Category: Etymology

Q: I see the verb “critique” used all the time in place of what I believe is the correct word—“criticize.” I thought “critique” meant to analyze the pros and cons, not to express disapproval.

A: Yes, the verb “critique” does indeed mean to analyze or evaluate, though it’s sometimes used in the sense of “criticize”—to find fault with.

Standard dictionaries don’t recognize the fault-finding sense, but the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, notes that the verb “critique” is used “(sometimes) to express a harsh or unfavourable opinion of (a person or thing).”

Interestingly, “criticize” once meant to analyze as well as find fault with, but the analytical sense is now obsolete. The OED says both “criticize” and “critique” ultimately come from ancient Greek terms having to do with literary criticism.

The verb “criticize” is derived from the noun “critic,” which ultimately comes from the Greek κριτικός, a literary critic. (The OED notes that κριτικός, an adjective meaning able to discern, is used substantively here as a noun meaning a literary critic.)

The verb “critique” is derived from the noun “critique,” which ultimately comes from ἡ κριτική (short for ἡ κριτικὴ τέχνη, the critical art).

When the noun “critic” (source of “criticize”) first appeared in early modern English in the late 16th century, Oxford says, it meant “a person who analyses, evaluates, and comments on literary texts; spec. a person skilled in textual or biblical criticism.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from A Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande for Ecclesiasticall Matters (1587), by John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury and later Bishop of Oxford:

“You woulde haue sayde, hee had beene Longinus the Critike (or one that giues his iudgement against euery body) and a Censor (or Master Controller) of the Romayne eloquence.”

When “criticize” first appeared in the early 17th century, the OED says, it had two senses:

(1) “to pass judgement on a person or thing; esp. to express a harsh or unfavourable opinion,” and (2) “to analyse, evaluate, and comment on something, esp. a literary text or other creative work; to subject something to critical analysis.” Oxford labels the second sense obsolete.

Both meanings of “criticize” were first used in the same work. Here are Oxford’s earliest examples of the two senses, from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

(1) “Goe now censure, criticize, scoffe and raile.” (2) “If a rigid censurer should criticize on this which I haue writ, he should not find three faults as Scaliger in Terence, but 300.”

(The second citation refers to the Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger’s comment in Poetices Libri Septem [Seven Books of Poetics, 1561] that ancient scholars found three faults in Terence’s plays, but the faults were theirs, not his: “illis potius quam ei sunt oneri” [“they are burdens to them rather than to him”].)

As for the noun “critique” (source of the verb “critique”), the OED says it first meant “a piece of writing or other review in which a text, creative work, subject, etc., is analysed or evaluated.”

The earliest example we’ve found is from The Nature of Truth (1641), by the English statesman and military officer Robert Greville, Second Baron Brooke. In the work, which originated as a letter to a friend, Greville says people should not be forced to worship against their beliefs:

“When ’twas first VVrot, ’twas intended but a Letter to a private Friend, (not a Critick;) and since its first writing, and sending, twas never so much as perused, much lesse, refined, by its Noble Author.”

The verb “critique” followed a century later, the OED says, when it meant “to analyse, evaluate, and comment on (a literary text, creative work, etc.).” The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a novel, narrated by a lapdog, that satirizes 18th-century culture:

“the worst ribaldry of Aristophanes, shall be critiqued and commented on by men, who turn up their noses at Gulliver or JosephAndrews” (from The History of Pompey the Little: or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog, 1752, by Francis Coventry).

In the 20th century, the OED says, the verb “critique” took on additional senses that include the one you’re asking about: “To make a critical assessment of (a person’s performance, actions, etc.); (sometimes) to express a harsh or unfavourable opinion of (a person or thing).”

The first Oxford example refers to making a critical assessment of students: “All student practice is critiqued in a constructive manner” (from The Journal of Higher Education, 1950).

Finally, here’s an OED example where the verb “critique” is being used clearly to mean find fault with: “He was by no means perfect, and this column has often critiqued his excesses” (from The Times, London, Feb. 1, 2016).

