Category: Language

Q: I’ve had quite a few doctor’s visits and laboratory tests lately and the medical personnel I’ve encountered use “pee” for urinate, both as a directive (in a cup) or while discussing results. I don’t object to this usage, but I wonder if it isn’t a bit informal in this setting. What do you think?

A: We’ve had this experience, too. At doctors’ offices, not only are we invited to “pee” into a cup, but sometimes we’re even asked how regularly we “poop.”

It may be that in medical settings, this deliberate informality is intended to make patients comfortable and put them at ease—a welcome contrast to the bewildering technical terminology the patients are faced with.

Or perhaps it’s an extension of the calculated familiarity that’s sometimes called the “hospital we,” as in “How are we feeling this morning,” a usage we wrote about in 2011.

We aren’t bothered by these usages in a medical setting, largely because our minds are focused on more important things—like whether we’d better start putting our affairs in order!

As for the words themselves, we’ve written before about the etymology of “poop,” which didn’t mean “defecate” until the late 19th century.

And though we have discussed “piss” and words derived from it, we’ve never written about “pee.” So here goes.

As a verb meaning to urinate, “pee” is simply a shorter form of “piss.” It originally developed in the 18th century, when it stood for “the initial letter of piss,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When it was first used, “pee” was a transitive verb—that is, it required an object, the thing that was urinated in or on.

The dictionary’s earliest example is about a cat: “He never stealt, though he was poor, / Nor ever pee’d his master’s floor” (from Ebenezer Picken’s Poems and Epistles, Mostly in the Scottish Dialect, 1788).

Early in the 19th century, the verb was also used intransitively (without an object), and again the OED’s earliest citation is Scottish: “To pee, to make water” (from John Jamieson’s Supplement to the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 1825).

Standard dictionaries in the US and the UK now describe the use of “pee” to mean urinate as informal—that is, acceptable in speech and casual writing.

Here’s an example from Lexico, formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online: “In the bathroom, the girl in the next stall answers her cell phone while she’s peeing.’

In modern British English, the phrase “peed off” is used in the same sense as “pissed off,” according to Lexico, which includes this among its examples:

“She looked really rather peed off but it made for a nugget of great telly.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: I assume that “equity” and “equality” are related if you go back far enough. Please write about the history of these two words. “Equity” seems to be replacing “equality” at the university where I teach.

A: Broadly speaking, both words mean the quality of being fair or equal. Their ultimate source, and that of their many relatives in English, is the Latin adjective aequus (level, even, just)—not to be confused with the noun equus (horse).

As they’re used in modern English, “equity” and “equality” may occasionally overlap, but they’re generally used in different ways—“equity” in regard to fairness, “equality” in regard to sameness.

Here are the definitions in Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online), which are representative of those in other standard dictionaries:

“equity: The quality of being fair and impartial.” The example given: “equity of treatment.”

“equality: The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities.” The example given: “an organization aiming to promote racial equality.”

(Lexico is an online collaboration in which Oxford University Press provides content for a website owned by the Lexico Publishing Group, owner of Dictionary.com.)

Both words entered English writing in the 14th century, “equity” around 1315 and “equality” in the late 1390s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, traces the two terms, along with their relative “equal” (early 1390s), to classical Latin words derived from the adjective we mentioned above, aequus.

While “equal” came directly from the Latin aequālis, “equity” and “equality” took a less direct route into English, by way of Old French.

First on the English scene was “equity,” from the Old French equité (a derivative of the Latin aequitātem).

The Middle English spellings varied widely (“equite,” “equyte,” “equitee,” and so on), but from the beginning the noun had to do with what the OED calls “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality; even-handed dealing.”

The dictionary’s earliest known use is a reference to the divine mystery of God’s “domes [judgments] in equyte” (circa 1315, from a poem by William de Shoreham, vicar of Chart-Sutton).

In legal language, “equity” has a special sense, one believed to have existed in writing since 1591. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it this way: “Justice achieved not simply according to the strict letter of the law but in accordance with principles of substantial justice and the unique facts of the case.”

As the OED says, this meaning of “equity” comes from the notion that a decision “in equity” was “one given in accordance with natural justice, in a case for which the law did not provide adequate remedy, or in which its operation would have been unfair.”

