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Starvard University · Word Origins 101
Ordinary words turn out to hide jokes, myths, and whole histories. An archbishop who helped start the Oxford English Dictionary, and a dictionary maker with an eye for a good story, teach you to dig up the past buried in the words you use every day.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Every word you say has a past, like a coin that has passed through a thousand pockets. The word salary once paid Roman soldiers in salt. The word silly once meant blessed. In this course you dig up the hidden stories inside ordinary words, learn which stories are true, and learn how to spot the made up ones.
Richard Chenevix Trench was a poet, a professor, and later Archbishop of Dublin, and in 1851 he gave a set of lectures called On the Study of Words that taught Victorian readers to treat their own language as a treasure chest. A few years later he read a famous paper pointing out the faults of English dictionaries, and the remedy he proposed grew into the Oxford English Dictionary. Ernest Weekley, our second guide, actually worked on that dictionary, and his 1912 book The Romance of Words retells its best discoveries as stories.
One warning runs through the whole course, and both men would insist on it: a good story is not the same as a true one. People love tales like the king who knighted a joint of beef and named it Sir Loin, and this course will show you that one, smile at it, and then show you the real, documented history, which is usually just as good. Where a famous derivation turns out to be a legend, we say so plainly.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
In 1851 a clergyman and poet named Richard Chenevix Trench stood up in London to give a set of lectures with a plain title, On the Study of Words, and a startling claim: the English language itself is an archive, and every word in it is a stored piece of the past. Trench borrowed a phrase from the American writer Emerson, who had called language "fossil poetry." Just as a fossil fern pressed in stone preserves the shape of a plant that lived long ago, a word preserves the thoughts, pictures, and habits of people long dead, carried safely into our own mouths. Trench thought the phrase almost too narrow. Language, he argued, is fossil ethics and fossil history as well.
He quoted Coleridge to make the same point from the other side: "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign." Armies and kings leave monuments, but ordinary speakers leave something more honest, a record of what they noticed, feared, traded, and joked about, packed into the words they handed down. "Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem," Trench wrote, "having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it." The word frank is his fossil history in miniature. The Franks were the Germanic people who conquered Gaul and gave France its name, and because they were the free, ruling people in a conquered land, their name slid into a moral meaning: a frank person is free spoken, generous, and straightforward. A whole social revolution sits inside one everyday adjective.
One honest detail shows how this science corrects itself. Later editions of Trench's own book carry a footnote admitting that his explanation of the name Franks is "now generally given up," and that the name probably comes from an old word for a spear. The fossil hunter had to relabel one of his own specimens, and the book prints the correction for everyone to see. That is the spirit of this course. Words really are fossils, but a fossil has to be identified with evidence, not with enthusiasm, and even our guides get revised.
Lesson 2
Peel an English word down to its root and, more often than not, you strike Latin, and behind the Latin, Greek. Rome gave English its law, its church, its medicine, and its schoolroom, first directly and then again through French, while Greek supplied the vocabulary of philosophy, theatre, and science. Ernest Weekley, in The Romance of Words, lines up a dozen of these buried pictures at random, and the list is worth walking through slowly, because each one turns a dull word into a small scene. A salary, from the Latin sal, is an allowance for salt, the pay of a Roman soldier partly reckoned in the stuff that preserved his food. Rivals, from rivus, a stream, were originally neighbours who shared the same water and quarrelled over it, which explains a great deal about rivals ever since. A supercilious person is one who lifts the supercilium, the eyebrow, at you. A trivial matter, from trivium, the meeting of three roads, is the sort of talk picked up where loiterers gather at a crossroads.
Some of the best Latin fossils are whole customs. Trench asks why a man offering himself for election is called a candidate, and answers from the Latin candidus, white: a Roman seeking office presented himself to the voters in a whitened toga, advertising his purity, and became a candidatus. The same civilisation hides inside companion, which Weekley traces to a Vulgar Latin word for a bread sharer, the person you split your loaf with. Friendship, in that word, is measured in shared meals. Greek contributes its own pictures, often through the stars and the sea. Disaster is an ill-starred event, a calamity blamed on an unfavourable planet, and it keeps company with jovial and mercurial, temperaments once assigned to Jupiter and Mercury. Nausea is simply the Greek word for seasickness. Atlas is the demigod who held up the world, whose picture on the front of map books gave us our name for the whole book.
Notice what kind of knowledge this is. Nobody voted these meanings in, and no committee could have invented anything half as vivid. Traders, soldiers, priests, and schoolboys carried the words from port to port and century to century, wearing them smooth like coins, until the picture inside was invisible to everyone except the person who stops and digs. That digging is a learnable habit, and Lesson 7 turns it into a method.
Lesson 3
Twice in its youth, English was invaded, and both invasions are still audible every time you open your mouth. The first invaders were the Vikings, Norse seafarers who raided Britain and then settled across the north and east of England in the region ruled by their own law, the Danelaw. They were close cousins of the English, their language a near relative of Old English, and they married in, farmed, and traded for generations. That intimacy shows in the words they left: not grand terms, but kitchen and cradle words, and, most astonishing of all, pronouns. They, them, and their are Norse gifts, borrowed because Norse and English speakers kept misunderstanding each other's own pronouns at the market stall. Sky, egg, window (in Old Norse a vindauga, a wind eye), husband, and score are Scandinavian too, and Weekley points out a neat family pair: skirt is the Scandinavian doublet of shirt, the same old word arriving twice by two different roads, so that English ended up wearing both.
