,
79a

chizzi, 41a chlebên, 28b chliuban, 27b chubrisi, 34a

chupisi, 34a coscirila, 44b cubisi, 34a dehsala, 2 dîhsala,
2b
doh, 228a dorot, 229a
dwesben, 56b
ebah, 108, 118a, 119,
120b, 121a, 122, 123a,
219b
ebihewi, 118
eibar, 122, 123
eitar, 173a eliboro, 12b elinbogo, 86a enêr, 230a
êo, 228b, 230a
êwa, 67a ezzesc(a), 174a
far(ro), 102a felefer, 70a ficchon, 78b fidula, 82b
fîhala, 75b fir-, 211a, 212a, 215a firdwesban, 56a
firneman, 213a firstân, 211b, 213a firstantan, 211, 212b
flaz, 76b flogarôn, 78a Fricco, 83b Frîja, 83b
gaburi, 65a getwâs, 56b giburt, 11b gifehan, 85b -gin,
228a gomman, 200a gôrag, 98a goug(g)alâri, 93b
gouh, 88b, 89b
1361
 Word Index

goukalâri, 93b goumo, 4b gund, 117a gundareba,

117a gunt, 117a habaro, 171a, 172a hag-, 216b
hagzussa, 216 hamal, 107a hamen, 107 hamm, 107a
happa, 2b happia, 2b harn, 23b Hartmann, 154b
hebba, 2b
hemera, 106b hemmen, 107a heppa, 2b
heripouhhan, 4a hewi, 118a hindberi, 110a
hintana, 229b
hintberi, 110a
hirn(i), 22b
hôna, 116a honag, 118a hônen, 116b hôni, 116a
hornbero, 72a hrîba, 16b humbal, 107b ibu, 230a int-,
214a, 215a
intfliohan, 214a intstantan, 211a, 213b,
214a io, 64a, 66a, 228b
irdwesben, 56a
iu, 227a, 228b
îwa, 110b, 119a jâmerlîh, 230a jenêr, 230a
karal, 50b
karl, 100a kegil, 128a, 129a kien, 129b
kienforaha, 28a
kîl, 26, 129b kîmo, 129b
kînan, 26a
klê, 27a klêo, 27a
kûski, 43b
latta, 139a
lazza, 139a lintwurm, 200a
1362
 Word Index

liut(i), 139b, 155a

lûdara, 139a manôn, 157a manslaht, 150b mennisco,
156a, 157 mêr, 64a, 66a mûheo, 158b mûhheimo, 159a
mûhhôn, 158b, 159, 160b
munt, 152a muntar, 151b nêoinaltre, 65a
noh, 228a obassa, 72b odebero, 72
ofto, 228b ôt, 72a
pouhhan, 6b quenela, 115b reccheo, 97b rîban, 78b
rîs, 118b
rîsahi, 118b Ruodperht, 185b Rupert, 185b
Ruprecht, 185b salaha, 121a, 200a scioban, 116b
skeriling, 108a skerning, 108a slagan, 199b
slango, 198a, 199b, 200 slîhhan, 199b
slingan, 199 sluzzil, 131b
strîa, 201b sûr, 200a
swing f0de, lille,
wîdello, 59

an, 199a 86b 147a

tharot fok, mage
wîhsila, 31a

, 229a 79a , 158b

trioga wiht, g0g, negle
n, 52b 223b 89a , 130b
untar- havre, orme
wintbrâ(wa), 28a

, 212a 171a slange,

200b
untara hjerne, pige,
wîvello, 59b

mbarhte, 24a 13b

210b
1363
 Word Index

uzan,2 219a, ked, pog,

wîz(z)ago, 218,

29b 25b 13b

uzana, 223a kede, rubb
229b 25b e, 179a
warg, wuot, kei,
rœv, 179b

71b 217b 131a

warge zir-, kejte, skud
ngil, 71b 212a 25b, 131, a, 44a
134a,
wegan zuscen, 135a skynd
, 217b 206a, 207b e, 187b
wib, zussa, kejtet,
slâ, 199a

155a 216b 131a

wibell zwitarn, kejtha
slœng, 195a

o, 59b 59b ndet, 131a

wida, kiddik, slœn
200a 107b ge, 192a,
kippe, 194b
42b smœre,
30a
OLD kleven, trave
SAXON 28b, 30b , 208a
kl0ver, trunte,
27a 202b
anttha io, lask, tudse
t, 214a 228b, 238a 146a , 206a
atafta iu, 228b led, turs(
1364
 Word Index

n, 229b 25b e), 51b

Beow kidlek,
a, 20a 176a
blindsl kîp, 42b OLD
kînan, 26a, 129a

ico, 198b DANISH

Boio,
19b
bokan klibon, flatr,
ormslâ, 197,
198a,

, 3b, 6b 28b 76b

bokon klioban, keed, 199b,
, 4b, 6b 27b 25b 200
bom, lada, kleffue stibor
5a 139b r, 27a d, 204b
-boro, latta, las, stigb
12b 139a 145 ord, 204b
bulia, liodan, todze
8a 139b , 205b
eo, loda,
228b 139b
farsta lud, FAROE
ndan, 143b, 144a SE
211a fila,
lûdara, 139a

75a
firihos man, dv0rgu kegils
, 65a 149b r, 49a barn,
132b
fogian oft, 228 geyrur, skuta
1365
 Word Index

, 219a 25b , 44a

gak, ofto,
88b 228b
gidwe quenela ICELANDIC
rg, 49a , 115b (Includes early
gio, sumarloda, modern and obsolete
230a gok, 139b, 141b words. Old and
88b thrabon Modern words are
haber , 207b ti-, undifferentiated. D is
o, 171a 212a equal to 5; $>, ae,
heribocan undar-, and o follow z.)
, 4a 212a
hinda untthat, -a, au5r,
n, 229b 214a 226b-227a, 107b
227b,
honia 228- ba5m
ûtan, 229b

n, 116b 230b r, 5a
hrom, vittea, af, 46b bakn,
4b 82b 3b, 4, 5a,
6a
innan, wiht, allt, barn,
229b 223b 46b alltaf, 145b
46b baugr, 5b
(Includes early Aml65i bauta
modern and obsolete , 141a, , 17b
words. B, 0, and a 143b berg, 56b
follow z.) aptan, bergmal,
1366
 Word Index

229b 56b
aska, berkja,
54b ass, 12b
48b, 49a
aftenb edderk at, berlin
akke, 7a op, 32b 172b gsass, 48
blind -at, berse
fil, 75

worm, 228a rkr, 216b

197a
byge, file, 75a at, Beyla
9a 172a , 8a
bake, filke, 75 ata, beyla
5b, 6a 172a , 8a
dvaer fjeld, Au5hu bi5a,
g, 49a 74a mbla, 107b 203b
d0sig, foder, Au5hu bjugr,
55b 86b mla, 107, 15b
123b

blaSra, 78a bleikr, 127a Böfi, 15b, 17 bök, 4b, 5b

böla, 8a bragS, 21b bragr, 22 brün, 21a brySja, 203a
bry'nn, 21a brogööttr, 21a
büa, 15b, 20b
bükr, 5b
bygg, 20a

1367
 Word Index

dasast, 55b dasi, 55b dauSyfli, 73a Dellingr, 61a dis,

152b dorg, 58b dorga, 58b draga, 58b draugr, 52b, 281a
drjügr, 58b drös, 209b, 210a drulla, 203a drütur, 209b
drylla, 203a
dufl, 8a dufla, 8a Dulinn, 62b durgur, 58a Durinn, 58b
düs, 55b düsa, 55b dvala, 62a Dvalinn, 62 dvelja, 60b
dvergmâl, 56b
dvergr, 48b, 49a, 50b,
51b, 52a, 53, 54, 56,
57b, 58
dvergur, 49a dylia, 62a dyrgill, 58a dyrgja, 58

1368
 Word Index

ei, 66a, 228b

eitill, 172b, 173a, 174
eitr, 174a
ekki, 219a
eldr, 138b
erta, 174a
ertr, 172b, 173b, 174a
etja, 172b etki, 219a ey, 66a, 228b
eySa, 172b fâk, 79a fâkhestur, 79a fâkur, 79a
fararskjöti, 44a
fat, 82b feginn, 204b fela, 74 fell, 74a fetill, 82b
fiSla, 82b fikinn, 80a
fikjask, 80 fikr, 80a
fipla, 79b firar, 65a, 153a fit, 82b fitja, 79b fitla, 82b
fjall, 74a fjatla, 82b fjüka, 80b
flaSra, 76, 77-78a fletja, 76b, 77b fletta, 78a flipi, 83b
flipr, 83b Freyfaxi, 154b Freyja, 83b Freyr, 83b Frigg, 83b
fuS, 86a föggur, 67b fokta, 79a
gâ, 88a, 90b
gapi, 32a
gaukr, 88b, 89a, 90
gaur, 95b, 96b
gaurr, 95b, 96a, 99b
geiga, 92a, 93a gervi, 99b gervilegur, 99b -gi, 228
gikkr, 91a gimb(u)r, 202a gjor, 95b gökr, 91a gömr, 4b
gor, 95b Görr, 95b guS, 48 gullböka, 4b Gunnhildr,
146b gySja, 58a
1369
 Word Index

gymbr, 202a
g0r, 95b haddr, 101a
hafr, 104 hafri, 171
hamalkyrni, 107a
hârr, 23b heiSinn, 204b heiSr, 100b heili(r), 23b, 24a
Heimdall, 61a heimr, 49a hemja, 107a héppi, 10b
heppin, 204b hérna, 229b hingat, 229a hjarni, 21b, 23b,
24a
hjarsi, 23b hjassi, 23b hjuppi, 10b
hljöta, 104b
hnefi, 168a hneggja, 167a hnifur, 167a hnippa, 167a
hnüka, 168b hnykkja, 169a hn0ggr, 166b hringr, 167a
hris, 176a hrisa, 176a hrisi, 176a hrütafifl, 31a
humli, 106b
hünaflöi, 116a Hüna-vatn, 116a hünn, 42a, 116a hoS,
100b HoSr, 100b hokull, 104a
iS, 122a iS, 122a iSr, 73a
Ifa, 122b ifill, 123a
Ifing, 122b, 123 ifingr, 120b, 122b, 123a ifjungr, 123a
ifli, 123a ifroSull, 123a
innan, 229b istr, 73a istra, 73a Itermon, 154b jaSarr,
3a Jakob,42a
jöS, 72a Jönki, 12b
jotunn, 116b kaga, 132a
kaggi, 128, 132a
kaggr, 132a
kagi, 132b
1370
 Word Index

Kagi, 128a
kakki, 128a, 133a karl, 100a, 155b
karlinna, 99b karlmaSr, 155b kauptün, 36a kefsir, 34a
keikja, 131a
keikr, 25b, 131 keipr, 25b, 43a, 129b,
131a kella, 100a kelli, 100a
kengr, 133a keppr, 42b
kerla, 99b, 100a
kerling, 100a
-ki, 228a kiS, 26a, 41a kiSa, 26 kifa, 24b kigi, 131b
kikna, 131b
kill, 129b kind, 178b kipa, 42b kjabbi, 41b, 42b
knefi, 16a
kobbi, 41b, 42a, 185b
Kobbi, 35a, 42a
koddi, 35a Kogurr, 133a Kolbeinn, 42a kolbitr, 140a
Kolbrandr, 42a
kolla, 203b
köpr, 41b, 42a, 185b kringr, 167a kubba, 33a kubbi,
33a, 41a küga, 127b kvâSa,31a kveSa, 25b kvennmaSr,
155b kvï, 104b kvïga, 104b kœgill, 32a koggull, 128b,
132a kogurbarn, 132b-133a kogurr, 133a kokkr, 133a
kökkur, 133a kongulvafa, 133a kongur, 133a kongurvâfa,
133a lâS, 143a laski, 146a lauss, 89b lébarn, 145b leiSr,
143a leloSre, 141a liSi, 137b, 142a
lindi, 138b litr, 143b
ljötr, 143a löS, 143a löSa, 143
1371
 Word Index

loSa, 139a, 141a, 143a

lodda, 139
Loddfâfnir, 139a, 140b,
142a
loSi, 139a, 141a loSinn, 139, 140b, 141a loSrmenni,
139a
LöSurr, 143b Loki, 54a lüSra, 139a lüt, 144a
lydda, 138b, 141b,
142a, 144a lySr, 139b
lykill, 130a
lyng, 100b, 101 lyta, 144a kosk(r), 145a maSr, 149b,
154a, 155b
maka, 158b man, 155a Manheimar, 149b man[n]R,
149b, 155b mannsaldr, 155b man(n)vit, 149b
meiSr, 154a mergr, 23b, 24a mund, 152a mœna,
154a mœna, 24a mœnir, 24a mogr, 154a nabbi, 48a
Njötr, 110a nöri, 48a Nörr, 95b opt, 228a
0y, 66a padda, 205b pïka, 13b, 18a
pintill, 175b
pjanka, 46a pjönkur, 46a râSi, 105a ragla, 181b
Rannveig, 217a rauSbrystingur, 184b
rebbali, 179b rebbi, 179b refr, 179b refur, 179b
reiSskjöti, 44a reini, 105a risi, 116b rjüfa, 179a rjüpkarri,
185b rjüpkerri, 185b
robbi, 185b
ropkarri, 185b
rubla, 179a roSull, 123a
1372
 Word Index