While “equity” had meanings related to fairness and justice, “equality” had to do with sameness or equivalency. It came into English from the Old French équalité (today it’s égalité), which in turn was a borrowing of the Latin aequālitātem (from aequālis).

The noun “equality” is generally defined, the OED says, as “the quality or condition of being equal,” and in the earliest citation it’s used in a physical sense:

“Þe see hatte equor, and haþ þat name of equalite, ‘euennesse,’ for he is euen and playne.” (“The sea hath aequor [Latin for an even, level surface], and hath that name of equality, ‘evenness,’ for it is even and plain.”)

That passage is from John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1398, of De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopedic Latin work compiled by the medieval scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus. We’ve expanded the quotation and taken it from a different manuscript than the OED used.

Other senses of “equality” followed. In the early 1400s, the word was used to mean equal “quantity, amount, value, intensity, etc.,” Oxford says. And in the early 1500s it was used for equal “dignity, rank, or privileges with others” or “being on an equal footing.”

Toward the end of the 16th century, these usages led to a new sense of the word: “the condition of being equal in power, ability, achievement, or excellence.” The OED credits Shakespeare with the first written evidence:

“The on-set and retyre / Of both your Armies, whose equality / By our best eyes cannot be censured” (King John, probably written in the 1590s).

One of the most common meanings today emerged in the late 19th century in the phrase “equality of opportunity,” which the OED defines as “equal chance and right to seek success in one’s chosen sphere regardless of social factors such as class, race, religion, and sex.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an 1891 issue of the Economic Review (London): “It will possibly, however, be contended that here the ideal is equality of Opportunity.”

Today the phrases “equality of opportunity” and “equal opportunity” (first recorded in this sense in Britain in 1925) are both common—though not equally common. The shorter “equal opportunity” is more popular, according to Google’s Ngram viewer.

The noun phrase “equal-opportunity employer” originated in the US in the 1960s, the OED says. Oxford’s definition is “one who professes not to discriminate against applicants or employees on such grounds”—that is, “race, gender, physical or mental handicap, etc.”

As we said above, the Latin adjective aequus gave us many English words beside “equity” and “equality.” We already mentioned “equal,” which was first recorded in a scientific work by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1391.

A passage in A Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391) explains how to regulate the complex astronomical instrument, and Chaucer uses “howres equales” and “howres in-equales” to mean “equal hours” and “unequal hours.”

That early use of “equal” retains a whiff of the Latin aequālis in its spelling, “equales”; the modern spelling didn’t appear until the 16th century.

Other English words that can be traced to aequus include “iniquity” (1300s); “equation” (1393); “equator” (circa 1400); “equinox” (c. 1400); “equate” (1400s); “equivalent” (c. 1460); “equalize” (1500s); “equidistant” (probably before 1560); “equivocate” (1590); “equivocal” (1601-02); “equanimity” (1607); “adequate” (1608) and “inadequate” (1675); “equilibrium” (1608); “equable” (1643); and a latecomer, “egalitarian” (1885).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: My wife and I started noticing the use  of “ground” for “floor” a few years ago. Now it’s rampant and almost universal. I will just scream at the TV, “It’s the FLOOR dang it!” Is there any reasonable explanation for this widespread abuse?

A: Usually, as we say in a 2009 post, the “floor” is what you walk on inside a building, and the “ground” is what you walk on outside. However, people have been using “ground” for “floor” in the indoors sense since at least the mid-19th century.

We wouldn’t describe the usage as “rampant” or “almost universal.” It’s out there, but not out there enough to get into most online standard dictionaries. Only two of the ten that we’ve consulted include it—with similar qualifications.

Collins describes the use of “ground” for “the floor of a room” as “mainly British,” while Merriam-Webster Unabridged says it’s “chiefly British,” and gives this example from Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point: “kneeling on the ground beside the couch he leaned over her.”

From what we’ve observed, the use of “ground” for “floor” appears in both American and British English.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, includes it without the “British” qualification (or any other).

In fact, the earliest written example in the OED is from An American Dictionary of the English Language (1847), by Noah Webster. The dictionary, a revised and enlarged edition published four years after Webster’s death, defines “ground” as, among other things, “a floor or pavement.”