The second invasion, in 1066, was a conquest from the top. William of Normandy took the crown, and for centuries the language of the court, the law, and the great house was Norman French, while English went on being spoken in the village and the field. Trench saw that you could almost reconstruct the Conquest from the vocabulary alone. The words of state and dignity are Norman: sovereign, sceptre, throne, realm, royalty, homage, prince, duke, palace, castle. The words of home are Saxon: house, roof, home, hearth, father, mother, husband, wife. One telling exception is king, which stayed stubbornly English even at the very top. And the farmyard preserves the whole social order, in the pattern Walter Scott gives the jester Wamba in Ivanhoe: the living animal, tended by the Saxon labourer, keeps its English name, ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer; but once it is killed, cooked, and carried to the Norman lord's table, it takes a French name, beef, veal, mutton, pork, venison.
So English grew up double, with a plain word and a grand word for half the things in life, and writers have exploited the choice ever since. The Viking layer tells you who the English lived with; the Norman layer tells you who ruled them. Read a page of English with those two invasions in mind and it stops being a list of words. It becomes a census of the dead, taken in vocabulary.
Lesson 4
A word's present meaning is only its latest address. Meanings drift, slide downhill, climb uphill, and sometimes walk the whole length of the scale, and Weekley devotes some of his happiest pages to these travellers. Take silly. Today it means foolish, but Weekley notes that it "once meant blessed," a sense still preserved in its German cousin selig. The path runs from blessed, to innocent and harmless, to simple, to simple minded, to foolish: each generation of speakers nudged it one step, and nobody along the way noticed the word crossing from a compliment to an insult. Trench and Weekley both love this word because it proves that a word's history can contradict its present tone completely. The blessed and the silly are the same word at different ages.
Nice has travelled even further. Weekley says it has traversed nearly the whole scale between bad and good: it comes, he explains, from the Latin nescius, ignorant, and in Middle English and Old French it means foolish; the old dictionaries gloss it as lazy, slothful, idle, dull, and simple. From foolish it narrowed to fussy and precise, the sense Shakespeare often uses, and from precise it softened into pleasant and agreeable, the pale little compliment we hand out today. Fond made a shorter version of the same journey: it once meant foolish, which survives in the phrase fond hopes, before it settled into loving. And dunce is a word with a grudge inside it. Weekley calls it a libel on the followers of John Duns Scotus, the great medieval thinker from Duns in Scotland, whose careful arguments his Renaissance enemies dismissed as hair splitting; the name of a subtle scholar became the ordinary word for a blockhead.
Words can also fall socially. Villain began as a farm labourer, the man of the villa and the village, and on the lips of his Norman masters, as Trench observes, it became more and more a title of contempt, until it meant a scoundrel outright. The lesson in all of this is double. First, never argue from what a word means now to what it must have meant, or from its origin to what it must mean now; the road between is long and winding. Second, treat these slides kindly, because they are the fossil record of human judgment itself. Every changed meaning is a small verdict that thousands of ordinary speakers passed on the world, one conversation at a time.
Lesson 5
Some words are name tags that outlived their owners. An Earl of Sandwich, who lived from 1718 to 1792, wanted a meal he could eat without leaving the gaming table, and the slices of meat between bread that were brought to him still carry his title to every lunch counter on earth. Captain Boycott was a land agent in County Mayo whose tenants and neighbours, in 1880, punished him by refusing all dealings with him; the weapon was so effective that his name became a verb within the year, and Weekley already notes French and German borrowing it. Nicotine preserves Jean Nicot, the French ambassador who sent tobacco plants to his queen in 1560. Silhouette, the cheap black profile portrait, carries the name of a French finance minister of 1759, though Weekley is honest that exactly why his name stuck to the portraits is variously explained. A name becomes a word when the thing it labels is too useful, or too notorious, to stay private property.
Places sign their work just as clearly, above all in cloth, because for centuries you bought fabric by the town that wove it. Weekley's chapter on words and places is a gazetteer in disguise. Muslin comes from Mosul, damask from Damascus, cambric from Cambrai, and jean, once spelled jane, from Genoa, the city whose sturdy cloth also stands behind our word jeans. Food travelled the same roads: the currant is the grape of Corinth shrunk in the telling, the damson is the plum of Damascus, and the peach carries Persia in its ancestry, reaching us through a Latin form of the word for Persian. Even money confesses its birthplace. The dollar descends from the Taler, the big silver coin of Joachimstal, Joachim's valley in Bohemia, where the mines were.
Stories contribute the third family. To tantalise is to suffer the punishment of Tantalus, the figure in Greek myth who stood in water that shrank from his lips and under fruit that lifted out of reach; Weekley shows the verb then becoming a pattern for new coinages from people's names. Atlas, from Lesson 2, belongs here too: a character in a story, printed on the front of a map book, until his name meant the book itself. Names, places, and stories are also exactly the raw materials from which false etymologies are manufactured, as the next lesson shows, so enjoy these tales, and then ask the dictionary maker's question: where is the dated evidence?