rogg, 140b sarS, 84b sarSa, 84b seiS-, 220a serSa, 84b
sigrbâkn, 4a skâld, 25a skarn, 23b skeifr, 131a skilja,
211a, 215b
skjâlgr, 90b -skjöti, 44a skrukka, 203a sküta, 68b
sküti, 68b slâ, 198b, 199, 200a sladdi, 143a slangi, 195a
slangr, 195a slangra, 195a slunginn, 192a slyngja, 194b
slyngr, 192a slyngva, 199a
smâri, 28, 29b-30
smjüga, 160a smjor, 30b smuga, 160, 161a smœra,
29b sm0r, 30b sorSinn, 84a spons, 176b steggi, 10b
steggur, 10b streSa, 84b stroSinn, 84b stromp(u)r, 203a
strumpa, 140b, 203a
struns, 203a strunsa, 203a strunta, 203b
strylla, 203b strympa, 140b, 203 stüfr, 204a
sumarliSi, 137b, 142a svâna, 229b
Sveinki, 12b
taS, 205b tâg, 207a
tâkn, 8a
tïS, 64b toddi, 207a toturr, 207a trefr, 208a troSa,
209b troll, 116b troll, 116b trüSr, 209 trumsa, 202b
trunsa, 202b trutta, 209b
tünriSa, 216a
tütna, 206a
ülfheSinn, 216b und, 213b
undan, 213b undir, 213b unz, 213b
ütan, 229b
vatnkakki, 133a vé, 217a, 220a
1373
 Word Index

-veig, 217a veikr, 127a vél, 223b véla, 74a vera, 64b
verk, 58a vetrliSi, 142a
VïSarr, 176b
vïSir, 176b
vïgja, 217a Vïgnir, 217a vïkja, 220b
vindâss, 146b Vingnir, 79a Vingskornir, 79a Vingpörr,
79a vingull, 79a vinstri, 131a
vita, 218b vitka, 220a
vitki, 218b, 220a
vitt, 223a
vœttr, 223b
volr, 222a
volva, 216a, 217b, 222 yfing, 123a Ymir, 59b yr, 110a,
122b yrkja, 58a pangat, 229a parna, 229b pél, 75b pjâ,
88b pjâka, 88b
pö, 228a popta, 204a porvaldr, 154b porveig, 154b
preyta, 209b prot, 209b
prüSr, 209a
püfa, 204a purs, 51b, 58b
pverr, NORWEGIAN
aeö, 1b aeör, 1b

51a (NYNORSK)
pybbast,
204a
pybbi amlod, kjea,
aetiö, 46b

nn, 204 141a 26a

ae, aevi, bobbe, koggeb
64b, 66a, 64b 185b arn, 132b
fagg 67b

1374
 Word Index

228b kokk, 133a

hamla, ladda,
NORWEGIAN (BOKMÂL)

(Regional words
106a 140a
are given in italics. 0,
humla, lodda,
and â follow zj
106b kakk, 203b lugg,
133a 140a
keip, rabbla,
131a 177b
amper klover, keiva, raggar,
, 122b 27a, 28b, 131a 140a
30b
Askela klovers keiveh robbe,
dd, 140a, mœre, 28b endt, 131a 185b
142a
berlin labbar, keiv(en svaga,
g, 48a 140a ), 131a 199a
Bus(s) labbe,
emand, 140a
17b
ladd, MODERN SWEDISH
bâk(e), 5b
duskregn, 200b dvalen,
62a
139b (Regional words
ljo, are given in italics. Â,
145b ä, and ö follow zj
lodde,
139b
dverg, lodden,
47b, 49a 139b
1375
 Word Index

dvergs nugga, arg,

hjärna, 24a

kott, 52a 166b, 169a 181b

dvergs nuggja, basun, kag,
lagen, 62a 166b 5b 127b
dvergs nygja, berling kage,
tein, 58b 169b , 48a 128a
d0sig, ormslo, blindw kagge,
55b 197, 198a, orm, 197a 128a
200
edder Oskelad Bragna kaitu,
kopp, 32b d, 140a m, 22b 134a
ef0y, pilke, kaja,
Brâvalla, 22b

119, 121a 75 130b

rage, kajhan
eitel, 172b, Brâviken, 22b
173b

181b dt, 130b

eiter, rangle, by, 9b karl,
173b 181b 99b
ert, rev, Kattsu
bâk, 5b

172b 179b nd(sgatan),

135a
fikla, rubbe, ke(d)a,
börja, 172b

84a 179a 25b

fikle, kibb,
slâ, 199a dvärg, 49a

78 42b
firla, sleng, dvärga klippa,
84a 195a net, 54a 167a
fjarla, slenge, dvärgs
klöver, 27a

1376
 Word Index

84a 194b net, 54a

fjell, slengja, dâsa,
knävel, 18b

74a 191b 55b

fjukle, slengje kobbe,
dösig, 55b

84a namn, 192a 35a, 42a

fleck, slengje faggor koppar
77b ord, 191b, na, 67b orm, 197a
193,
fukla, 194a fagott, kubb,
84a 69b 42a
gaura slesk, fakkla, kugge,
(sb), 96a 198a 84a 128a
gaura sleva, /i'c/ca, kuisch,
(v), 95b 197, 199b, 78b 44b
200
gorre, slim, /i'kas, ladder,
95, 96a 198a 79b, 81b 139b
gund, smug, ^'k(k)la lask,
117a 160b, 162a , 78b, 84a 146a
gurre, larker,
stâlorm, 197a fjäll, 74a

95a 138a
Hadal strump flacka, led,
and, 100b, en, 202a 79b 138b
101a
Hadel tobba, ledig,
flattera, 76b

and, 100b 179b 137b

havre, tossa, fleka, lille,
1377
 Word Index

171a 205b, 206a 77a 147

hekse trave, flicka, lodde,
skott, 52a 208a 46b, 79b, 139b
145
hekse trunta, fokk, loki,
skudd, 202b 79, 86a 54a
52a
hjerne trăve, fokka, lädda,
, 24a 208a 79 140a
Hornfr tussela gorre, ladder,
u, 125a dd, 140a, 95a 139b
hün,4 142a gosse, maka,
2a 97b 158b
kage, gurre,
tafle, 140a murgröna, 120a

128a 95a
keiv, vike, garrä, njugg,
25b 220b 95a 166b nugg,
166b
gök, 89a

havre, n gg, 166b

y
171a
släng, fotus, lasiws,
ormslä, 197,
198a, 199b

192a, 195a 150a 146a

piga, slänga, fra-, -
13a 191b, 194b 213a lauda-,
137a
slängd, frapjan laudi*,
pojke, 13b, 18

192a , 211, 215b 139b,

140b
1378
 Word Index

putte, slöfock, frauja, -laups,

147b 79a 83b 137a,
140b,
ragg, spik, frisahts 141b
140b 86a , 211a,
213a
raggar tecken, frops, -
e, 140b 9b 211 leipan,
138a
Ragge tossa, gabaur liudan
n,140b, 205b, 207b ps*, 11b *, 136a,
181b 137a,
rag(g)l trava, gageig
139, 141b, 143

a, 181b 208a an*, 92a

rattba trollbac galiuga -lukan,
cka, 7a ka, 7a guS*, 48a 130b
regndu trollpac gaman, ludja*,
sk, 200b ka, 7a 155, 156a, 139b,
140b
rubba, trullbac 157a magap
179a ka, 7a s*, 151b
räv, trullpac gamun manag
179b ka, 7a ds*, 152b s*, 118
rödfik tussa, gaurs, mana
or, 31a 205b 95b maurprja,
149b,
rötast tädsa, gaweih 150b
1379
 Word Index

ar, 31a 205b an, 216b

skuta, guma, manas
uppâ, 120b

44a 155b eps, 149b,

150b,
skvapp veta, gund, 151a,
a, 25a 218a 117a 153b, 155
slä, ärt, hakuls manau
199a 173b *, 104a li*, 149b
haliuru manleika,
nnas, 222a 149b,
155a
OLD hamfs* manna
SWEDISH , 107b , 149b,
hana, 150b,
150a 152a,
156b,
157a
aftanb tossa, hauhs* manni
akka, 7a 205b, 207b , 50b sks*, 156,
157a
Bragn piaup, haunei manw
hem, 22b 155a ns*, 116a uba, 152a
fleckra haunja manw
, 77a n, 116 us, 152a
hauns, 116 marisaiws
*, 200
GOTHI haurds, mawi,
1380
 Word Index

C 130b 96b
himins, mawilo,
106a 96b
aba, baidjan himma mimz,
150a *, 8b , 227a 154a
abrs, bairgah hina, minniz
204b ei*, 21b 227a a, 150a
bairhts hindan mins,
afar, 66b

*, 5a a, 229b 150a
afswag bandw hita, muka
gidai, 199a a*, 8b 226a modei*,
159a
aftana, bandwj hlaifs, nauh,
229b an*, 4b 172b 228a
barn, -hun, ni
aglaitei*, 173

11b 228a aiws, 64b

airis, beitan* hundaf
qipan, 25

64b , 26b aps, 150b

aiw, boka, hunds* raupja
64b 4b , 115a n, 179a
aiws*, Boio, hwelau samal
64b 19b, 20b ps, 137a aups*,
137a
ajukdu brupfa skohsl
H airnei*, 21b

ps, 66b ps, 150b *, 48b

akrs, drauhs ibuks*, slahan
100a nos, 52b 120b *, 199,
1381
 Word Index

200a
andab driusan iftuma swala
eit, 150b *, 52b *, 120b ups*, 137a
andbei dulps, inkilpo, -ta,
tan*, 26b, 60b 144a 229a
150b
andha dwals*, innana, taikn,
usjan, 6b 229b 8b
213b
ans*, fair-, iu, trudan
49a 212a, 213a 227a , 209b
anses, fairHus, ja, pata,
49a 65b 227a 229b
aqizi, faur-, ju, piuma
2a 213a 227a, 228b gus, 200a
asts, faurata ju ni, prutsfi
56b ni*, 8b 229a ll, 60a
atisk, fetjan*, juggala pwair
174 82b ups, 137a, hs, 51
139b
atta, jupan, ubils,
filhan, 74, 75a

96b 228b 122b

Attila, filudeis keinan utana,
96b ei*, 152b *, 26a, 43a, 229b
129b
auk, fitan*, kilpei*, uf-,
226a, 228a 82b 144a 213b
1382
 Word Index

aukan flokan* kinnus ufbaul

*, 226a , 75a *, 149b, jan*, 8a
150a
azgo*, fodr, knops* ufhaus
54b 86b , 75a jan, 101b
bagms fotuba kuni, ufta,
, 5a urd, 150a 75a 228b

und, 213b, 214a und-, 214a undaro, 213b

undgreipan, 214a undredan, 214a undrinnan, 214a
(u)h-, 228a
unpa-, 213b, 214a unpapliuhan*, 213b,
214a
usgaisjan*, 52b
waihts, 223b

HITTITE
ates(sa), 3a halhaltumari, 49a

ARMENIAN
bugale, 13b bugel, 13b buguel, 13b

LATVIAN
auza, 172b bauze, 5a buoze, 5a burts, 12a

LITHUANIAN

1383
 Word Index

balandis, 45a baugus, 6b bauzas, 5b buoze, 5a bugti,

6b driuktas, 58b drugys, 52b drilk tas, 58b druska, 52b
gegne, 128a gniauzti, 169b
jau, 228b
karve, 45a karvelis, 45a kaukas, 50b kekse, 34a
kumpas, 106b, 107b
wair, 155b wait, 210b wakan*, 221b weihs, 216b,
217a, 219b, 220a, 223 wilwa, 74b witan, 218b, 223a
wiprus, 105a wokains*, 221b wokrs*, 221b wops, 127b

harpai-, 172b nepis-, 3a

bugul, 13b manr, 153a t'ap'ar, 2b

drugt, 52b efeja, 119b

ragana, 182

1384
 Word Index

lasas, 144b mainyti, 154b ozys, 171b pirStas, 50b

pisti, 85a răgana, 182a slíekas, 198 valkas, 99a vedegâ,
1b véikus, 99a zagaras, 128a zagas, 128a zaginys, 128
Zagre, 128a Záisti, 177a Zmogus, 151b Zmónes, 151b
BRETON
brenn, 23a cudon, 44a eze, 2