The OED also cites British sources, including this example (which we’ve expanded) from Murder in the Mews (1937), a short story by Agatha Christie: “We came along at once and forced the door open. Mrs. Allen was lying in a heap on the ground shot through the head.”

As we’ve said, the usage isn’t new. You became aware of it a few years ago, and you now seem to hear or see it everywhere.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the “recency illusion.” The linguist Arnold Zwicky came up with the term, which he’s defined as “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

The use of “ground” for “floor” may have you screaming at the TV, but it doesn’t seem to bother language commentators. It isn’t mentioned in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.), Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.), Pat’s Woe Is I (4th ed.), or other guides.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the usage begins showing up in more dictionaries, perhaps labeled “informal” or “colloquial.” If that happens, usage writers may have something to say about it.

Is there an explanation for this use of “ground”? Well, perhaps it was influenced by the use of the phrase “ground floor” for the floor of a building at ground level. That phrase appeared a couple of centuries before people began using “ground” to mean “floor.” However, we haven’t seen any evidence for or against this idea.

As you know, the noun “ground” can refer to many things other than the surface of the earth—a parade ground, grounds for divorce, coffee grounds, a ground for an electrical connection, the grounds around a house, etc. So it’s not surprising that people might use such a flexible word to mean a “floor.”

If the “ground” at the bottom of an ocean can be called the “floor,” a usage that dates back to the 17th century, is it really so outlandish to call a building’s “floor” the “ground”?

(In “Lycidas,” a 1637 elegy for a friend drowned in the Irish Sea, Milton refers to the seabed as “the wat’ry floore.”)

When the noun “ground” first appeared in Anglo-Saxon times (spelled grund or grunde), it referred to the bottom of something—the sea, a well, a ditch, and so on, according to the OED.

Perhaps the oldest citation is from Beowulf, an Old English epic that may have been written as early as 725: “Me to grunde geteah fah feondscaða” (“A sea fiend dragged me to the ground”).

In the 10th century, “ground” came to mean the surface of the earth. The first Oxford example is from the Blickling Homilies (971): “gefyldan eal oþ grund” (“they all fell to the ground”).

When “floor” showed up in Old English (spelled flór), it referred to the wood, brick, stone, etc. that people walked on in a room.

The first OED citation is from King Ælfred’s translation (circa 888) of De Consolatione Philosophiæ, a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius: “He gefeoll niwol of dune on þa flor” (“He fell headlong down on the floor”).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: Is there a historical connection between “emerge” and “emergency”?

A: Yes, the two words are related. Etymologically, an “emergency” is the emerging of something unexpected.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ll expand here, is from a sermon given by John Donne on Jan. 29, 1625, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London:

“The Psalmes are the Manna of the Church. As Manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes minister Instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.”

The OED defines this sense of “emergency” as “a state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action,” and describes it as the “ordinary modern use.”

However, the dictionary also notes a related sense, now rare, that appeared around the same time and reflected the word’s classical origins: “The rising of a submerged body above the surface of water.”

Oxford cites an example from Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a 1646 reference work in which the English polymath Thomas Browne debunks various myths and superstitions, including the belief in “a Tyrant, who to prevent the emergencie of murdered bodies did use to cut off their lungs.”

The nouns “emergency” and “emergence,” as well as the verb “emerge,” are ultimately derived from the classical Latin ēmergere (to rise out or up). The Latin verb is a compound of the prefix ē- (out) and mergere (to dive or sink).

If you’re wondering, mergere is the source of the English verb “merge.” As John Ayto explains in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “merge” meant to immerse or submerge in the 17th century, and “the modern meaning ‘combine into one’ did not emerge fully until as recently as the 20th century.”

“It arose,” Ayto writes, “from the notion of one thing ‘sinking’ into another and losing its identity; in the 1920s this was applied to two business companies amalgamating, and the general sense ‘combine’ followed from it.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: Can you say something about how wordplay—intentional, often whimsical linguistic innovation—affects etymology?