But as we noted above, standard dictionaries haven’t yet recognized this expanded usage.

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Q: The act of clinking glasses and saying “cheers” is becoming known as “cheersing.” Well, there wasn’t already a word for this, so I guess we needed one. What do you think of this neo-verb?

A: The use of “cheers” as a verb meaning to say “cheers” in a toast, often while clinking glasses, has been around for at least two decades. Standard dictionaries haven’t recognized it yet, but two collaborative online dictionaries have entries:

Wiktionary defines it as “to say ‘cheers’ as a toast (to someone)” and has this example: “We cheersed and started drinking” (from Unheard Love: Experience the Illusion of Love, 2018, a novel by Kavya Mahadik).

Urban Dictionary (in a 2011 entry) says it’s a “clickety clank clack of glasses in union, most commonly to refer to beer mugs raised in celebration.” Example: “He spilt nearly half of his Budweiser when he cheersed his glass with Pat’s.”

The earliest example we’ve found is from Mosh Pit (2004), by the Canadian novelist Kristyn Dunnion: “Choosy Soozy was drinking shots at the bar with her friends. I cheersed her with my fist because I didn’t have a beer yet, and she yelled, ‘Hey, thanks for coming to the show!’ ”

Interestingly, saying “cheers” as “a toast or salutation before drinking” is relatively recent, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The interjection first appeared in the early 20th century.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a newspaper in Perth, Australia: “The brief toast of ‘Cheers, dears!’ ” (Sunday Times, Sept. 14, 1930). However, the dictionary cautions that “the earliest use so far traced comes from Australia but it is uncertain whether it originated there.”

As for the etymology, the OED says the interjection apparently originated as the plural of the noun “cheer,” which meant one’s countenance, face, or emotional state when it appeared in the late 12th or early 13th centuries.

The first two senses are now obsolete, but the third—the emotional state—is still seen in the somewhat musty expression “be of good cheer,” which Oxford dates back to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385):

“Loue hath beset þe wel be of good chere” (“Love hath beset thee well, be of good cheer”).

In the 15th century, the noun “cheer” took on the sense of “food and drink provided for a guest or (now chiefly) enjoyed on a festive occasion,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s first example is from Le Morte Darthur (circa 1470), Sir Thomas Malory’s Middle English prose version of the Anglo-Norman Arthurian tales. In this passage, the desolate Palamedes, who’s hopelessly in love with Isolde, doesn’t feel up to dinner:

“So they wente vnto mete, but sir Palomydes myght nat ete, and there was alle the chire that myght be had” (“So they went to dinner, but Sir Palamedes could not eat, despite all the cheer [food and drink] that might be had”).

In the early 18th century, the OED says, the noun “cheer” came to mean “a shout of acclamation, encouragement, or jubilation; esp. (in singular and plural) the loud, collective shouts and other expressions of acclamation of a company or crowd.”

The first Oxford citation is from The Barbacue Feast: or, the Three Pigs of Peckham, Broil’d Under an Apple-Tree (1707), by the British satirist Edward Ward: “A huge Whistle-booby Boatswain … commanded three Chears from the Company.”

The dictionary notes that the term could refer at this time to specific shouts of “hear hear,” “hurrah,” “huzza,” and so on. However, none of the examples cited include shouts of “cheer” or “cheers.”

In the early 20th century, the interjection “cheers” began being “used as an expression of encouragement, approval, or enthusiasm,” Oxford says. The first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a letter written on May 30, 1915, by W. Robert Foran, a British Army officer, big game hunter, and writer:

“We go out in a couple of weeks to the front. Cheers! Love to all my old friends in the Club. Send me THE SCOOP. Best wishes from Вob” (from the June 19, 1915, issue of The Scoop, a daily published by the Press Club of Chicago from 1911-17).

And as we mentioned above, the earliest OED citation for the use of the interjection “cheers” as a toast or salutation before drinking appeared in Australia in 1930.