CORNISH
cudon, 44a gocy, 36b gocyneth, 36b

IRISH
blaith, 78a blath, 78a
bran, 23a
caile, 99b
caobh, 41a cuib, 41b drab, 46b drabog, 46b fen, 23a
gabhar, 104a gerr, 98a
lath, 137
pait, 147a poitin, 147a
pota, 147a

OLD IRISH
ainder, 101b
bratt, 139b
cara, 45b cittach, 13a cuilenn, 121 Culhwych, 200b
dergnat, 53, 54a do-biur, 210b druth, 209b

SCOTTISH GAELIC
1385
 Word Index

beachd, 6a beag, 13b blad, 78a

bladair, 78a
breith, 21a
brideun, 12a
bun, 177b

gour, 95a neze, 2a

plac'h, 100a

goc, 36a loder, 140a pimpey, 175b

puite, 147a
rap, 177a, 179b rop, 179b
scabfuidhtear, 187a scabfuidtear, 187a scaoilim,
187a sceatrac, 187a sceideal, 187a sceinnim, 187a
seamar, 29b, 30a seamrog, 29b sgabaim, 187a snath, 2a
striopach, 201a, 202a, 203b

dry,222b
formúichdetu, 158b gair, 98a rap, 177a
1386
 Word Index

rigain, 55a
robb, 179b
rumúgsat, 158, 160b
tucu, 210b

caile, 99b
caileag, 99b caoch, 35b carfhocal, 164a carshúil, 164a
cartuatheal, 164a cearr, 163a

cearr muigea δασύς, λαγ

muigean, n, 163a, 177a ως, 177a
163a 164a
cuain, neoni, δούλο λα
41b 35a ς, 68a ος, 131a
cu peallaid δραπέ λαώ,
beag,41a , 74b της, 208a
146a
curcud peallaij, δρέπω λαοζ
doch, 164a 74b , 208a , 137a
curdo pighepi εΐδαρ, λατρ
o,164a , 176a 172a ίΒ, 137a,
143a
curglo ragair, Ρεϊδω, λατρ
ff, 164a 182a 218b ον, 143a
curjut sgad,18 είκαΐω λύζ
1387
 Word Index

e, 164a 7a ς, 92b ω, 115a

curnoi sluaeng είτα, λύθε
ted, 164a a, 194a 225b ν, 137b
drabag sluagh, εκανον λύσ
, 46b 194a , 109b σα, 115a
eidhea sluaghg έλλέβο λύτο
nn, 120b hairm, 194a ρος, 115b , 137b
feall, smuig, ενΦού λύω,
76b 164b σίασμος, 137b
52a
feallea striopa ε'ντερ μαίν
idh, 74b ch, 202a α, 73a ομαι,
152b-1
maoid uimpe, εντερο Μόν
h, 182a 176a ν, 212b ης, 157a
muig, επί, μανί
163a 225b α, 153a,
157a
έπιζόιν 217b
ω, 119a
WELS επίστα μαντ
H μαί, 211a, ς, 217b
212b
επίστη μασ
μί, 212b τροπός,
201a
anner, coegyn εργον, Μέν
1388
 Word Index

101b naidd, 36b 50a νες,

155b
bach, cor, 54a ερπετο μηρ
13b ν, 177a ς, 28b
bachg edn, ετί, μόν
en, 13b 72b 225b, 226, ος, 154a
227a
bedw, eiddew, ετος, μύε
31a 120 226a ω, 160a
brida faigh, εύαν, μύχί
w, 11b 68a 119a ος, 160b
cau, gairm, Εύμενί μύχ
127b 194a δες, 209a ος, 160a
ceinac herlod( εφίστη νανν
h, 177a es), 99b, μί, 212b ος, 50b
137b
cenau, llawdr, θεος, νανν
41b 140a 50a, 56b ος, 50b
chwap naddu, θεουρ νύσ
, 34b 2a γός, 50a σω,
169b
ci, 41a neddau θεουρ νύττ
, 2a γία, 50a ω, 169b
cob, neddyf, θηκη, Ροΐδ
33a 2a 86a α, 218b
cobio, samrog, θηρ, οΐδο
33a 30a 99a σ, 172b,
1389
 Word Index

173a
coed, socen θολερ οίκο
44a lwyd, 71a ος, 60b γενης,
35b
coeg, ysguda θολος, οίφ
36a w, 187a 60b ω, 84b
coege ysgutha ϊψ-, ομίχ
nnod, 36b n, 44a 121a λη,160b
ίψός, ◊φις
119b, 120b , 121a
GREEK ίος, παίζ
109a, 119a ω, 13b
(Digamma does Ίς, παις
not influence the 119a , 13b
alphab ιφί, παίχ
etization.) 119a θείς,
13b
ϊφυον, παλ
121a λακη,
99b
αζω, αξίνη, καίω, παρ
172b 2a 24b θενος,
97b
ά- α'πιον, καίνω, πεδ
Μρη, 1b 119 109b η, 120a
αθήρ, άποδιδ κίβωτο πεζα
174a ρασκω, ς, 33b , 82b
1390
 Word Index

208a
αϊγιλο άρχη, κισσός πε
ς, 171b 22b , 120a, ρατα,
123a 73a
αίγίλω άρχος, κλείω, πελε
ψ, 171b 22b 127a κύς, 2b
αίγοθ αρχω, κονίλη πεμ
ήλας, 44b, 22 , 115b, πω,
45a 117a 176a
αιπύς, βαβαζ Κοπτός περ ,
121b ω, 17b , 34b 211a
αϊων, βαιος, κορη,9 πηγν
64b 13b 9b ύμί, 86a
α'λύσ βρέγμα κόρση, πίφ
σον, 115a , 21, 22 22a αύσκειν,
4b
α'λύσ βρεγμό κρανίο πόρ
σος, 115a ς, 21, 22 ν, 23b ς, 104a
άνήρ, βρέφος κρίνω, πούς
151b, , 105a 212b , 177a
152b
α'νθος γένυς, κύβος, Πρία
, 117a 150a 34b πος, 83b
άνθρω Δαίδλο κύδαζ προ
πος, 151b, ς, 187b ω, 24b, πομπός,
154a, 25a 176a
156a δασύ^ύ λαγνος πτερ
1391
 Word Index

ς, 177a , 177a όν, 11b,

12a

1392
 Word Index

words are given in italics.)

AVESTAN
drva, 52, 53 dvr, 52a garada-, 105a

OSSETIC
PERSIAN
(Modern, Old, and Middle)

SANSKRIT
b
ach,
(Includes Vedic Sanskrit. The words have been
transliterated but follow the order accepted in
Sanskrit dictionaries.)

fœrœt, 2b gyryn, 98b

ajâh, 104a ântarah, 212b aravindam, 173a ibhah,
121b isa, 2b uksa, 86a kâmpate, 172a kllah, 26b
kutsâyati, 25a kumpah, 107b knUj, 115b
khid, 25b khidâti, 25b

Manus, 152a, 153b mara, 152b mrzu-, 22

1393
 Word Index

rœwœd, 162a
martiya-, 152b tab'ar, 2b
gabhâh, 33b gârbhah, 105a grstih, 105a ghorâh, 98a
candrâh, 117b capalâh, 104a, 172a dâsyuh, 56a
drapayati, 208a druh, 52a dhatturah, 58a dhvârati, 52,
53, 54a dhvarâs-, 51b, 52b,
54a
à tout, 18a ache, 119a acoquiné, 36b, 37a,
39-40a acoquiner, 36b, 37a afficher, 81a affres, 122a
affreux, 122a argot, 196a bâfrer, 176a beekenes, 9a
Boice, 15b bois, 15b bouée, 9a
bran, 23a, 200b
breneux, 23a bûche, 26b cheau, 41a chicane, 26b
chicaner, 26b cobir, 33a coco, 38b
Cœur de Lion, 113b cok, 39a coq, 40 coq niez, 37b
coqueliner, 36b, 37a coquin, 36b, 37b, 39a,
40a
coquineau, 37a couillon, 34a crapaud, 205b dent-de-
lion, 113b doux-œil, 46a
élinguer, 192b estibourner, 204b fagot, 67b fagoté,
69b faix, 67b félon, 74a ficher, 81a fil, 74b filou, 74
filouter, 74 flatter, 76b
foutre, 80b, 81a, 86b
garçon, 57a, 75a, 97 gauche, 90, 93 gauchir, 90 gôle,
89a guese, 46a hache, 1, 2b, 178a hanebane, 108b
haquenée, 38a hennebanne, 109a jouer, 9a jusquiame,
1394
 Word Index

109a katplöz, 134a langue, 193, 196a languer, 193b

lapereau, 178a lapin, 176a, 177a linguer, 193b maroufle,
182b mocca faux, 84b moquer, 164b morgue, 164
mouchard, 160b
mouch part', put(e), rubrie
e, 160b 177b, 178a 147a nne, 184b
mouch rabot, rabot, ruffien
eur, 160b 178a 178b , 182b
muchi rabote, Ragem strepp
er, 159a 178a on, 181b et, 202a
musea rabotte, rebusc strupe
u, 164b 178 hier, 26b , 202a
musse rabouill rebuke
tronce, 202b

r, 158a, ère, 177b, r, 26b

160a, 178
162a, rabouill ribaut, trons,
165a et, 178b 16b 202b
nabot, rabouin Robin, trote,
50b , 185b 184b, 185 209a
nain, râleur, Rogom
50b 163a ant, 181b
Pierro Robin,
t, 184b 112a, 184b
piler, slang, ITALIAN
74a 193b tette- (Regional words
pimpant, chèvres, are given in italics.)
175b 44b tille, 2a
1395
 Word Index

pimperne
au, 175b
pimpr torchon afro, ficcarsi
eneau, , 46b 122a , 81b
175b
pinge, toujour azza, 2 fico,
176a s, 66a 81b
quai, trèfle, bafra, fottere
127a, 28a 176a , 86b
132b
quatre tre(s)pa bafre, garzon
, 133b sser, 208a 176a e, 97b
rabatt trompe boa, ghezzo
re, 180b r, 201a 8b , 92b
vache, boia, 109a Gyptiüs, 92b
râble 'rabbit's giüsqüiamo,
body

93b 8b Boio,
9a
OLD FRENCH boja, müffo, 182a nano, 50b
mücchio, 158b

pigliare, 74a
(Includes Middle French. Anglo-French
and Provençal words are given in italics.) 18b
caccherelli
, 38a
chiave,
127a
ciarlare,
195a
afre, fee, 38a ciarlat pinco,
122a ano, 195a 176a
1396
 Word Index

aze, condo
flat, 76b, 167a pütto, 147a

2a tto, 136b,
137a
baffe, flater, drudo, ragazz
176a 76b, 77b 210a o, 181b,
182a
baiess flatir, fagno, rospo,
e, 19b 76b, 77b 81b 205b
bastar flavele, fica,
smücciare, 160a

d, 145b 76a 81b, 82a

boess gars, ficcare
üccello, 13a

e, 19b 97b , 81
boie,
gigüer, 93b

8b, 19b
bran, gore, LATIN
23a, 200b 95a gorre, (Medieval Latin
bren, 95a gourre, words are given in
23a 95a italics.)
buchier,
26b
buie, grom, abies,
apiüm, 119