A: English speakers have been playing with words since Anglo-Saxon days, as we noted in a recent post about the word “play,” but we don’t see evidence that wordplay has significantly influenced English etymology. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case: the evolution of the language has made possible much of the wordplay in English.

Language change, especially change in spelling and pronunciation, has given rise to many puns that use homophones (words that sound alike but have different meanings, origins, or spellings) and homographs (words that look alike but differ in meaning, origin, or pronunciation).

For example, Lewis Carroll plays with the homophones “axis” and “axes” in Alice in Wonderland (1865). When Alice tries to show off her knowledge, the Duchess interrupts her: “ ‘You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—’ / ‘Talking of axes,’ said the Duchess, ‘chop off her head!’ ”

However, this wordplay wouldn’t have worked back in King Ælfred’s day. In Old English, “axis” was eax and “axes” was aexan. The two words didn’t become homophones until the early 17th century.

Shakespeare plays with the homophones “son” and “sun” at the beginning of Richard III, believed written in the early 1590s: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.”

That play on words might perhaps have squeaked by in Old English, but it wouldn’t have worked quite as well. In the epic poem Beowulf, for example, “son” is sunu and “sun” is sunne. And, no, the anonymous author didn’t play with them.

As for homographic wordplay, Dickens has Pip, the narrator of Great Expectations (1860-61), use “point” as both a verb and a noun: “They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point into me.”

Again, this play on words wouldn’t have worked in Old English (spoken from around 450 to 1150). The verb and noun “point” appeared in the Middle English period (roughly 1150-1500), largely borrowed from Anglo-Norman and Middle French.

And here’s a homographic example from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) that combines two meanings of “grave”—the adjective’s serious sense, which appeared in the mid-1500s, and the noun’s burial sense, which showed up sometime before 1000.

When Mercutio is fatally stabbed in a sword fight, Romeo tries to comfort him by saying, “Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.” The dying Mercutio responds: “No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”

Although language change has given us many puns, it has also taken many back. Because of pronunciation changes since Elizabethan times, for instance, much of Shakespeare’s wordplay doesn’t play well with modern audiences.

Consider this comment by Thersites in Troilus and Cressida about Ajax on the eve of a battle with Hector: “Ajax goes up and down the field, asking for himself.”

In Elizabethan times, “Ajax” was pronounced “a jakes”— the same as a now obsolete term for an outhouse. So Thersites was suggesting that Ajax was so afraid of fighting Hector that he couldn’t control his bowels.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: What’s the origin of the word “chap”? The British seem to use it the way Americans use “guy.” Does it apply only to men? Or could a Brit say a woman is “one of the chaps” as we’d say she’s “one of the guys”?

A: The noun “chap” has been used since the early 18th century to mean a man or boy. The usage is primarily British and began life as a shortening of “chapman,” an obsolete term for a merchant that dates back to Anglo-Saxon days. (We’ll have more on “chapman” later.)

“Chap” is used once in a while for a woman, but not all that much. One of the few examples we’ve seen is from the first episode of The Vicar of Dibley, a British sitcom that began airing on Nov. 10, 1994.

After the Rev. Geraldine Granger arrives at St. Barnabas as vicar, one of the villagers says, “She seemed a decent chap to me,” while another replies, “That’s the point. She’s not a chap.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has this early example for the term “humorously applied” to a woman:

“Nought would do / But I maun gang [must go], that bonny chap to woo.” From Helenore, or the Fortunate Shepherdess (1768), the major work of the Scottish poet Alexander Ross.

Feminized versions of “chap” are sometimes used humorously now, especially in the phrases “chaps and chapesses” and “chaps and chapettes,” but this usage isn’t all that common either, according to our searches of news databases.

We haven’t found any standard American or British dictionary that accepts the use of “chap” as a gender-neutral term. All the ones we’ve consulted define it in this sense as a chiefly British noun for a man or boy. Some label it informal.

None of the dictionaries have an entry for “chapette,” but one, Collins, includes “chapess” and defines it as an “informal, humorous” British noun for a woman.

The collaborative Wiktionary, which defines “chap” as a man or fellow, has entries for “chapess” and “chapette.” Both are defined as informal British terms for a “female chap; a woman.” Usage notes add that they’re generally found in the two plural phrases cited earlier.