In the dictionary’s next example for this sense of the word, two old friends exchange drinking salutations:

“ ‘Cheers!’ said the one, and ‘Here’s mud in your eye!’ the other” (from The Clock Ticks On, a 1933 mystery by the British author and journalist Valentine Williams).

In the late 20th century, the interjection “cheers” took on the sense of “thanks” in British English. The first OED example is from the British journalist Phillip Howard in The Times, London, Aug. 4, 1976:

“By a remarkable transition from the pub to the sober world at large outside cheers has become the colloquial synonym in British English for ‘thanks.’ ”

Finally, here’s an example from Kingsley Amis’s novel Jake’s Thing (1978). In this passage, Jake is relieved that a news agent doesn’t smirk when he sees a racy magazine among those Jake has selected:

“As it turned out he had been hard on this man, who politely didn’t smile or leer when he saw Jake’s selection, named a cash sum once and said Cheers five times, the first time when he noticed the approach of his customer, again when he handed the magazines, again when he took money, again when he gave change and the last time when bidden good-bye.”

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Q: I find the singular “dynamic” is increasingly being used as a noun. For example, “the meeting had a strange dynamic.” I’m OK with “dynamics” as a noun, but how did “dynamic” get that status?

A: The use of the singular noun “dynamic” for something that influences growth, change, progress, and so on has been around since the late 19th century and is standard English.

We find the usage a bit jargony, but it’s recognized by all the standard dictionaries we regularly consult. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as “a force or factor that controls or influences a process of growth, change, interaction, or activity.”

M-W cites a review by the pediatrician and microbiologist June E. Osborn in The New York Times Book Review, April 7, 1996: “Denial has always been the most devastating social and political dynamic of the AIDS epidemic.”

An earlier sense of “dynamic” came into English in the late 18th century, borrowed from the French adjective dynamique (dynamic). The French term comes from the Greek adjective δυναμικός (dunamikos, powerful) and noun δύναμις (dunamis, power or strength), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the word first appeared in English, the OED says, it was a plural noun for “the branch of Physics which treats of the action of Force: in earlier use restricted to the action of force in producing or varying motion.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The New Royal Encyclopaedia Londinensis; or, Complete, Modern and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1788), by George Selby Howard:

“Dynamics is the science of moving powers; more particularly of the motion of bodies that mutually act on one another.”

In the early 19th century, the OED says, the plural noun took on the sense of “the moving physical or moral forces in any sphere, or the laws by which they act.”

The first OED citation is from On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God (1833), a treatise by the Church of Scotland minister and social reformer Thomas Chambers: “To unsettle the moral dynamics which nature hath established there.”

The singular noun “dynamic” appeared in the late 19th century in the same sense as “dynamics” where the plural term means a branch of physics. The first OED citation is from an 1873 paper on mathematics:

“The science which teaches under what circumstances particular motions take place … is called Dynamic … It is divided into two parts, Static … and Kinetic” (Mathematical Papers, 1882, by William Kingdon Clifford).

The singular noun soon took on the sense of an “energizing or motive force”—the meaning you’re noticing. The OED’s earliest citation is from a book that examines Darwinism in a Christian context:

“The Struggle for Life, as life’s dynamic, can never wholly cease.” From The Ascent of Man, 1894, by Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelist, biologist, and writer. (The book was based on Drummond’s 1893 lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston.)

As for the adjective “dynamic,” the dictionary says it first appeared in the early 19th century, when it meant “of or pertaining to force producing motion: often opposed to static.”

The first OED citation is from an 1827 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the national academy of science in the United Kingdom.

In the paper, Davies Gilbert, the society’s president, notes that the Scottish engineer James Watt introduced the term “duty” (the useful effect of an engine in work performed) “for what has been called in other countries the dynamic unit.”

In the mid-19th century, Oxford says, the adjective took on the figurative sense of “active, potent, energetic, effective, forceful.” The first citation is from English Traits (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s portrait of the English people.

In commenting on their wills, letters, public documents, proverbs, and speech, Emerson writes, “Their dynamic brains hurled off their words, as the revolving stone hurls off scraps of grit.”