8b, 9a 99a 119a

buskie hakenei ablind arcia,
r, 26b , 38a a, 198b 1b
busch hobe, acernu ascia,
e, 26b 112a s, 121a 2a
chamo hobel, adhuc, asser,
1397
 Word Index

rge, 163a 112a 224b, 228a 3a

coart, hober, ador, assis,
177b 112b 1b, 174a 3a
cob(b) hobera adulati
assüla, 3a

ir, 33a n, 112a o, 77a

cobe, 112a aedes,
hobereaü, 111b, astütüs, 1b

35a 122a
coffir, hoberel aetern
atqüe, 231b

33a , 112a us, 46b

coite, maufé, aevum
aüt, 228a

145b 183a , 64b

coitrar afflare 172b
mocqüer, 164b avena, 171b,

t, 145b , 76a
coken ager, avis,
müchier, 159

ay, 35b, 100a 13a

37b, 39b
connin 160a alitilia, axis,
mücier, 159b,

, 177a 103a 3a
cot(t)i alere,
müsel, 164b bacülüm, 128a

r, 33a 103a
elebre altile,
müsser, 159a bastüm, 145b

, 115b 103a
niais, altilia, Bavari
embuié, 19b

37b 103a a, 20a

embui noche, altiliu blater
ier, 19b 169b m, 103a are, 76a,
78a
1398
 Word Index

eslang oche, altus, Bogii,

uer, 192b, 169b 103b, 116a 20a
193b
(e)stro pimper, amare, boia,
pier, 201b 175b 85a 8b, 9a,
14b, 18b,
fais, pimpre anguis 19a
67b nele, 176a , 205b

bova, 8b bucca, 7b bucina, 5b, 6a bufo, 205b

caballus, 42b cacare, 131b caecilia, 197a calta, 31a canis,
41b caper, 104 caprimulgus, 44b
caput, 147b carus, 45b cauculator, 92a cauculus, 92a,
93b cauda, 177b cavere, 24b cavillari, 24b cavus, 128a
cernere, 212 cervus, 45a cibus, 33b cicuta, 105b circulus,
98a cirsium, 31a
clam, 200b
claudere, 127a, 130a clava, 27b, 28a, 130a clavis,
127, 130b clustrum, 130a coccel, 171a coconellus, 37b
cokinus, 39 colel, 34a columba, 44b conscius, 43b coppa,
34a coquina, 36b coquinator, 36b corimedis, 162b
cranium, 23b crision, 31a cubare, 33b, 41a cubus, 34b
cunlla, 115b, 116a cunlculus, 177b cuppa, 32a curmedia,
162b curmedus, 162b discernere, 212a distinguere, 212
dlvergere, 50a
dlvergium, 50a dolium, 34a dolus, 34a dolosus, 34a
edere, 1b elleborum, 115b eminere, 153a equa, 119b
1399
 Word Index

ervum, 173 esca, 1b

etiam, 225b
excernere, 23b fallax, 74a familia, 155a farl, 14b, 17a
fascinare, 218a ferlre, 84a ferus, 98a figere, 81 fllum, 74b
flabellum, 76a flagitare, 76a flagrare, 78a flare, 76a
flatare, 76a flatitare, 76b folfir, 72b fraus, 52a fregare,
85b friare, 84a fricare, 84a, 85b fritinnire, 12a
frumentarius, 163a fucus, 20a, 81a fuga, 6b fugere, 6b
futuere, 85b, 86b,
87a
garrula, 99b gemini, 6a gerere, 98b gerula, 100a
gibbus, 43a
girella, 99b
grummus, 99a grumus, 99a guttur, 35a hariolus, 222b
hedera, 101b, 120a hermaphroditus, 59b hiems, 102a
homo, 151b, 154a
humilis, 116b humus, 116b
ibex, 121-122a id, 225b, 227b
incubare, 41a infans, 14b infra, 210a intelligere, 212
inter, 210a, 212a
interpres, 211a iocularl, 93b jam, 227a jocari, 9a
jocus, 92b Jupiter, 155b Juppiter, 155b labia, 30a
laburnum, 30a
lac, 144b
lacer, 146a lactare, 76a laevus, 131a
latro, 137a, 143a ledus, 137b letum, 138a llberi, 139b
liddo, 137b liddus, 137b lidus, 137b
1400
 Word Index

lingua, 193, 194a

lis, 145a
lito, 137b
litus, 137b, 142a
lolium, 171a
manere, 153a
manes, 151a, 154a,
155a, 157a manis, 151a mano, 154a mano, 154a
manus, 151b, 152a,
154a, 155a maturus, 157a memini, 152b mens, 153a
mentula, 152b meretrix, 201b mica, 158b miser, 158b
monere, 157a monile, 154b mons, 153a, 154a
muger, 159b, 160b,
163a, 165a mundus, 154a murmurare, 163a nanus,
50b, 57b necromantia, 221a,
222a nux, 169b obliquus, 198a occidere, 25b orbus,
197a orcus, 48b ovis, 72b, 171b p(a)ellex, 34a, 99b
palumbes, 45b papilio, 44b parcae, 222b pedica, 120a
pellicia, 34a penis, 176a per, 64a percipire, 212b
phelphur, 72b philfor, 72b pilare, 75a pimpinio, 176a
pinsere, 85a placare, 76a polfir, 72b porfilio, 72b
porphyrio, 70b, 73b praeputium, 148a praestare, 210b,
211b
prehendere, 120a
puella, 13b, 144b puer, 13b, 147a, 148a
pugio, 85a pugnare, 85, 86a pullus, 12a pulvis, 144b
pumilio, 50b, 57b pungere, 85a, 86a pupa, 14a pupus,
1401
 Word Index

13b, 14a putare, 147b putidus, 147a putus, 147a, 148a

pygmaeus, 57b
pytho, 222b rabies, 177b radie-, 108a
rapidu tabul
s, 177 a, 204a
tabu
robus, 185b

m, 115b
robust tesqu
us, 177b a, 56a
rubecu titilla
la, 184a re, 25a
rubisc torqu
a, 184b ere, 50a
rupe, trifoli
179b um, 27b,
28a
saga, tuber
218b , 204a
Salapu tugur
tis, 147b ium, 34b
salapu uteru
tium, s, 72a
147b-148
salere, vates,
148a 217b
scaevu veger
s, 131a, e, 220a,
1402
 Word Index

135b 224a
scire, vegiu
159a s, 219b
scorell vellus
us, 71a , 74b
semel, vene
64a ficus,
216a
sempe versu
r, 64a, 66a s, 97a
serpen Vesta
s, 53b , 94b
simph vestis
oniaca, , 94b
108b
solipu victi
ga, 148a ma, 216b,
217a,
stola, 219b,
94b 220a,
223b
stupra vllis,
re, 202a 74b
stupru vince
m, 201b, re, 217a,
203b 220a
stupu vir,
1403
 Word Index

m, 202a 153a
subau virgo,
dire, 210b 97
viscer
subministrare,
210b

a, 73a
substa viscu
ntia, 215a m, 31a
subve vox,
nire, 210b 50b,
220a,
224a
supers zizani
titio, 210b a, 171a
PORT
UGUESE
(Mode
rn and
Old)
lasca,
ficar, 81a

146a
filhar, pute,
74a 147a
garcao rapos
, 97b a, 177b,
179b
SPANI
SH
1404
 Word Index

(Old Spanish
words are italicized)
Iberia
azuela, 2a

, 123b
boya, lasca,
18b 146a
mofa
boya, 9a

r, 182a
much
braña, 23a

acho,
175a
bren, muec
23a a, 164b
cayo, mujer
132b , 161a
pájar
conejo, 177b

o, 13a
Ebro, puta,
123b 148b
enano rabad
, 50b illa, 77b
ficar, rabea
81a r, 177b
rabo,
garzón, 97b

177b,
178a
hincar rabón
1405
 Word Index

, 81a , 177b
hogar, rapos
161a a, 177b,
179b

1406
 Word Index

OLD SLAVIC
dze-da, 229a esce, 228a, 231a jebati, 84b

POLISH
figli, 89a fukaC, 89b gardlica, 99b gardziel, 99b

RUSSIAN
aist, 72a atu, 18a baiat', 20a biaka, 7b, 17 blevat',
120a bliushch, 120a boi, 20b Boian, 20 boiat'sia, 17a, 20a
bok, 7b bui, 17a, 20b buka, 7b, 17b, 18b, 20a,
157a bukashka, 7b bukhnut', 7b byk, 7b chelovek,
154 chemer, 107a chemeritsa, 106b chemerka, 106b
da, 229a
dergat', 208a
doroga, 200b
drapat', 208a drozh', 52b ebat', 80a eshche, 228a,
231a fal'shivyi zaiats, 181a figli, 83a figliar, 83a
fukat', 81b golub', 44b gore-zloschast'e, 200b iadro,
172b Ibr, 123b karla, 50b
karlik, 50b

sto-da, 229a toporu, 2b

1407
 Word Index

koby-a, 42a kochac', 34a nedaktóry, 229a zabobon,

17b

kasha, 30b kashka, 30b khikhikat', 92a klever, 30b

kliuch, 130a kliuka, 130a kobyla, 42a kogda, 229a
komet', 154a kormit', 154a korova, 45a kovër, 133a
koza, 104a, 171b
kozodoi, 44b
kub, 34b kubok, 34b kuda, 229a
kuditi, 25a kuritsa, 34a kudakhtat', 25a lad'ia, 138a
letat', 138a
liutik, 109a
loskut, 146a meniat'(sia), 154b mgla, 160b Mikhailo
Buka, 17a mozg, 24a molodoi, 138a muchit', 160b
mukhlevat', 164b muzh, 157b naebyvat', 80a
net, 228a
nrav, 152b
ovës, 171, 172b
ovsiug, 171a

ovtsa shcheka BASQU

, 171b tit', 25a E
pet', shchekolda,
180a 130a
Petia, shchekot and(e) iba
1408
 Word Index

180a at', 25a re, 101b i, 123b

Petr, skared, anre, ka
180a 164a 101b k(h)o,
129a
petuk slab, 7b gako,
h, 180a 129a
pleva slimak,
t', 120a 198a
plius togda, FINNIS
hch, 120a 229a H
pokid topor,
a, 229a 2b
poku tut, 228a kidata, re
da, 229a 24b po,
179b
poroz udirat', kitista, tai
, 102b 208a 24b, 25a ka, 8a
profu uzhe, poika, ta
kat', 81b 228a 18 ppara,
2b
pug-, ved,223a
7b
pugo ved'ma, ARABI
vitsa, 7b 223a C
pukhnut', veshch',
7b 224a
pup, viakhir', hasisat wa
1409
 Word Index

14a 45b -al-kalab, lad,

115a 136a
put', vsegda, rlbas,
200b 64a, 229a 119b
put'- zaiats,
doroga, 177a
200b
puzo, zhaba, HEBRE
7b puzyr', 205b W
7b
zherebënok, 105a

ruba zhezl, ra:nx,1 IS,

nok, 178a 128a 77b 104a
ryba, znakhar', 6a mi
179 22b , 177a
shan znat', 136a HI
dra, 117b 22b 194a S,104a
(The words
transliterated in
the text)
chaver go
, 33b r, 41a
ganif, yel
68b ed,
136a

1410
 INDEX OF PERSONAL AND PLACE NAMES
Aasen, I., 191b Abaev, V.l., 34b, 102a, 208a A.B.C.,
207b Abrahams, R.D., 63b Adam of Bremen, 83b Adams,
D.Q., 3a, 50b, 55b,
109a, 218a
Adams, E., 11a, 32b, 185b,
197b,218a Adams, F., 186a Adams, J., 80a Adams, R.,
175a Addis, J., 180b Ader, D., 176b ^lfric, 24b, 202a,
211a, 216a A.G., 193a Ahlqvist, A., 18b Aitken, A.J., 87b,
188a
Alabama, 208b
Alessio, G., 110a Alexander, H., 125a Alexander
Jöhannesson. See
Jöhannesson, A. Alfred (King), 104b, 210b
Allen, H.E., 40b, 184b, 185b
Allviss, 48a
Alsace, 112b
Althaus, H., 83a A.M., 203a Ambrosini, R., 85a
Amlööi, 141a Amosova, N.N., 100a Andersen, H., 133a
Andersen, T., 79a Andersson, F., 130b Andreev, N.D.,
156b Andresen, K., 72a, 209a Anne (Queen), 194a
Arbeitman, Y., 84b Arcamone, M.G., 160a
Arditti, A., 80b Argent, J.E., 148b
Ärhammar, N., 14b, 208a Aristotle, 44b Army
Motors, 123b
Ârni BöSvarsson. See