In looking into your question, we came across a Dec. 27, 2017, article in the Times (London) about gender-neutral guidelines at a military training base in England for future officers.

The two-page document, written by the Joint Equality Diversity and Inclusion unit at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, suggests that “chaps” and other gendered words be replaced by such terms as “people, folks, friends or you all.”

So the British military (at least the unit nicknamed JEDI) considers “chaps” a gendered word—unlike the non-gendered plural “guys,” which appears in both US and UK standard dictionaries.

Some British dictionaries describe the use of “guys” for men and women as American, though Oxford Dictionaries Online defines the usage both in its US and UK editions as “People of either sex,” and gives this example: “you guys want some coffee?”

(We’ve published several posts about “guy,” including one in 2007 about the non-gendered usage and one in 2008 about the origin of the term.)

Interestingly, English has four distinct “chap” words. Here are the senses: (1) a man or boy, (2) cut or roughened, as in chapped lips, (3) the jaws or cheeks, and (4) cowboy leggings.

As we said earlier, the use of “chap” in sense #1 is a shortening of “chapman,” an old term for a trader or dealer. The word was céapmann in Old English, where céapian meant to buy and sell, and céap meant bargaining. Yes, those Anglo-Saxon words are ancestors of our adjective “cheap,” which as you know may describe something that’s a bargain.

The earliest OED example for “chap” used to mean a man or boy is from A Complete History of Algiers (1728), by Joseph Morgan: “ ‘Prithee!’ returned my scornful, choleric Chap; ‘Don’t compare Me to any of your scoundrel Barbarians!’ ”

As for sense #2, “chap” first appeared in Middle English as a verb meaning to “remove by chopping,” according to the OED, which cites this example:

“Anon her [their] hedes wer off chappyd.” From Richard Coer de Lyon, a poem believed written in the early 1300s about the storied exploits of King Richard I of England during the Third Crusade.

(The verb “chop” showed up in the mid-1300s as simply another form of “chap,” the OED notes. Although there were similar words in other Germanic languages, the ultimate source for the cutting sense of “chap” and “chop” is uncertain.)

By the late 14th century, Oxford says, “chap” was being used as a noun meaning a “painful fissure or crack in the skin, descending to the flesh: chiefly caused by exposure of hands, lips, etc., to frost or cold wind.”

The first OED citation is from John Trevisa’s 1398 translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum (“On the Order of Things”), an encyclopedic Latin reference compiled in the 13th century by the medieval scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus:

“Lepra … makyth chappes, chynnes and clyftes” (“Leprosy … maketh chaps, chinks and clefts”).

Early in the next century, the OED says, the verb “chap” came to mean to “crack, cause to crack in fissures.” The earliest citation is from a translation, dated around 1420, of a Latin book about agriculture:

“And yf thai [“they,” the roots of a flowering tree] chappe, a stoone under the heed Roote is to doo.” From a Middle English translation of Opus Agriculturae, also known as De Re Rustica, written by Palladius in the late 4th or early 5th century.

The participial adjective “chapped” showed up in the mid-15th century. The first Oxford example is from the The Towneley Plays, a series of mystery plays (dramas based on biblical stories) believed written sometime before 1460: “My fyngers ar chappyd.”

The earliest example we’ve seen for “chapped lips” is from an April 11, 1823, letter by Francis Hall from Soatá, Colombia: “at the expiration of five hours we gained the summit of the Paramo without any other inconvenience than chapped lips.”

(The Páramo is an ecosystem in the Colombian Andes. Hall, a retired British army officer, joined Simón Bolívar’s independence movement in South America and later became a hydrographer for the Colombian government.)

The use of “chaps” to mean the jaws or cheeks (sense #3) showed up in the mid-16th century, and is now primarily used for the cheeks, or jowls, of a pig. The first OED citation is from a 1555 translation of a Latin history of Spain’s explorations in the New World:

“The hooke ouerthwarteth and catcheth hold of his [a shark’s] chappes” (from The Decades of the Newe Worlde, Richard Eden’s translation of an early 16th-century work by the Italian historian Peter Martyr of Angleria).