Lesson 6
Before there could be a science of word origins, there had to be a book that collected the evidence, and for English that book exists because our first guide demanded it. In 1857 Trench read a paper to the Philological Society in London on the deficiencies of English dictionaries: they omitted old words, guessed at origins, and recorded meanings nobody could verify. His remedy was radical. A real dictionary, he argued, must be built on historical principles, every word followed through dated quotations from actual books, so that its biography could be checked. The Society took up the plan, volunteers across the English speaking world were set to reading centuries of literature and copying out quotation slips, and under its editor James Murray the project grew into the New English Dictionary, later famous as the Oxford English Dictionary. Weekley, our second guide, worked on that dictionary himself, in what he modestly calls a humble share of its etymological part, and The Romance of Words is full of its findings.
The method matters more than the monument. A dictionary maker does not ask whether a story about a word is charming; he asks when the word is first found, in what forms, and whether the proposed origin could have produced those forms at that date. That test quietly kills most of the famous etymology legends, and Weekley devotes a whole late chapter to what he calls anecdotical etymology, slaying them with dates. The story that a king of England knighted a loin of beef and dubbed it Sir Loin collapses, Weekley shows, because sirloin is found in the fifteenth century and comes from the French surlonge, built from sur, over, and longe, from the Latin lumbus, loin: it is the cut above the loin, and no monarch was involved. The word cabal was said to be an acrostic of five ministers of Charles II, but the dictionary finds cabal in English long before that ministry existed. And the beloved tale that posh comes from "port out, starboard home," the cooler cabins on ships to India, is a legend of exactly this kind: no ticket, timetable, or printed source from the period records any such abbreviation, and acronym origins of this shape are almost never how words are actually born. Posh, in short, is a good story and an unproven one.
Weekley knew why the legends refuse to die. Before the dictionary makers, what passed for etymology, he writes, was "merely a congeries of wild guesses and manufactured anecdotes," and the manufactured anecdotes are still manufactured daily, because a neat story is easier to remember than a dated quotation. Trench and Weekley leave you with the antidote. A derivation is a claim about history, and history runs on evidence: earliest forms, earliest dates, and a path the sounds could actually have travelled. Learn to ask for those three things and you can grade any word story you are ever told, including the ones in this course.
Lesson 7
Everything in this course now becomes a tool. Most long English words were assembled, at some point in history, out of a small stock of Latin and Greek parts, and if you learn the busiest parts you can dismantle words you have never seen and guess their meanings the way you would read a label. Start with Latin. Port means carry, so we get transport, import, portable, and reporter, one who carries news back. Dict means say, giving dictate, predict, verdict (a true saying), and contradict. Scrib and script mean write: scribble, describe, manuscript, prescription. Spect means look: inspect, spectator, prospect, respect, literally a looking back. Duc means lead: educate, conduct, introduce, produce. Ject means throw: eject, project, and a dejected person is thrown down. Each root is one key that opens a whole corridor of doors, and fifty roots can unlock thousands of words.
Greek supplies the other half of the workshop, especially for science and ideas. Tele means far off, phon means sound, and graph means writing or recording, so telephone, telegraph, and photograph explain themselves, and telescope adds scope, a watcher or instrument for looking. Chron means time, hence chronicle and chronological; bio means life, hence biography, the writing of a life, and biology. Logos means word, reason, or study, and it closes a hundred names of sciences. Phil means loving: philosophy is the love of wisdom, and a philanthropist loves mankind; the opposite pole, mis, to hate, gives misanthrope. Learn these pieces actively. When you meet a new long word, do not reach for the dictionary first. Break it, guess it, say the guess aloud, and then check. Being wrong is part of the training, and the check teaches you the word far better than the definition alone, because now the word has a story attached to it, and stories are what memory eats.
One caution, and it is the caution of the whole course. A root tells you where a word has been, not what it must mean today. Lesson 4 showed silly travelling from blessed to foolish and nice from ignorant to pleasant; no root study would predict either journey, and insisting that a word really means its oldest meaning is the one error Trench and Weekley alike warn against. Use roots as a reading lamp, not as a law. You now own the course's whole method: dig like Trench, check like Weekley, enjoy the fossils, and grade every story, however charming, by its evidence. The dictionary on your shelf is no longer a referee's rulebook. It is a museum, and you know how to read the labels.
Sources
This course is taught from two books, both free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg: Trench's 1851 lectures that started the modern study of English words, and Weekley's 1912 collection of word stories, written by a man who helped make the Oxford English Dictionary.
Graduation
You dug up words like fossils, struck Latin and Greek a layer down, heard two invasions still speaking in your own sentences, watched silly fall from blessed to foolish, read the name tags left by earls, captains, cities, and myths, and learned how the great dictionary grades every story by its evidence. You also know which tales to enjoy without believing, and that may be the most useful skill of all. Congratulations: everyday English will never sound ordinary again.
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