1411
 Böövarsson, Â. Arnoldson, T.W., 23b, 73a, 175a
Arvidsson, S., 48 Asbj0rnsen, P.C., 140a Ascham, R., 162a
Âsgeir B. Magnüsson. See
Magnüsson, Â. Ash, J., 86b Askr, 143b Audrey, S.,
130b Aufrecht, Th., 152b Augst, G., 32a
Austin, W.M., 4b
Australia, 33b Austri, 47b Baader, T., 29a Babcock, C.,
98b, 180b Bacchus, 119a Bäck, H., 97a, 176a Bagg, L.G.,
185a Bahder, K. von, 118b, 228b Bain, D., 84b
Bailey, H.W., 151a Baist, G., 76b Baker, S., 147b,
148a Ball, C., 2a, 14a Balliolensis, 177, 179b
Baly, J., 2a, 65b, 103a, 218b Bammesberger, A., 83a,
98b, 150, 151a, 153a, 156b, 227b,
230a Barber, Ch., 217a Barbier, P., 76a, 77b, 78b,
185b
Barbour, 19b Bardsley, C.W., 15b, 35a Barnes, M.,
144a Barnes, W., 12a, 25b, 28b, 32b, 50a, 64b, 91b, 95a,
104a, 128a,
167a, 172b, 194a Barry, M., 62b, 63
Bartholomae, C., 52a, 53a
Baskakov, N.A., 20a
Baskett, W.D., 25a, 73a, 175a,
185a, 209b
Bause, J., 135b
Bayne, T., 207b Bechtel, F., 140b Beckh, H., 152b
Beddoe, J., 63a
Bede, 103, 226b
1412
 Bee [= Badcock], J., 190a
Beekes, R., 42a, 131a, 151a
Beeler, 53a
Begley, C., 147a
Behaghel, O., 54b, 188b, 189b Behr, U., 77b
Beikircher, H., 211b Belardi, W., 211b
Bell, R., 36b, 70b
Benediktsson, H., 89a Benfey, T., 30a Benois-
Thomas, 148a Benveniste, E., 22a, 66b Beowulf, 4a, 8b,
12b, 20a, 48b,
101a, 225 Berg, A., 138b Bergbüapättr, 143b
Bergdal, E., 141a Bergerson, J., 91b, 142b Bergqvist,
E., 216b Bergsten, N., 102a
Berlingr, 48a
Bern, 115b
Berndt, R., 77a, 89a, 96b, 99a
Berneker, E., 78a, 151b, 217a,
228b, 229 Bertoldi, V., 122b Bertoni, G., 81b
Bett, H., 93b Beysel, K., 209a Bezzenberger, A., 128,
150a,
151b
Bible, 41a, 101b, 104b, 170b, 171a, 176a, 178a
Bickel, E., 148a
Bickerton, D., 63b Bierbaumer, P., 58a, 110a, 118a,
141a, 170b Bierwirth, H.C., 44b
Bilderdijk, W., 9a, 51b
Bingham, G.W., 177a
1413
 Binnig, W., 102b
Binz, G., 173, 174a
Birlinger, A., 159a, 160b
Birnbaum, S.A., 164b
Bishop, J.W. Jr., 126a
Björkman, E., 28b, 42a, 60a, 61b, 89b, 91a, 94b, 95b,
96a, 97b, 99a, 118a, 140a, 145,
169a, 206a, 207a, 230b
Bjorvand, H., 101b, 172b Blackley, W.L., 74 Blefuscu,
147a Blickling Homilies, 8b Bliss, A.J., 19a
Bloch, B., 85a Blok, H., 72a
Bloomfield, L., 41b, 53a, 56b,
79b, 80a, 142a, 213a
Bloomfield, M., 2b Blunt, C., 15 Boase, C.W., 144b
Boccaccio, G., 38a BöSvarsson, Ä., 89a, 204a
Bohn, H., 161b Bolton, H.C., 63b
Bomhard, A.R., 156
Bonfante, G., 81b
Booth, D., 115a Bopp, F., 86a
Boselinus Curmegen, 162b
Both, M., 1a
Boutkan, D., 56a, 150b, 167a, 179a
Boys, Th., 34a Brabant, 31a
Bradley, H., 32b, 63a, 64a, 65b,
110b, 136b, 137, 139b, 141b, 142b, 145, 146a, 192a
Bradtke, von, dwarf
Brand, J., 89b Brandl, A., 77a Brandreth, E., 113a
1414
 Brant, S., 40a
Brasch, C., 2a
Braune, W., 54b, 96b, 99a, 149b,
165a, 167b
Breal, M., 211a
Bredero, A.H., 178b Breeze, A., 209a Bremmer, R.,
79b, 170b
Brendal, J.M., 77a Brewer, J.C.M., 162b, 187b
Britannia..., 36a Br0ndal, V., 179b Br0ndum-Nielsen, J.,
39b, 130b Brok, H., 29a Brokkr, 47b, 48a Brouwer, J.H.,
18b Brown, A., 103a, 105a Brown, E., 225a, 227a Bruce,
R., 113a Bruckner, W., 81b Brüch, J., 76b, 160a
Brückmann, P., 147b
Brüll, H., 83b
Brugmann, K., 48b, 73a, 80a,
97b,121b,150b-152a Brumbaugh, T.B., 186b
Brunner, K., 1a, 10a, 12b, 14b, 48b, 54b, 55b, 64b,
66b, 101b,
105b, 118a, 126b, 127a, 199a,
206, 219b, 223a, 225, 226b
Brunovicus, 63a Bülbring, K., 43b, 91a, 183a Bugge,
S., 2a, 3b, 4b, 6a, 6b, 8a,
30a, 82b, 83b, 97b, 98a, 149b, 173b
Bükolla, 107a Burchfield, R.W., 69a, 87a
Burns, R., 43b, 91a, 183b
Burton, T., 81a Bury, J.B., 86a Butler, S., 149a, 161b
Buxton, 199a
1415
 B.W., 124b
Byron, G.G., 189a
Byskov, J., 130b Cahen, M., 83b
California, 124a Calvus, 147b, 148a Cambridge (UK),
98b Camden, 36a Cameron, A.G., 6a Campanile, E., 82b,
209b Campbell, A., 1a, 10a, 14b, 48b, 54b, 55b, 66b,
101b, 149b,
205, 206b, 219a, 223a, 225a Campbell, J., 225a
Camp Ripley, 124b
Capell, E., 92b
Carey, J., 36b
Carl, H., 79b
Carnoy, A., 177b, 179a Carr, J.W., 180b
Carstens, H., 3b, 135b
Casaubon, M., 35b, 99b Cassidy, F.G., 63b, 87b
Catullus, 147b-148 Ceelen, F., 118a, 119b, 120b
Celander, H., 76b, 85a Cesario, 40b
Chamberlain, A.F., 180b Chance, F., 38, 111b, 112a,
113,
114b, 147a, 177, 185b, 186a Changon de Roland, 97b
Chapman, B., 180b
Chapple, W., 34b
Charnock, R.S., 15a, 104b, 119a,
178b, 180a, 184b, 205b Charpentier, J., 30a, 118a
Chaucer, G., 16a, 35b, 38b, 70, 83b, 119b, 159b, 190b
Chemodanov, N.S., 56b Cheshire, 104b, 165b, 185a
Child, F.J., 37b China, 40b
1416
 Christ's Hospital, 68a Christensen, A., 151a
Clairborne, R., 76a, 174a Clarendon, 31a Clark, P.O., 147b
Classen, K., 171a Claudius, 110a
Claus, H., 205b Cleland, J., 50a, 177a Coates, R., 206a
Cockayne, O., 42b, 43b, 99b, 127a, 171a, 218b, 226a
Codex Legum Antiquarum, 219b
Coetzee, A.E., 164a
Cohen, G.L., 29a, 104b, 136a, 164b, 180b, 186b, 187,
188b,
189b
Colby, E., 125b
Coleman, E.H., 190b
Coleman, J., 85a Colman, F., 126b Collinder, B., 6b,
8a
Collyns, W., 34b Colodny, J., 39b
Connecticut, 1b
Cook, A.S., 38 Cooke, W.G., 38b
Cop, B., 3a
Cornu, J., 76b Corominas, J., 81b Cortelyou, J. van Z.,
32b Cosjin, P.J., 65, 66, 226a Cottle, B., 180a Courtney,
W.P., 190b Cowan, H., 32a Craig, W.J., 40b Craigie, W.,
14a, 19a Craik, T., 40b Craven, 63a Crook, K., 147b
Cumberland, 224b Cura Pastoralis, 65a Cursor Mundi,
145a Curtis, J.L., 36a Curtius, G., 205a Cymbeline, 92b
Cynewulf, 66a Daa, L.K., 13b Dahlberg, T., 7b
D'Angremond, Th.H., 18a Dainn, 48a
Dante, 81b
1417
 Dasent, G.W., 140a, 142b David Copperfield, 158a,
209a Davidowitz, G., 136a
Davies, J., 33a, 44a, 46b, 169b
Davis, M., 68
De Bont, A.P., 82b, 164a
De Boor, H., 48a, 52a, 57a, 58b
Debrunner, A., 173b
De Hoog, W., 27a, 12b Defoe, D., 49b
Delatte, F, 164b
Delbrück, B., 149b, 150b, 151a,
210a
Del Rosal, F., 81b De Montigny, A.H.K., 57b De
Morgan, A., 108b Dent, A., 111a
Derbyshire, 191a Derocquigny, J., 178b
Derolez, R., 52b, 54a De Schutter, G., 178b
Desportes, Y., 54a De Tollenaere, F., 48b
Detter, F., 33a, 41a
De Vaan, M., 117b, 179a Devon(shire), 69a, 74a, 96a
De Vries, J., 47b, 49b, 50a, 51, 54, 5a, 58b, 84a, 167a
De Vries, W., 72a, 79b, 82b, 178a, 179a
Dickens, Charles, 68b-69a,
158a, 165b, 180a, 182b, 185b,
186a, 209a Diefenbach, L., 226a Diensberg, B., 19b,
98b, 127a,
140a
Dietz, K., 2a, 4b, 13a, 14b, 15a, 18a, 19b, 20b, 82a,
83a, 142b,
1418
 159b Dobozy, M., 62b
Dobson, E.J., 13a, 14, 15, 16a,
18b-19
Dodgson, J.M., 195a, 196a Dörner, H.H., 60a Dolle,
R., 77a Don Juan, 189a
Dorset, 35a, 69b, 117a, 175a, 176b
Douce, F., 36a, 38b, 40b
Drake, A.E., 102b, 104a, 177b Draupnir, 47b Drees,
L., 154b Drente, 117 Drexel, A., 41b
Droege, G., 87b
Drosdowski, G., 80a
Druh, 51b
Duckett, E., 148a Duflou, G., 216b Dulinn, 62a
Dumbarton, 63a Dumfriesshire, 188a Durham (UK), 68a,
98b Durnir, 48a
Dvalinn, 47b, 48a, 62a Dwight, B.W., 86b
Dyen, I., 156b
Earle, J., 38a, 137a, 142a
E.B., 186b
Ebbinghaus, E., 44a, 107b Eddas, 4b, 24a, 47a, 48,
49a,
51a, 57a, 62a, 107b, 120b,
122b, 140b, 143b
Edinburgh, 188a
Edlinger, A.V., 45b, 105a Edwards, E., 68a, 70b, 90b,
100a, 120b
Edwards, P., 111a, 187b Edye, L., 69a
1419
 Eggers, H.-J., 22a, 54b, 149b
Eichner, H., 3a, 156b
Eirenarchia, 158b Eisiminger, S., 69, 86b
Eitri, 47b
Ejder, B., 3b
Ekwall, E., 75a, 94b, 96b, 100b,
142b, 145a, 176a, 204a
Elisabeth, 143b
Ellekilde, H., 79a
Ellert, E., 96b
Ellis, A.J., 62b, 63a, 64a
Ellwood, T., 63a
Elmevik, L., 104b, 133a, 144a,
145b Embla, 143b
Epinal Glosses, 105b Ernout, A., 120a Ernst, C.W., 39a
Ershova, I.A., 200b
E.S.C., 134a
Espy, W., 180a
Essex, 15b, 142b Estrich, R., 187b, 188a
Ettmüller, L., 4b, 5b, 11, 64b,
66a, 71a, 106a, 205b, 218a,
220b
Etymologiae, 57b, 94b Eugene the Jeep, 124a, 125,
126a
Ewen, C.L., 15b, 35a, 180a Exeter Book, 130b Exodus,
4a, 8b
Fafnir, 47b, 68b-69a, 140b
1420
 Fagin, 68b Fagin, Bob, 68b
Faiss, K., 102a
Falileyev, A., 33a
Falk, H., 84a, 105a, 123a, 130a,
198a Falr, 48a
Fay, E.W., 85a, 97b, 105a
F.C.H., 180b Fehr, B., 1b
Feilitzen, O. von, 15 Feinagle, G. von, 189a Feitsma,
T., 3b Fernandez, L.G., 53b
Feste, 40
Festus, 160b
Fick, A., 128, 157a
Fielding, H., 191b
Finnur Jönsson. See Jönsson, F.
Fischart, J., 59a, 145b Fishwick, H., 133b Fiue
Hundred Pointes..., 112b F.J.J., 186b
Flasdieck, H., 43b, 109b Flash, 191a
Fleece, J., 126a
Fleissner, R.F., 68b, 187a Flom, G.T., 79b, 89a Florida,
132b
Foerste, W., 28b, 29a, 30b, 66a,
80b, 108b, 128b
Förstemann, E., 19b-20a Förster, M., 30a, 36a, 70a,
110a,
217b
Fokkema, K., 83a
Folchün, 116a
1421
 Forby, R., 112a
Fordyce, C.J., 148a
Fort, M.C., 70a
Fort George G. Meade, 123b
Fort Myer, 125b
Fort Riley, 123b
Fowler, H.F., 181a
Fraenkel, E., 198a Fraenkel, M., 164b Franck, J., 77a,
79b, 230
Franconia, 15a Frank, R., 103b, 120b Frankis, P., 169b
Fraser, W., 34b French, W., 40b
Freyja, 48b
Freyr, 47b, 83b, 144a