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Q: I was surprised when autocorrect changed “intermittent” to “intermit.” I checked and, lo and behold, there is a word “intermit.” Does it not strike you as odd that the base-form is less known than its “built-up” version?

A: We don’t use, or recommend using, the autocorrect function in a word processor. Our spell-checkers flag possible misspellings but don’t automatically “fix” them. Word processors have dictionaries, but not common sense—at least not yet!

As for the words you’re asking about, the adjective “intermittent” (irregular or occurring at intervals) is indeed more common than the verb “intermit” (to suspend or stop). In fact, the verb barely registered when we compared the terms on Google’s Ngram Viewer.

However, “intermittent” isn’t derived from “intermit,” though both ultimately come from different forms of the Latin verb intermittere (to interrupt, leave a gap, suspend, or stop), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The Latin verb combines inter (between) and mittere (to send, let go, put).

When “intermit” first appeared in English in the mid-16th century, it meant to interrupt someone or something, a sense the OED describes as obsolete.

The modern sense of the verb—“to leave off, give over, discontinue (an action, practice, etc.) for a time; to suspend”—showed up in the late 16th century.

It means “leave off” in the dictionary’s earliest citation for the modern usage: “Occasions of intermitting the writing of letters” (from A Panoplie of Epistles, 1576, by Abraham Fleming, an author, editor, and Anglican clergyman).

As we’ve said, “intermit” isn’t seen much nowadays. English speakers are more likely to use other verbs with similar senses, such as “cease,” “quit,” “stop,” “discontinue,” “interrupt,” or “suspend.”

When the adjective “intermittent” appeared in the early 17th century, Oxford says, it described a medical condition such as a pulse, fever, or cramp “coming at intervals; operating by fits and starts.”

The earliest OED citation is from an English translation of Plutarch’s Ἠθικά (Ethica, Ethics), commonly known by its Latin title Moralia (The Morals), a collection of essays and speeches originally published in Greek around the end of the first century:

“Beating within the arteries here and there disorderly, and now and then like intermittent pulses” (from The Philosophie, Commonly Called, The Morals, 1603, translated by Philemon Holland).

The adjective later took on several other technical senses involving irregular movement, but we’ll skip to its use in everyday English to mean occurring at irregular intervals. The earliest OED citation for this “general use” is expanded here:

“Northfleet a disunited Village of 3 Furlongs, with an intermittent Market on Tuesdays, from Easter till Whitsuntide only” (Britannia, or, An illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales, 1675, by the Scottish geographer John Ogilby).

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Q: When I encountered “orthogonal” years ago in geometry class, it meant perpendicular. In recent years, I hear it used in everyday English to mean “irrelevant.” How did this happen?

A: Yes, the old mathematical meaning of “orthogonal” has evolved over the years, but the sense you describe as “everyday” is not all that common, and certainly not heard every day.

The English adjective comes from Middle French, where orthogonal meant “having a right angle,” but the term ultimately comes ancient Greek, where ὀρθογώνιος (orthogonios) was “right-angled.”

The word first appeared in English in a 16th-century mathematical treatise, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. At the time, it also meant “right-angled.”

The earliest OED citation is from A Geometrical Practise, Named Pantometria, begun by the mathematician Leonard Digges sometime before his death about 1559 and finished in 1571 by his son, Thomas, also a mathematician:

“Of straight lined angles there are three kindes, the Orthogonall, the Obtuse and the Acute Angle.” The word “pantometria” (or “pantometry”) in the title of the treatise is an old term for “metrology,” the scientific study of measurement.

In the late 1600s, the OED says, “orthogonal” took on a somewhat wider sense of “relating to or involving right angles; at right angles (to something else).”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, it developed several other mathematical senses that aren’t relevant here. But one sense that appeared in the early 20th century—“statistically independent”—may be pertinent.

We think this sense could have led to a more general, but relatively uncommon meaning that we’ve found in only two standard dictionaries.