The use of “chops” to mean the jaws or mouth appeared a few decades later, as we wrote in a recent post about musical “chops,” or skill. A singular use of “chop” (spelled “choip”) to mean jaw showed up in the early 1500s.

Finally, sense #4, the use of “chaps” for the leggings worn by cowboys, appeared in the late 19th century. As John Ayto explains in his Dictionary of Word Origins, the term “is short for Mexican Spanish chaparreras, a derivative of Spanish chaparro ‘evergreen oak.’ ”

Ayto adds that “they were named from their use in protecting the legs of riders from the low thick scrub that grows in Mexico and Texas (named with another derivative of chaparro, chaparral). Chaparro itself probably comes from Basque txapar, a diminutive of saphar ‘thicket.’ ”

The earliest OED example for this sense of “chaps,” which we’ve expanded, is from Baled Hay (1884), a collection of sketches by the American humorist Bill Nye:

“ ‘Chaps,’ as they are vulgarly called, deserve more than passing notice. They are made of leather with fronts of dogskin with the hair on. … ‘Chaps’ are rather attractive while the wearer is on horseback, or walking toward you, but … the seat of the garment has been postponed.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: I’m curious about the verbs “furbish” and “refurbish.” My dictionary includes both, and says either can mean to renovate. So why do we usually use “refurbish” in that sense when “furbish” would do nicely?

A: Both “furbish” and “refurbish” have meant to polish or renovate for hundreds of years, but “refurbish” is far more popular today. Up until the 1930s, though, “furbish” was more popular, and it’s made somewhat of a comeback in recent years.

As the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary explains, “ ‘Furbish’ was borrowed into English in the 14th century from Anglo-French furbiss-, a distant relative of an Old High German word meaning ‘to polish.’

“In its earliest uses, ‘furbish’ also meant ‘to polish,’ but it developed an extended sense of ‘renovate’ shortly before English speakers created ‘refurbish’ with the same meaning in the 17th century. These days ‘refurbish’ is the more common of the two words, although ‘furbish’ does continue to be used.”

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks the appearance of words or phrases in digitized books, indicates that the use of “refurbish” rose sharply in the second half of the 20th century as the use of “furbish” fell. However, “furbish” rose a bit in popularity in the early 21st century while “refurbish” fell.

Getting back to your question, we’d recommend using “refurbish.” The verb “furbish” is likely to raise eyebrows these days and send readers to their dictionaries.

As for the etymology, the verb “furbish” originally meant to “remove rust from (a weapon, armour, etc.); to brighten by rubbing, polish, burnish,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest OED example is from the Wyclife Bible of 1382: “The swerd is whettid and furbishid” (Ezekiel 21:9).

Two centuries later, Oxford says, “furbish” came to mean “to brush or clean up (anything faded or soiled); to give a new look to (an object either material or immaterial); to do or get up afresh, renovate, revive.”

Here’s the dictionary’s first example: “The Soule, which must be fayne to be, as it were, newfurbished” (from A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, a 1587 translation by Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding of a work by the French Protestant writer Philippe de Mornay).

When “refurbish” showed up in the early 17th century, according to the OED, it meant “to brighten or clean up” and then “to restore to good condition, to renovate; (now esp.) to repair and redecorate (a building, room, etc.).”

The earliest Oxford citation is from A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), compiled by Randall Cotgrave: “Refourbir, to refurbish, repolish.” The next example is more substantial:

“She made up but one Suit of Cloaths in a Year, and even that one she would get so neatly refurbished, that it would sometimes last her eighteen Months” (from Eliza Stanley’s 1736 translation of Histoire du Prince Titi, a novel by Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, pseudonym of the French freethinker Hyacinthe Cordonnier).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.

Q: You’ve defended the verbing of nouns as a process that goes back to the early days of English. What do you think of this one—a restaurant space “reconcepted into a modern tavern”?

A: Both “concepted” and “reconcepted” are occasionally seen in writing, the latter often in articles about restaurant makeovers (the quote you spotted comes from a 2016 review on Zagat.com). But the usage isn’t common.

These words are past participle forms (often used adjectivally) of a verb—to “concept”—that’s little used and largely unrecognized by lexicographers.