Fricco, 83b Friederici, G., 132b Friedrich, G., 148a
Friesen, O. von, 6a, 42b, 197a,
206a, 207a
Frigg, 83b
Frings, T., 2b, 43b Frisk, H., 131b
Fritzner, J., 133a Froehde, F., 16a Fugitive and
Original Poems,
190b
Fürness, H.H., 40b, 110a, 135a Fürnivall, F.J., 110b
Gabriel, E., 105a
Gallee, J.H., 109, 115b, 116a,
167a
Gamillscheg, E., 76b, 16a, 178a
Gamkrelidze, T.V., 3a, 22a,
1422
 156b, 174b Garcia de Diego, V., 12a, 176a Gardner,
J.D., 186b Garrison, W.B., 102a, 103a Garrod, H.W., 148a
Gebhardt, A., 145b George, 83a Georgiev, V., 2b Gepp,
E., 118b
Gering, H., 18b, 122b
Gerland, G., 79a, 116b Germania, 59b, 149b, 155b
Gerson, S., 39b
Gibbens, V.E., 97a
Glasgow, 188a Glatthaar, M., 93b
Glendinning, V., 148b
Glenvarloch, 138a
G.L.G., 133b
Gneuss, H., 210, 214a
Godfrey, R., 207b
Görlach, M., 33b
Goetz, D., 102a
Götze, A., 133a
Gold, D.L., 33b, 63b, 64a, 80b,
82a, 86a, 136b, 189b, 194a Goldberger, W., 78b, 80b,
81b
Goldschmidt, M., 81b
Goldsmith, O., 134b Gollancz, I., 141a, 190b
Gonda, J., 84a, 188b
Gore, W.C., 164b
Gotti, M., 191b Gottlieb, E., 104a
Gottlund, C.A., 13b
Gower, J., 209a
1423
 G.P., 69b
Gradl, H., 79b Graham, W., 74a, 204a
Gramatky, H., 125a Graßmann, H., 21b
Grau, G., 143b
Gray, L.H., 160b
Green, J.H., 186b, 187b, 188
Greene, D., 62b
Greenough, J.B., 90a, 184b, 190b Greppin, J.A.C.,
115a, 152b
Grienberger, T. von, 52b, 154b Griffith, R.H., 189a
Grimm, J., 5b, 29b, 50a, 59a,
72a, 108a, 154b, 155a, 171a,
209a, 216b, 218, 219, 220, 221,
223b, 224b, 226a, 227a, 230b Grimm, W., 71b
Grindon, L.H., 111a Gröber, G., 146a
Gröger, O., 72a
Groningen, 178b Grootaers, L., 120b Grot, Ia.K., 72a
Groth, C.E.P., 162b
Grübe, F., 171a
Grzega, J., 98b
GüSmündür Olafsson. See Olafsson, GüSmündür.
Gülzow, E., 135b
Güntert, H., 5b, 53b, 109b, 120a, 151b, 156b, 168a,
178a, 179b,185b, 216b, 221b-222a
Güiraüd, P., 193b
Gülliver, 146a, 147b Günnell, T., 49a
Güsmani, R., 201b Gütenbrünner, S., 58b Güyter, 76a
1424
 G.W., 104a
Gysseling, M., 7a Haberdicüt, 113a H.C.C., 144b
Haeserijn, R., 15a Haldeman, S.S., 180b Hale, C., 40b
Hales, J.W., 38a, 135a, 224b
Hall, A., 177a
Hall, J., 196a Hallibürton, E.P., 124a Halliwell, J., 42b,
111b, 112,
182b,191b Hamlet, 110a-111a, 141a, 158a,
161b,224b Hamp, E.P., 5a, 10a, 111, 85a,
104a, 120a, 130b, 187a, 200b Hampshire, 129b, 142b
Härbarözliöö, 143b, 144a Hargrave, G., 187b Harm, V.,
211, 214b Harrison, H., 15b, 35a, 180a Harrison, W.A.,
110b, 111a
Hart, J., 225a, 227a Harvard, 68b, 186b
Haüpt, K., 60a
Haüpt, M., 61b Haüpt, P., 104
Hauschild, O., 114 Hävamäl, 140b Hawes, D., 209a
Hayward, A.C., 191a H.B.F., 112b H.C.C., 138a, 144b
H.C.K., 70b
Heeroma, K., 29a, 31b, 87a,
230b
Hehn, V., 171b, 172a Heinertz, O.N., 73a Heliand, 4a,
143b, 207b Hellquist, E., 5b, 44b, 74b,
138a, 142b
Helm, K., 116a
Hempl, G., 65, 66a, 151b-152, 212, 214a, 225a, 226,
227a,
1425
 228, 229a, 230b
Henke, J., 81a Henno Wotan, 109a Henrion, P., 149a
Henry IV, 10a, 158a, 183a Henshaw, T., 36b
Henzen, W., 204b
Hephaistos, 53a Herbermann, C.-P., 203a Hercules,
28a Herescu, N.J., 78b Hermann, E., 157a Hermes, 49a
Hermodsson, L., 110a, 151b
Herne, 109b
Herriör, 58b Hesselman, B., 5b
Hester, D., 123a
Hesychios, 119b Hettema, M., 46b
Heukels, H., 29a H.E.W., 133b Hewitt, W., 91a Heyne,
M., 2a, 130b Hibbard, G., 175a
Hibyskwe, 89a Hickes, G., 36, 144a, 157b Hiersche,
R., 157b High, E.C., 191a
Hildebrand, R., 59b Hill, D., 4a
Hilmer, H., 14a, 100a, 167b
Hintner, V., 82b
Hirt, H., 49b, 94b, 95a, 97b, 159b, 173b, 209a, 211a
Hixson, J., 93b Hjälmpers saga, 4a Hobberdidance,
113a
Höfer, A., 59, 60, 62b, 70b
Höfler, O., 185b Hoekstra, H., 3b
Hoenir, 143b Hoeufft, J.H., 77b
Hofmann, D., 18b, 83b, 88b
Hogg, R., 126b Holbrooke, G.O., 128b, 153a, 220a
Holland, 163a
1426
 Holly, 196a
Holm, G., 130b
Holthausen, F., 12a, 17a, 18b, 22b, 30b, 43a, 53, 58a,
67b, 72a, 75a, 78b, 85a, 94a, 95a, 96, 99a, 102b, 118a,
128a,
129b, 130b, 133a, 136b, 142b,
144b, 145a, 146a, 149b, 230a
Homeyer, C.G., 59b Hooper, J., 185b, 186a
Hoops, J., 58a, 115b, 116, 121-
122a, 123a Hopkinson, S., 177 Hoptman, A., 84b
Horn, W., 1b, 32b, 65a, 66a,
73b, 97a, 103b, 104a, 127a, 174a, 193b, 225b Hough,
C., 214b
H.R., 190a
Hreinn Benediktsson. See Benediktsson, H.
Hubschmid, J., 146a, 179b
Hudibras, 161b Hudson, H.N., 40b Hudson, W.M.,
33a
Hughes, G., 86b, 176a
Hughes, J., 113a Huisman, J., 131b Huld, M., 221a-222a
Huntingdonshire, 202a Huss, R., 179b Iago, W., 16a
Idaho, 175a Ifing, 122b
Ihrig, R.M., 208a
Illich-Svitych, V.M., 156b
Ipsen, G., 173b
Isaac, G., 33a Isidore, 57b, 94b
Ising, G., 104b
1427
 Isle of Mona, 63b
Isle of Wight, 129b, 185b
Ivaldi, 47b
Ivanov, V.Vs., 3a, 14a, 22a, 45a, 52a, 156b, 174b
Jäckel, J., 214a James, Ch., 186a Jamieson, J., 226a
Janko, J., 81b Janni, P., 57b Janz, B., 62b Jasanoff, J.,
21b J.C.M., 180b
Jellinghaus, H., 25b, 66b, 120a,
127b, 138a, 169b Jenkins, H., 111a Jensen, H., 77a,
153a, 156b Jersey, 207b
Jespersen, O., 32a, 82b
Jew of Malta, 110b Jirlow, R., 130b
Jöhannesson, A., 41b, 88b Johansson, K.F., 6a, 7a,
21b, 22,
41b, 167b, 168a, 176a, 197a,
198b,200
Jonson, B., 101b
Jönsson, F., 58a, 133a, 142b Jordan, R., 14b, 15a,
32b, 38a,
77a, 89b, 103b, 225, 227a Jordanes, 222a Jungner.,
H., 83b
Jutland, 29b-30a Kähler, H., 153b Kaestner, W., 17b
Kahle, B., 58a, 142b Kalb, H., 103b
Kaluza, M., 10a, 104a, 127a,
136b, 205b, 223a, 226b, 227a Kansas, 123b
Karaliunas, S., 45a Karg-Gästerstadt, E., 72b
Karsten, T.E., 55b, 197a
1428
 Kaspers, W., 43b, 135
Katz, J., 21b, 152b
Kauffmann, F., 6a, 56a, 206a,
207a Keightley, T., 177a
Keinzel-Schön, F., 75b Keller, A., 80b
Keller, M., 96b
Kelling, H.D., 147a
Kelly, H., 190b Kelly, W.K., 148a Kent, 25b, 105b,
142b, 166a, 175a
Ker, J.B., 36b, 112a, 161b, 201b Kerns, J.C., 156b,
230b Keyworth, Th., 187a King Lear, 40a, 113a King of
Cocknei, 36b, 40b King, A.G., 124b Kitson, P., 44b, 70a
Kittredge, G.L., 71b Klaeber, F., 4a, 8b, 20a, 99a,
193b, 225 Klein, E., 102b
Klein, J., 228a
Klein, Th., 118b, 119b
Kleinpaul, R., 147a
Kluge, F., 5b, 13a, 14b, 22a, 57b,
71b, 75b, 86a, 91a, 103b, 114a,
118, 130a, 146b, 150b, 156a,
202a, 217b, 226b, 227, 228, 229a, 230b
Kluyver, A., 216b
Knobloch, J., 30b, 76a, 81b, 91b,
101a, 148a, 208a, 209b Koch, C.F., 43b, 44a, 95a,
105a
Kock, A., 79b, 199a, 199b-200a Kock, E.A., 141a Kögel,
R., 17a, 221b
1429
 Koeppel, E., 49b, 200 Kohl, J.G., 63a
Koppmann, K., 60b, 114a
Korsch, Th., 20a
Kossmann, M., 166b, 179a
Koziol, H., 200b
Krahe, H., 49a, 118b, 146b,
150a
Kralik, D., 71b Krause, K., 164a Krause, W., 51b
Kretschmer, P., 53b
Kriebitzsch, P., 200b
Kroes, H.W.J., 152a, 154b Kroesch, S., 211a
Krogmann, W., 12b, 52, 54a, 72b, 162b, 169b, 208a
Kruppa-Kusch, V., 42b Kubriakova, E.S., 118b Kück,
E., 80b Kügler, H., 224b Künßberg, E. von, 200b
Kuethe, J.L., 68a
Kuhn, A., 51b, 52a, 108a, 149b,
150b, 152b Kuhn, H., 4b, 32a, 100b, 101a
Kuhn, S., 80b, 87b, 174b Kumada, K., 76a
Kure, H., 60a, 107b
L., 162a
Ladde, 142b Laddedale, 142b Ladgate, 142b Ladhill,
142b
LxcebOc, 108b, 171a Läffer, L.Fr., 122b Lagarde, P. de,
72a Laistner, L., 13a, 17a, 79b Lambarde, W., 158b
Lancashire, 42b, 134 Lane, G.S., 209b
Langenauer, I., 190b
Langland, W., 35b, 38a, 40a,
1430
 83a, 181, 182 Lanman, C.R., 76b Larson, P., 97a Lass,
R., 85a, 86a
Last, W., 102b
Latendorf, F., 59a, 60a
Lauffer, O., 216a Laws of /Elfric, 216a Lay of Igor's
Host, The, 20 Lear, 40a Lebrun, Y., 67a Lecouteux, C.,
54a, 209a
Lee, F B., 207b, 208b
Leendertz, O. Jr., 19a
LeFanu, W., 148a Lehman, B.H., 175a Lehmann,
Winfred, 16a Lehmann, Wilhelm, 54a, 141a
Lehnert, M., adz(e), 1b, 32b, 73b, 97a, 103b, 104a,
127a, 225b
Lenz, P., 164a
Leo, H., 25a, 27b, 104a, 216b
Lerchner, G., 21a, 29b, 129a Le Roy Andrews, pimp
Lessiak, P., 52a, 220
Leumann, M., 155b Leverkus, 59b, 60b Levin, J., 45a
Levin, S., 64a, 184b, 185a Levitskii, V.V., 220
Lewis, H., 2a
Lhuyd, E., 147a
Liber monstrorum..., 57b Liden, E., 96a, 143a Liebert,
G., 105a Lighter, J.E., 68a Limburg, P., 217a Lind, E., 142b
Lindeman, F., 101b, 173b
Lindenbrog(ius), F., 219b Lindisfarne Glosses, 171a
Lindquist, I., 140b, 202b
Lindroth, H., 5b, 58, 199a, 200b
1431
 Linnig, F., 72a
Llewellyn, E., 27a, 120b
Lochner-Hüttenbach, F., 171b,
184b,185a Lockwood, W.B., 10b, 70b, 71b Löfstedt,
E., 128b, 143a Loewe, R., 115b Loewenthal, J., 4b, 50b,
54a,
83b, 85a, 122a, 123a, 153a
Logeman, W.S., 10b, 176b
Loki, 47b, 48a, 54a, 165b, 183a,
190b
London, 36b, 69b
Long, H.A., 35a Lothian, J., 40b Lower, M.A., 15b,
180a Lubotsky, A., 150b Luce, M., 40b
Lübben, A., 50a, 59b, 60a, 61
Lühr, R., 32a, 139a, 150b, 202a Luick, K., 1, 10a, 19a,
32, 38a,
49b, 67a, 74a, 89b, 96b, 97a,
98b, 102b, 103a, 118a, 127a,
225
Luiselli, B., 81b
Lumpkin, Tony, 190b Lund, J., 2b, 5b
Luther, M., 104b
Lutjens, A., 57b
Lydekker, R., 177a Lydgate, J., 70b
Lyme Regis, 35
Lynch, G., 125a