American Heritage online defines it as “very different or unrelated; sharply divergent.” The dictionary has this example: “Radical Islamists are ultimately seeking to create something orthogonal to our model of democracy” (from an article by the American national security expert Richard A. Clarke in The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2005).

Dictionary.com defines it as “having no bearing on the matter at hand; independent of or irrelevant to another thing or each other,” and has this example: “It’s an interesting question, but orthogonal to our exploration of the right to privacy.”

The OED, an etymological dictionary, doesn’t include this newer sense. As far as we can tell, it first appeared in the late 20th century.

Here’s an example that we’ve found from a lecture by the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna on Oct. 20, 1990, at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, CA:

“Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind, to create another dimension, orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history.”

And here’s a later example from Why People Believe Weird Things (2002), by the American science writer and historian Michael Shermer: “For the most part intelligence is orthogonal to and independent of belief.”

We especially like this discussion of “orthogonal” at the US Supreme Court on Jan. 11, 2010. Richard Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor, used the term in arguing for the plaintiffs in Briscoe v. Virginia:

Friedman: “I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging …”

Chief Justice John Roberts: “I’m sorry. Entirely what?”

Friedman, “Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.”

Roberts: “Oh.”

Justice Antonin Scalia: “What was that adjective? I liked that.”

Friedman: “Orthogonal.”

Roberts: “Orthogonal.”

Friedman: “Right, right.”

Scalia: “Orthogonal, ooh.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy: “I knew this case presented us a problem.”

Friedman: “I should have … I probably should have said …”

Scalia: “I think we should use that in the opinion.”

Friedman: “I thought … I thought I had seen it before.”

Roberts: “Or the dissent.”

(We cobbled this account together from reports in The Washington Post, the ABA Journal, The Volokh Conspiracy, and The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.)

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Q: In Can You Forgive Her (1864-65), one of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, a character complains about the “wretched cheeseparing Whig government.” How did “cheeseparing” come to mean penny-pinching?

A: When the term first appeared in the 16th century, it literally meant a paring, or shaving, from a rind of cheese.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Anglican religious treatise that compares Roman Catholic relics to cheeseparings from the moon:

“Ye abused those that beleeued you, making them beleeue the Moone was made of a greene cheese, as they say: but were those blessed relikes so good as the cheese paring?” From The Supremacie of Christian Princes (1573), by John Bridges.

(Another treatise by Bridges, Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande, 1587, includes an early version of a common proverb: “a foole and his money is soone parted.”)

The OED’s next “cheeseparing” citation is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, believed written in the late 1590s. In the play, Falstaff says the thin, vain Justice Shallow looks “like a man made after supper of a cheese paring.”

In the 19th century, Oxford says, “cheeseparing” came to mean “saving money by making numerous small cuts or adjustments; rigorous economizing, esp. of a mean or parsimonious kind.”

Merriam-Webster online has this explanation: “Presumably, the practice of paring off the rind so as to waste the minimum of cheese was viewed as an excessive form of frugality.”

The first OED citation for the parsimonious sense is from an article in The Parliamentary Review (July 19, 1834) on the retirement of Charles Grey, second Earl Grey, as Prime Minister.

During his four years in office, the article says, “There has been much cheeseparing concerning poor clerks, and small offices.”

In case you’re curious, the second Earl Grey is apparently the source of the name of the bergamot-flavored tea blend, though the earliest known evidence for the name dates from several decades after his death, according to the OED.

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Q: Halloween being just around the corner, I am curious about the history of the word “scary.” In standard American English, it means inspiring fear, but I often hear African-Americans and white Americans from the South use it to mean easily frightened.

A: Those two senses of the adjective “scary” (fearsome and fearful) have been around for hundreds of years. Both are accepted without reservation in all current standard American dictionaries and at least one standard British dictionary.

Merriam-Webster, an online American dictionary, defines “scary” as (1) “causing fright,” (2) “easily scared,” and (3) “feeling alarm or fright.” It has these two examples: “a scary movie that gave the child nightmares for weeks afterwards,” and “a scary horse who spooked and kicked at its own shadow.”