We checked 10 standard American and British dictionaries and found only one, Dictionary.com, that includes “concept” as a verb (none have the derivative “reconcept”).

Dictionary.com labels the use of “concept” as a verb “informal,” and says it means “to develop a concept of; conceive.” This is the example given: “He concepted and produced three films.”

In a column written more than a decade ago, the author and lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower notes that the verb “concept” has appeared occasionally in advertising-industry jargon (“Is Concept a Verb?” Slate, May 12, 2006).

He quotes an example from Adweek: “He’s the only creative person I ever met that had his ideas concepted, shot and edited the moment he presented it to you.”

Sheidlower says the usual substitute for “concept” is “conceive,” though “Ad people use concept to refer to a broader range of work than just thinking up a general idea—it’s closer to design but without the aesthetic notions usually associated with that word. (Interestingly, some engineers use the term in a similar sense.)”

He notes that the verb isn’t found in dictionaries because it “isn’t ready yet.” He adds, “When it is, it’ll get put in.” Apparently, the word still isn’t ready. The leading dictionary publishers haven’t decreed it common enough, and judging by our research it hasn’t entered everyday usage.

Most of the examples we’ve found have been from press releases, trade publications, and promotional websites of the past decade or so. We’ve found only a handful in the mainstream media, including these (note how forms of “concept” and “reconcept” are used):

“James runs a production company in Vancouver so he was up on how to concept a video” (Vancouver Sun, Dec. 6, 2018).

“Sixteen, the two-star Michelin restaurant housed in the Trump International Hotel, is closing to reconcept” (Chicago Tribune, March 21, 2018).

“As it turned out, this was the very first character Bigloo created—and he concepted it perfectly on the first try” (Forbes, March 11, 2019).

“The food mirrors the art at the newly opened and re-concepted Untitled, located inside The Whitney Museum” (HarpersBazaar.com, June 1, 2015).

We gather that in the restaurant industry, “concepting” isn’t just a matter of decor, though that’s usually involved. It means developing a theme, a menu, and a philosophy of “plating.” (Restaurateurs use “plate” as a verb. It means to put food on a plate, a usage dating to 1953.)

As we’ve said, Dictionary.com is the only standard dictionary to recognize the verb “concept.” It’s an exclusively digital dictionary, based on Random House Unabridged, that’s updated by a staff of lexicographers.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, also has an entry for “concept” as a verb, defined simply as “to conceive (in various senses).” Not one of the OED’s examples uses “concept” in the Dictionary.com sense “to develop a concept of.”

Oxford says the verb was first recorded in the early 17th century and was “rare” afterwards. The earliest known evidence is from a letter written from London on March 25, 1603, by Sir Thomas Ferrers to his brother, Sir Henry:

“The Lord Keaper, with the rest … came all to Whitt Hawlle, having at Richmond … concepted and sett downe by generall agryment this proclemation herwith sent.” (The proclamation of March 24, 1603, announced the death of Queen Elizabeth and the succession of James I.)

In that passage, “concept” is used in one of the senses of “conceive” that’s listed in the OED (“to plan, devise, or formulate”). In other citations, it takes on additional senses of “conceive” (“to become pregnant” … “form the idea of” … “comprehend” … “understand,” and so on).

The OED also has an entry for the adjective “concepted,” defined as “conceived, formed, produced.” But most of the examples are from the 17th and 18th centuries, and the dictionary says it’s “now rare.”

As for the etymology, the OED says the verb “concept” was developed partly from the post-classical Latin verb conceptare (to conceive in the womb) and partly from the 15th-century English noun “concept.”

The noun had multiple origins, too. It developed partly from the classical Latin noun conceptum (something conceived), derived from the past participle of concipere (to conceive), and partly as an alteration of the 14th-century noun “conceit,” which can also be traced to concipere and which originally meant a notion or a conception.

The dictionary’s earliest example of the noun, and the only citation from the 1400s, is from a 1479 religious treatise referring to a “sinistre, or vayne concept.” In that example, Oxford says, the word means “something conceived in the mind; a notion, idea, image, or thought.”

[Note: We wrote a post on the pronunciation of the verb “concept” in June 2019.]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation.
And check out our books about the English language.