1432
 Lynn, W.T., 26a, 127a, 205b Lytir, 144a Maak, H., 61a
Macclesfield, 191
MacGillivray, H.S., 98b Machan, T.W., 122b
Mackay, C., 21a, 35a, 40b MacKay, L.A., 148a
Mackel, E., 80b, 81b
MacRitchie, D., 164b Maeshowe, 144a Mätzner, E.,
37b, 95a, 204b Magnüsson, A.B., 79a, 203a Maimonides,
115a Maine, 63a Majüt, R., 45a Makaev, E.A., 57a, 86a
Makovskii, M.M., 1b, 12, 16a, 21b, 33b-34a, 85a, 98a, 102b,
121a, 129a, 138, 144b-145a, 153b-154a, 171b, 177b, 178a,
221a
Malkiel, Y., 40b, 131a, 205a Mallory, J., 3a, 55b,
109a, 218a
Malone, E., 40b Malone, K., 75a, 91a, 120b,
122b, 123a, 141 Manczak, W., 66b, 151b Mandel, J.,
13a, 16a Mannhardt, W., 79a Mannüs, 59b Mansion, J.,
15a
Marchand, H., 189b
Markey, T.L., 5a, 11b, 14a, 98b,
128b, 129a, 132a Markwart Altfil, 61b, 62b
Marlboroügh, J.Ch., 194a Marlowe, C., 110b, 111a
Marsh, G.P., 74a
Marshall, E., 185b-186a, 207b
Marshall, J., 37b Martin, B., 2b
Martin, E., 124b, 154b
Martin, Ralph, 124b, 125a Martin, Roland, 121b
Martinet, A., 132a, 217 Maryland, 123b Matthews, C.M.,
1433
15b, 35a Maürer, D.W., 93b, 191a Mawer, A., 104a
Maxwell, H., 10b Mayhew, A.L., 10b, 11, 27b,
38a, 65b, 102b, 116a, 138a, 162a, 227a
Mayoü, M.B., 219b
Mayrhofer, M., 117b, 201b McArthür, R., 86a
McCloskey, R.G., 123b-124a, 125b
McDavid, R., 186b
McFarlane, W.C., 124b, 126a
McKinley, R., 15b
McLintock, D.R., 213b, 214a
McMüllen, E., 132b
McPeek, J.A.S., 148a
Meech, S.B., 77a
Meid, W., 49a, 118b, 146b, 150a
Meier, H., 97a, 153a
Meißner, R., 141a Melefors, E., 100b Melioranskii,
P.M., 20a Menai Strait, 63b Mencken, H.L., 124a, 125b,
126a, 187b, 188a Menges, K., 20a, 195b Mentz, R.,
60a, 62b Menzel, W., 109b
Merchant of Venice, The, 134a Meritt, H.D., 94a
Meringer, R., 2b, 49a Merkülova, V.A., 30b
Merry Wives of Windsor, The,
109b
Metrical Homilies, 145a Meyer, J., 172a Meyer, W.,
160a Meyer-Lübke, W., 154b
Mezger, F., 153b Michiels, H., 70a
Middlesex, 38a
1434
 Miller, Th., 226b Miller, W., 102a
Minneapolis, 124b Minnesota, 124b Misogonus,
114a Mitchell, J., 163a, 177a, 218b
Moberg, L., 100b Modeer, I., 3b, 4b, 5a, 5b- 6a, 6b, 8b,
9a
MoSinn, 62a MoSsognir, 52b
Moe, J.E., 140a
Möller, H., 4b, 6a, 84b, 85a,
86a, 96b, 97b, 104b, 117b M0ller, K., 42b, 141a
Moerdijk, A., 98b
Mogk, E., 53a
Mohr, W., 139a
Montgomerie-Fleming, J., 91a
Montgomery, M., 110b Moore, Th., 149a Mordek, H.,
93b More, Th., 162a
Morley, H., 147a, 148b Morrlgain, 55a Morris, R.,
102b, 103b Morris, W.S., 103a, 220a Morsbach, L., 67a,
118a Mosse, F., 3b Motsognir, 47a, 52b Motz, L., 47b,
53a, 57a, 58b,
217b,222a Mowcher, Miss, 158a Mozeson, I.E., 138b,
194a Müch, R., 15b, 50b, 100b, 109b,
176a, 179b
Müllenhoff, K., 153a
Müller, E., 16
Müller, F.M., 38a, 84b Müller, G., 43b Müller, J., 46a
Mü ller, M. See Mü ller, F.M. Müller-Graüpa, E., 79b
Müir, K., 40b
1435
 Müller, J.W., 18a, 74b, 80a
Mürray, J.A.H., 10b, 35b, 37b,
39a
Mürray, K.M.E., 37b Müss-Arnolt, W., 104 Müst, G.,
104b
Mütschmann, H., 91a Naarding, J., 72a, 117a Nabbi,
48a
Napier, A.S., 15a, 206a
Narrenschiff, Der, 40a Nehring, A., 171b, 172a, 198a
Nemnich, P., 199b Nerman, B., 49a, 54a Neümann,
F., 61a Neümann, G., 98b Neümann, J.H., 147a Neüss, E.,
72b New Brünswick, 186b
Newell, W.W., 63b
New England, 63b Newman, J., 211a, 214 Newton,
A., 70b New Zealand, 33b Nibelungenlied, 48b Nicholas
Nickleby, 165b
Nicholson, B., 110b, 111a
Nicklin, T., 95a, 99a Nicolai, O., 65b, 228b
Niedermann, M., 152a
Nielsen, N., 167b
Nigra, C., 8b
Nilsson, J., 28b, 29b, 31a, 155a Njals saga, 8a
Njötr, 109a Noguchi, R., 80b Norberg, R., 130b
Nordfeld, A., 141a
NorSri, 47b
Noreen, A., 4b, 11a, 22b, 32b, 53a, 54b, 55b, 58a,
96b, 97b,
1436
 98a, 107a, 149b, 172b, 198a,
200b, 202a
Noreen, E., 5b Nöri, 48a Normier, R., 201b
Northamptonshire, 142b Northumberland, 188a
Northumbria, 10a Norway, 40b
Notker, 230a Nutt, A., 92a
Obidicut, 113a Ochs, E., 78b, 79b Ode, A., 217a
Odin (ÖSinn), 47b, 48a, 83b,
143b, 157a, 176b, 221a, 222a Oehl, W., 56b, 75a,
157a, 175b
Offa, 15b
Ogonovs'ka, O.V., 2b Ogura, M., 212a, 213b
Ohio, 125a
Okasha, E., 6a Oklahoma, 124a Ölafsson, G., 204b
Oliver Twist, 68b
Olrik, A., 49a
Olsen, Bernard, 79a Olsen, Birgit, 26a
Olsen, M., 122b, 133a
Olson, E., 194b, 199a Olybrius, 126a
O'Muirithe, D., 134a Ono, S., 212a Opie, I., 63b, 64a
Opie, P., 63b, 64a Orel, V., 207a Orkney, 144a Ormulum,
88a
Orosius, 210b
Ostheeren, K., 52b
Osthoff, H., 22, 121a, 199b,
216b, 220 Otfrid, 56a, 66a, 107a Otkupshchikov,
Iu.V., 23a,
1437
 182a, 223a Ott, J.H., 9a Ovid, 59b Oxford, 68b, 186a
Page, R.I., 4a, 6a Palander, H. [aka H. Suolahti],
184b
Paley, F.A., 103b, 104a
Palmer, R., 119b Palsson, G., 21b
Pandare, 70b Paracelsus, 50b Paris, G., 76b Paroisien,
D., 68b
Paros, L., 85b
Partridge, E., 87a, 125b, 192,
203b Paschall, C., 152a
Paul, H., 204b Pauli, I., 145b, 176b Pavlova, O.A.,
200b
Payne, C.H., 125b
Payne, J., 159a
Payne, L.W., 208b
Peacock, E., 33a Pedersen, H., 53a, 97b, 99a,
101b, 150a, 171b, 211a Pegge, S., 37b
Pennsylvania, 186b
Persson, P., 22b, 41b, 42a, 72a, 167b
Petersson, H., 23b, 30a, 53b, 56a, 58a, 105a, 120b,
121b-122a, 123a, 168b, 169a,
171b Pethtel, L., 175a
Pfannenschmid, H., 61a Pheifer, J.D., 114b
Pictet, A., 44b, 45a, 51b, 104a, 141a, 172b, 216b
Piemont, 176a
Piers Plowman, 37b, 181a, 182b
Pinkerton, E.C., 18a, 19a
1438
 Pipping, H., 122b, 198a, 199a
Pipping, R., 130b Pisani, V., 18b, 97a, 148a
Plate, R., 178b
Platt, J.A. Jr., 65a, 191b, 195b,
196a Pliny, 174a
Plymouth (UK), 28, 65a, 66b,
71a
Poetto, M., 80b
Pogatscher, Alois, 28, 65a, 66b,
71a, 101a, 226b Pokorny, J., 30a, 101b, 117b Poli, D.,
211b
Polome, E., 5a, 6a, 22b, 47b, 49a, 56b, 84b
Pomerania, 96b Pons, E., 148b
Pontinga, Y., 216a Porzig, W., 173b Pott, A.F., 13b,
25b Potter, C., 63, 64a Powell, T., 63a P.P., 134b
Prellwitz, W., 97b
Prescott, R.G.W., 183a
Princi-Braccini, G., 17b
Prior, R.C.A., 28a, 29a
Promptorium parvu[loru]m,
158b
Propp, V., 30a
Psilander, H., 230 Puhvel, J., 49a, 221a Pyles, Th., 83b
Pyrenees, 57b
Qui Tam, 190a, 197b
Quigley, J., 187a
Q.W., 124a Rabelais, F., 148b Radcliffe, I.N., 161b
1439
 Ramat, P., 4b, 150b, 155a Ramsey Cartulary, 162b
Rankin, L., 63b
Rapkin, M., 125a Rapp, K.M., 98a Rappoport, H.,
188b Rauch, I., 143b Raucq, Eliz., 104b
Rawson, H., 86b R.D.S., 188a
Read, A.W., 80b, 81a
Reaney, P., 15b
Redslob, W., 135b Rees, N., 180b Regel, K., 25
Regin, 47b
Reichborn-Kjennerud, I., 52b,
57a
Reinisch, L., 32a, 179b Reinius, J., 209b
Remaines..., 36a Revard, C., 80b
Reves, H.F., 190b Rhys, J., 137a Ribas, 57b Riccius,
C.G., 60a Riecke, J., 56a Riese, A., 148a Riley, H.T., 194
Ritter, G., 124b
Ritter, O., 15a, 16a, 18a, 46b,
54b, 101a, 103b, 121a, 142b,
144b, 169a, 171a, 193 Rittershaus, A., 223a Rivals,
The, 67b
Rix, H., 211b
Robin Goodfellow, 112b, 185b
Robins, A.F., 190b
Robinson, F.C., 98 Rocchi, L., 18a Rochholz, E., 60b,
61a
Roeder, F., 101a Roelandts, K., 13a, 15b, 20b
Rogström, L., 127b
1440
 Roman de Renart, 177b Roman van Torec, 51b
Root, R.K., 70b Rooth, E., 2b, 4a, 95b Roscoe, E.H.,
125b
Rosenfeld, H.-Fr., 42a, 79b, 80a Ross, A.S.C., 126a,
180a, 203b Rotermund, G., 59b Rowe, Jos.H., 63a
Ruhlen, M., 156b
Rule, F., 162b
Ruprecht (Knecht), 112b, 185b Russell, T.B., 187b
Sabaliauskas, A., 107a Sabler, G. von, 151b
Sachsenspiegel, 59a-62b Sachsse, 60a Sahlgren, J., 133a
Sainean, L., 160a, 178a Saint Jacob [Jakobus], 91b Saint
Nicholas, 185b
Salerno, 208b
Samelson, A., 186b
Sampson, J., 191b, 196 Sands, D., 40b Sandahl, B.,
87a
Santangelo, P.E., 81b, 177b Sapir, E., 32a Sarrazin, G.,
109b
Sauer, H., 27b, 58a, 118b
Saussure, F. de, 206b Sauvageot, A., 18b Savage,
F.G., 111a Saxo, 141a Scaliger, J.J., 160a Scarpart, G., 81b
Schachmatov, A., 119b Schleswig, 99a
Schlutter, O.B., 32b, 43b, 71b,
94b, 99a Schmidt, G., 225a, 227b, 229
Schmidt, J., 150, 151b
Schmidt, K., 98a, 155b
Schmidt, L., 50a
1441
 School for Wives, The, 190b
Schrader, O., 171b, 172a, 197
Schrijnen, J., 169b
Schrijver, P., 27b, 101b
Schröder, E., 78a
Schröder, F.R., 122b Schröder, G., 193b Schröder, H.,
107b, 114a, 167b,
188b, 189, 202b, 226a, 227,
228b, 229a, 230b
Schröpfer, J., 211b
Schuchardt, H., 9a, 101b Schütte, O., 60a
Schüwer, H., 168a Schumann, C., 95b
Schur, N., 175a Schwabe, H.O., 67b, 159a
Schwartz, E., 130a Schwartz, M., 51a, 56b, 57b
Schwentner, E., 117b Schwerin, 60a
Scott, C.P., 1b, 11b, 38, 39a
Scott, W., 43b Scovazzi, M., 142a Sebastian, 40b
See, K. von, 143b Seebold, E., 42a, 52b, 80a, 173b,
213b, 226a
Seelmann, E., 89b
Segar, E.C., 124b, 125, 126a
Sehrt, E., 143b
Seiler, H., 153b
Seneca, 147b, 148 Senn, A., 5a
Serenius, J., 127b, 218b
Sermo ad Anglos, 221a
Sewall, R.K., 63a
1442
 Shakespeare, 10b, 31a, 37b,
40, 81a, 86a, 92a, 94b, 109b,
110a-111a, 134a, 135a, 141a, 183a, 191a, 224b
Sharp, S., 4a
Sharypkin, D.M., 20b
Shchur, G.S., 12a, 138, 144b Sheidlower, J., 86, 87a
Sheridan, R.B., 67b
She Stoops to Conquer, 134b,
190b
Ship of Fools, The, 40a Shipley, J.T., 45b, 76a, 85b,
103a, 113a, 208b, 227b Shrewsbury, 68a
Shulman, D., 102b Shurtleff, G.W., 187b
Siebenbü rgen, 75b
Siebs, T., 60b, 107a, 109, 110a,
115a, 116, 128b, 169b Sievers, E., 1a, 10a, 12b, 14b,
26a, 29b, 48b, 54b, 55b, 64b,
66b, 89a, 101b, 105b, 111a, 126b, 127a, 199a, 206,
219b,
223a, 225 Sif, 47b
Sifert, G., 50a Sigfüsson, B., 95b Sigismund, R., 110b
Sigma, 117a Sigurd (-Or), 47b, 140b
Simpson, R.R., 110b-111a
Singer, S., 46b
Skalmowski, W., 152b
Skeat, W.W., 1b, 33a, 37, 39a, 41b, 43b, 44a, 67b,
70b, 74b,