Collins, an online British dictionary, lists both senses in British English, defining them as (1) “causing fear or alarm; frightening” and (2) “easily roused to fear; timid.” All the other standard British dictionaries we’ve checked list only the first sense.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, defines “scary” as (1) “terrifying, frightful” and (2) “frightened, timorous.” It describes the second meaning as “originally and chiefly North American.”

The first sense appeared in the 16th century. The earliest OED citation (with the adjective spelled “skearye”) is from an English translation of the Aeneid, a Latin epic by the Roman poet Virgil:

“But toe the, poore Dido, this sight so skearye beholding, What feeling creepeth?” (from Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil His Æneis, 1582, translated by Richard Stanyhurst, an Anglo-Irish literary scholar, poet, and translator).

The second sense was first recorded in the 18th century. The earliest Oxford example is from correspondence by an American merchant in London to his partners in Maryland:

“If you are scary, we never shall cut any figure in the business” (from a letter dated Nov. 29, 1773, in Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, published in 1979). Johnson left England during the American Revolutionary War and returned after the war.

The most recent OED citation for the second sense is from a children’s book by an English writer: “He was as scary of being seen as a wild deer” (from Thursday’s Child, 1970, by  Noel Streatfeild).

As for the etymology of “scary,” the dictionary says it was “formed within English, by derivation”—that is, by adding the suffix “y” to the noun “scare.” In Middle English, the noun (spelled “skere”) had the now obsolete sense of fear or dread.

The noun was derived from the use of the verb “scare” (“skerre” in Middle English) to mean frighten or terrify. The OED’s earliest citation for the verb is from the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies:

“He wile himm færenn ȝiff he maȝȝ & skerrenn mare. & mare” (“He [the devil] will frighten him if he can and scare him more and more”).

Middle English borrowed the verb “scare” from early Scandinavian. In Old Norse, skirra meant to terrify, avoid strife, or shrink from, similar to the adjectival senses of “scary” in Modern English.

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Q: Online, The New York Times posted this headline: “I Paid My Kid $100 to Read a Book. You Should, Too.” It could be read as saying I should join the mother in bribing her daughter, though the intended meaning is to do something parallel. Up your alley?

A: In our opinion, there’s no ambiguity in that Times headline. “You Should, Too” is simply an elliptical version of “You Should [Pay Your Kid $100 to Read a Book], Too.”

We doubt that any Times readers would think the writer was urging them to bribe her child. Like you, they would realize “You Should, Too” was short for the clunky full version above. It’s similar to someone saying, “I brush my teeth with Ipana. You should too.”

Elliptical constructions have been common in English since Anglo-Saxon days. Here’s an example from King Alfred’s late ninth-century translation of Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Pastoral Care), a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory:

“We magon monnum bemiðan urne geðonc & urne willan, ac we ne magon Gode” (“We can hide our thoughts and desires from men, but we cannot [hide them] from God”).

And these constructions can often be read two ways, with the intended one clear in context. For instance, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth fails to persuade Mr. Bennet to curb Lydia, “and she left him disappointed and sorry” (short for “and [when] she left him [she was] disappointed and sorry”).

As for that Times article, we were struck by something else—the writer’s insistence that her 14-year-old child read only a print book, the kind stacked in “teetering towers” on nightstands. We wonder if she’d have needed a bribe to persuade the girl to read an ebook.

Although print books are still dominant in the US, ebooks are growing in popularity and 30 percent of Americans read them, according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center.

We used to feel about print books much as the writer of the Times article. We have a library of several thousand that we’ve read and reread over the years.

However, the small type in many of the books has become a challenge to our aging eyes. Cataract surgery and new reading glasses have helped, but not enough. With ebooks, we can select the most comfortable type size, typeface, background, margins, line spacing, and so on.

And one unexpected delight of ebooks is the ability to click on an unknown word, place, poem, song, or person’s name to learn more. In reading print books, we often skip over such things rather than run to a dictionary or a computer, leaving blanks in our understanding and enjoyment.