1443
 89, 91a, 93a, 95a, 97a, 102a, 103b- 104a, 106b, 108a,
112b,
119b, 130a, 133b, 162a, 169b, 177a, 180b, 186b,
189b, 197b,
204b
Skelton, J., 148a, 209a Slang, Jack, 190b
Slangenberg (General), 194a
Sleeth, C., 187a, 188 Smiles, S., 191b
Smith, A.H., 22b, 31b, 35a,
142b Smith, C., 76a
Smith, E.C., 35a
Smith, L., 180a Smith, R.H., 147a
Smithers, G.V., 161a
Smits, A., 60b
Smythe Palmer, A., 176b, 177b, 183a
Snorri, Sturluson, 47a, 56a, 59b-60, 120b, 171b
Söderlind, J., 147 Söhns, F., 95b
Solmsen, F., 157b Somerset, 142a Sommer, F., 49b
Specht, F., 11b, 53b Sperber, H., 79b, 80b Spillner, P.,
125a Spitzer, L., 81a, 83a, 90b, 97b,
163a, 175a, 176a, 181b, 182, 184a, 187b, 188a, 192,
196a,
204b,
Sprenger, R., 114a Stalmaszczyk, P., 171b Stanley,
E.G., 170b, 182b
Stanley, J.P., 46a Stapelkamp, C., 21a, 79b, 141,
169b, 207b Stave, J., 17b Stech, S., 30b, 116b
1444
 Stege, H. ter, 72a Steiner, R., 152b
Steinhauser, W., 166b
Stella, 148b Steller, W., 54b
Stevens, J., 175a Stevenson, W.H., 15a
Stewart, D., 125b Stibbe, H., 155a Stiles, P., 213a
Stoddard, J., 161a
Stoett, F.A., 79b
Stokes, W., 78a
Stoltz, G., 105a
Stone, L., 86a
Stopa, R., 82a Storm, J., 74a, 76a St. Paul (MN), 125a
Strachan, L., 207b Strandberg, S., 42a
Stratford-on-Avon, 81a Strathclyde, 63a Stratmann,
F., 89a
Streitberg, W., 150a Stroebe, L.L., 98 Strömbäck, D.,
144a Strunk, K., 98a Strutt, J., 28a Stuart, H., 32b, 55a
Stürmer, F., 161a
Sturtevant, A.M., 73a Sturtevant, E.H., 2b, 3a, 73a
SuSri, 47b
Suffolk, 33b Sunden, K., 209a
Suolahti, H. [aka Hugo Palander], 44, 70a, 71b, 72,
73b
Surrey, 104a
Sussex, 104a, 118b, 142b, 166a,
175a
Svanberg, N., 197a, 198b, 199b,
200a
1445
 Sverdrup, J., 23b
Swainson, C., 71a
Swann, H.K., 71a
Sweet, H., 71a, 94b, 102b, 210b,
224b
Swift, J., 146a-149a Swinton, W., 218b Sydow, R. von,
59b, 71a
Sylt, 213b
Szemerenyi, O., 5a, 9a, 142a Tacitus, 59b, 149b,
155b, 216b Talbot, H.F., 51a, 205a, 218b Tatian, 13a
Tavernier-Vereecken, C., 15a
Taylor, I., 63a, 70b, 74a, 191, 194b
Te Winkel, J., 51b, 55a, 120b
Tell, Wilhelm, 61a Ten Brink, B., 118a
Tengvik, G., 15a, 138a, 140a
Ten Kate, L., 216b
Terasawa, Y., 98b
Terry, F.C.B., 44b, 133b, 207b
Ter Stege, H., see Stege, H. ter
Tew, E., 180b
Thackeray, W., 209a Thames, 36a
Thaning, K., 77a
Thielmann, P., 148a
Thieme, P., 2b Thiselton-Dyer, W.T., 110b pjalar-Jons
saga, 58a Thomas, S.P., 79b Thompson, G., 171
Thomsen, V., 13b, 18a
Thor (törr), 47b, 48a, 157a
1446
 Till Eulenspiegel (Ulenspiegel),
61a
Timmermann, U., 14b Titus Andronicus, 31a
Tobler, A., 8b Tobler, F., 119b Tobler, L., 70a
Törnkvist, N., 54b, 84a, 98a,
208a Toledo (US), 125a Toll, J.-M., 27a, 120b
Tommaseo, 136b
Tooke, H., 127, 201a, 220a, 226a
Torpusman, R., 147b Tournament of Tottenham, The,
40b
Townsend, J., 24b, 138a T.R., 180b
Trier, J., 80a, 83a, 105a, 118a,
155a, 168a, 176 Troilus and Criseyde, 70b Trombetti,
A., 156b Trot, Dame, 208b
Trotwood, Betsey, 209a Trubachev, O.N., 11b, 128a
True History of a Little
Ragamuffin, The, 184a Trumbull, J.H., 63a, 151a
Trutmann, A., 150b T.T.W., 134 Tuisco, 59b Tuisto, 59b
Turnbole, 36a Turnmillstreet, 36a
Tusser, T., 112b, 113a
Twelfth Night, 40, 92a
Twente, 230b Tylor, E., 180b
Tyneside, 188a
Tyrwhitt, T., 36b, 38b, 100a, 158b
Üepk, N., 8b
Udall, N., 162a
Uhlenbeck, C.C., 2b, 5a, 8a, 92,
1447
 120b, 128a, 150, 151, 152a,
171b Ulenbrook, J., 32a Ulrix, E., 81b Ulving, T., 156b
Uspenskij, F., 107a Vafprüönismäl, 122b Van den Berg,
B., 18a, 29 Van den Helm, G., 9a Van der Meulen R., 178b
Van Draat, P.F., 162b Van Ginneken, J., 29a Van
Haeringen, C., 3b Van Helten, W.L., 79b, 86a,
150b,167b Van Kempe Valk, C., 99b Van Langehove,
G., 72a Van Lennep, J.H., 194b Van Lessen, J.H., 95b,
178b,
179a
Van Maerlant, J., 51b Van Wijk, 17a, 54b Van
Windekens, A., 173b Venables, E., 158a Vendryes, J., 53a
Vennemann, T., 2b, 129a, 170a
Venmans, L.A.W.C., 53b Vercoullie, J., 15b, 171a,
173b
Verdam, J., 169b
Vermeer, H.J., 16b
Verner, K., 3a, 26a, 72b, 119a,
121, 198a, 210b, 217, 218a,
220b, 223b
Vespasian Psalter, 1a Vestri, 47b Vidos, B., 8b, 9a
Viola, 40b
Virginia, 125b
Vqlospä, 47a, 57a, 143b, 221a
Vq Isa pättr, 4a
Volundr, 47b, 52a
Voronin, S.V., 34b
1448
 Voyles, J., 5a
W., 203a
Wackernagel, W., 13b, 72, 91b,
93b
Wadstein, E., 3b
Wagner, N., 151a Wagner of Charleston, 93a
Wakelin, M.F., 22b, 32b
Walde, A., 78a Wall, A., 89b
Wallenberg, J.K., 77a
Walpole, H., 144a Walsh, C., 133b Waltemath, W.,
81b
Walther, C., 28b Wanner, H., 202b
Warwick, E., 200b Warwickshire, 131a, 142b Wasson,
G.S., 68a Wayland, 47b W.D., 188b, 189b
Webb, J., 81a
Weber, G.W., 176b
Webinger, A., 17a, 78b
Wedgwood, H., 37b, 38a, 84a
Weekley, E., 37b, 169b, 180,
185b, 208b
Weißbrodt, E., 164b Weijnen, A.A., 29a, 170b, 181b
Weinstock, H., 38a Weise, O., 79b
Weiser, L., 49a
Weiske, J., 59b
Weisweiler, J., 66a, 67a, 211a Wells, W.A., 124a,
125a
Wesche, H., 221a
1449
 Wescott, P.W., 187b Westerberg, A., 221a
Westphalia, 96b Westwood, J.O., 63a Whallon, W., 85a
Whatmough, J., 148a Whitby, 93a White, H.A., 34b
Whitehall, H., 141b
Whitman, C.H., 71a, 197b, 206a
Whitaker, J., 7a, 33a
Widdowson, J., 17a
Wiedemann, O., 150a, 173b Wilbraham, R., 104b,
112a Wilken, E., 60a William (King), 184b Williams, G.,
81a, 87a, 202a Williams, H., 148a Willis, N.P., 102b
Wilson, E., 81a, 86a
Wilson, J.D., 110a
Witczak, K., 171b Witty, J.R., 63b
Wodan. See Odin.
Woeste, F., 32a, 41a, 60a, 61a, 104a
Wolf, S.A., 164b Wolff, L., 100b Woll, 76, 77b
Wood, F.A., 2a, 4b, 22a, 3a,
43a, 52b, 53b, 74b, 78a, 90b, 94a, 97b, 99a, 129b,
164a, 164b-169a, 172a, 174a,
179, 187b, 197a, 199, 204a, 212a-213b, 214a, 217b
Wordsworth, W., 224b Wortmann, F., 26a, 42b, 43a
Woty, W., 190b
Wright, H.G., 70b Wright, J., 127a, 150a Wright, E.M.,
127a
Wright, W.A., 40b Wüst, W., 152a, 153a, 154a
Wulfstan, 221a, 222a
Wuotan. See Odin.
1450
 Wuttke, D., 40a W.W.E.T., 112b Wyld, H.C., 32, 103b
Yale, 68b
Ymir, 24a, 59b-60a
Ynglinga saga, 56a
Yorkshire, 62b, 63a, 64a, 93a,
139a, 142b, 188a Zaccaria, D., 81b Zacharias, 143b
Zachrisson, R., 206a
Zettersten, A., 159b
Zeus, 190a
Zimmer, H., 158b, 159 Zimmermann, F., 16a
Zippel, O., 71a
Zollinger, G., 50a, 72b, 129a
Zubaty, J., 89, 168a Zupitza, E., 15b, 22a, 26b, 53a,
129a, 159b, 163a, 171b, 216b
Zupitza, J., 15a, 229a

1451
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