We’d argue that an ebook, with its ability to fill in those blanks, may often provide a deeper, more satisfying experience than what the Times writer refers to as “classic deep reading—with two eyes in front of paper, and nothing else going on.”

The truth is that books have had many forms over the centuries, and “book” hasn’t always meant one printed on paper and held between covers.

In Old English, spoken from around 450 to 1150, a “book” (boc or bec) could refer to a literary work in portable form written on vellum, parchment, papyrus, wood, metal, or other material, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In fact, it wasn’t until the late Middle English of the 15th century that the first printed book appeared in English—Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473-74), William Caxton’s translation of a French romance written by Raoul Lefèvre in 1464. (A “recueil” is a literary compilation or collection.)

Today when we want to reread a print book in our home library, we’re more likely to borrow a copy from one of the online digital libraries affiliated with our local public libraries: Cloud Library, Hoopla, and Libby.

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Q: Is there a reason why “cuddle” and “huddle” have the same “-uddle” ending, and  “snuggle” has the slightly similar “-uggle”?

A: As far as we can tell, “cuddle,” “huddle,” and “snuggle” aren’t related. They got their “-uddle” and “-uggle” spellings in different ways.

“Cuddle,” for example, is “a dialectal or nursery word of uncertain derivation,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says it may have come from the Old English cúð, meaning snug or cosy (the letter ð was pronounced “th”). An unrecorded form, cúðle, may have become “cuddle,” as fiðele became “fiddle.”

Oxford says “huddle” is also “of uncertain origin” but may ultimately be a “diminutive and iterative” form of the prehistoric Germanic root hud- (to cover). An iterative, or frequentive, is a verb expressing repeated, frequent action (like “slither” and “slide”).

And “snuggle,” the OED says, was “formed within English, by derivation,” combining the verb “snug” (once spelled with a double “g”) and the suffix “-le.”

As the dictionary explains, one function of the suffix “-le” is to form verbs from other parts of speech, like adjectives, or to create a diminutive or frequentive version of an earlier verb.

Examples formed in Old English, the dictionary says, include “nestle, twinkle, wrestle.” In Middle and early modern English such words included “crackle, crumple, dazzle, hobble, niggle, paddle, sparkle, topple, wriggle, etc.”

And some, the OED adds, come “from echoic roots, as babble, cackle, gabble, giggle, guggle, mumble, etc.” (Usually, a consonant that follows a vowel is doubled when it appears before an “-le” suffix.)

Of the three words you mention, the first to appear was “cuddle,” which Oxford defines as “to press or draw close within the arms, so as to make warm and ‘cosy’; to hug or embrace affectionately, to fondle.”

The cuddling involved a farm animal in the earliest OED citation: “Cudlyng of my cowe.” From a song, written around 1520, cited in Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1845), a collection of medieval and Renaissance writing, edited by Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell.

The next word, “huddle,” originally meant “to put or keep out of sight; to conceal or hide, as among a crowd or under a heap; to hush up,” a usage that’s now obsolete, the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from an English translation of a Latin epistle defending the Church of England. It’s a response to epistles by Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca, Bishop of Silves, Portugal, urging Queen Elizabeth I to embrace Roman Catholicism:

“To chop of the head of the sentence, and slyly huddle the rest [Latin: qui sententiæ caput abscindens astute reliqua subtices].” From Against Ierome Osorius Byshopp of Siluane (1581), James Bell’s translation of an epistle by Walter Haddon and John Foxe.

The OED defines the last of the three, “snuggle,” as “to lie snug or close, esp. for warmth or comfort; to settle down cosily or comfortably; to get or press close to a person, esp. as a mark of affection; to nestle.”

The dictionary’s first example is from an entry in an English-French dictionary: “To Snuggle, or to snuggle together, se serrer dans un Lit.” From The Great French Dictionary (1688), by the author and lexicographer Guy Miege.

A final note: The earliest version of “when pigs fly,” an expression used to say something will never happen, appeared in the translation of the Latin epistle mentioned above:

“This is a great promise, my good Lord: But when will this be done? when pigges flye with their tayles foreward.”

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