Category: Writing

Q: We saw Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and noticed that the Italian libretto makes generous use of “hello,” notably with shouts of “Hello, Minnie!” at the saloon. I don’t see anything about “hello” on your blog. Would you like to correct this oversight?

A: We’ve discussed “goodbye” in several posts (most recently, in 2011), but we haven’t written about “hello.” What better time than now?

Despite its ubiquity today, the use of “hello” as a greeting is relatively new, dating back only to the mid-1800s, at least in writing. However, “hello” was used to attract attention or express surprise as far back as the 1820s, and its ancestors date from the 16th century.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary for “hello” used to attract attention is from the Oct. 4, 1826, issue of the Norwich (CT) Courier: “Hello, Jim! I’ll tell you what: I’ve a sharp knife and feel as if I’d like to cut up something or other.”

The first OED citation for the term used to express surprise is from a letter in the Sept. 23, 1827, issue of the U.S. Telegraph, a Washington, DC, daily: “Hello, sez Joe Laughton, wher’s Bil Perry un Olla Parsons?”

And the earliest example in the dictionary for “hello” used as a greeting is from the May 28, 1853, issue of the New York Clipper, an entertainment weekly: “Hello ole feller, how are yer?”

The first Oxford citation for “hello” used in the telephone sense is from an Aug. 15, 1877, letter by Thomas Alva Edison to T. B. A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh:

“Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What you think? Edison — P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.” (We’ve expanded the citation by going to the dictionary’s source, the October 1987 issue of Antique Phonograph Monthly.)

The OED notes that Edison “is popularly credited with instigating the practice of saying hello when answering the telephone” and “for the word’s subsequent popularity as a greeting. His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, preferred ahoy to be used.”

Etymologically, “hello” is the last in a line of similarly spelled words that can be traced back to the 1500s.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says “hello” is ultimately derived from “holla” or “hollo” (1588), a shout to attract attention, and perhaps from “holla!” (1523), an exclamation meaning “stop!” or “cease!”

Chambers seems to dismiss suggestions that the usage may have been borrowed from, or influenced by, similar terms to attract attention in Middle French (holà) and German (hallo, holla).

“The more probable explanation,” the dictionary says, “is that hello, hallo, holla and hollo are all natural formations in English and that they are parallel to natural formations in German, French and other, if not all, languages.”

By the time Puccini’s opera about the California Gold Rush had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910, with shouts of “Hello, Minnie!” ringing out, the use of “hello” as a greeting was an everyday occurrence.

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Q: After separating the recyclables into three bins and dragging them out to the street, my hubby turned to me and said he was pooped. Speaking of which, where does “pooped” come from?

A: The adjective “pooped” (or “pooped out”), meaning exhausted or worn out, showed up in the early 20th century in American English.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Sergeant Eadie (1928), Leonard H. Nason’s fictional account of an artilleryman in World War: “I haven’t had any sleep in two nights, and I’m a little poobed [sic].”

The OED inserted the bracketed “sic.” Nason, a sergeant in World War I and a lieutenant colonel in World War II, used “poobed” two other times in the book, so that’s probably what the word sounded like to him.

The next Oxford citation, from Soldiers March! (1930), a World War I novel by Theodore Fredenburgh, uses the usual spelling: “The whole outfit is too pooped to have any goldbricking.”

The OED says the adjective is derived from the somewhat earlier verb “poop” (or “poop out”), meaning to break down, stop working, or give out.

The dictionary’s earliest example for this colloquial verb is from a 1927 issue of the journal American Speech: “Poop out, fizzle.”

The OED says the origin of the verb is uncertain, but it points the reader to the verb “poof” (1915), meaning to appear or disappear like a puff of air, and the interjection “poof” (1868), an expression of such appearing or disappearing.

In case you’re curious, the adjective “pooped” is not related to the “poop” having to do with defecation.

When the verb “poop” showed up in the Middle Ages, it had nothing to do with defecating. Rather it meant, Oxford says, “to produce a short blast of sound, as with a horn; to blow, toot.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation, with the past tense “pooped” spelled “powped,” is from “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer (circa 1390):

“Of bras they broghten bemes, and of box, / Of horn, of boon, in whiche they blewe and powped” (“They brought out trumpets of brass and boxwood, / Of horn and bone, on which they blew and tooted”).

In the late 1600s, the OED says, this now-obsolete musical sense of “poop” evolved to mean, in nursery slang, to “break wind.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the farting sense of “poop” is from Richard Hogarth’s Gazophylacium Anglicanum, a 1689 etymological dictionary: “To poop, from the Belg. Poepen, to fart softly: both from the sound.”

Oxford notes that the verb “now usually” means “to defecate.” The first example is from an 1882 book by Frederick William P. Jago about the Cornish dialect: “Poop, or Poopy, to go to stool. (Said by children.)”

Since we used the noun “poop” in the title of this post to mean the latest information or the inside story, we should discuss the origin of this sense too.

The OED says this colloquial usage apparently evolved from its use in the early 1900s as cadet lingo at the US Military Academy at West Point.

The dictionary’s first citation is from the 1911 issue of Howitzer, the military academy’s yearbook: “Poop, a speech; a thing to be memorized.”

The Oxford entry for the noun includes 1904 and 1908 citations from the yearbook in which “poop” is used as a verb meaning “to memorize completely” or “to be able to quote verbatim.”

The first citation for “poop” used to mean the inside story is from the Jan, 6, 1945, issue of the New Yorker: “That’s pretty confidential poop, and it wouldn’t have done for us to tip off the Japs about our course.”

The earliest example for its use as up-to-date information is from a 1947 issue of American Speech: “The word poop, which indicated the latest information, whether official or unofficial, was also incorporated into poop sheet, denoting the latest bulletin or directive.”

In explaining the origin of the usage, the OED cites this passage from Military Customs and Traditions (1956), by Mark Mayo Boatner:

“Poop, information of any sort, usually written (on a ‘poop sheet’). Of West Point origin, probably from the fact that the cadet adjutant makes important announcements in the mess hall from a balcony known as the ‘poop deck’ (from its resemblance to a ship’s poop deck).”

When “poop” showed up as a nautical term in the late 15th century, it referred to the stern, or rear end, of a ship.

English borrowed the term from Middle French, where the stern was referred to as la poupe. The ultimate source is puppis, classical Latin for the rear or afterdeck of a ship.

The earliest example in the OED is from The Book of Fayttes [Feats] of Armes and of Chyualrye, a 1489 translation of a French work written by Christine de Pisan in 1410: “The pouppe whiche is the hindermost partye of the shippe.”

Today, the “poop” (or “poop deck,” first recorded in 1717) refers to the superstructure at the stern of a ship. This modern OED example is from The Agüero Sisters, a 1997 novel by Cristina García:

“The nebulous lights Christopher Columbus saw from the poop deck of the Santa María were probably Bermuda fireworms.”

Meanwhile, the nautical noun “poop” gave rise to a related verb in the early 18th century. A large wave was said to “poop” when it broke over a ship’s stern. This is the OED’s earliest example:

“We again scudded, altogether ignorant where we were; for a Sea which pooped us the second Day, had carried away the Binnacle with the Two Compasses.” (From A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, a 1727 satire by the pseudonymous “Captain Samuel Brunt.”)

This later fictional example is from Patrick O’Brian’s novel Thirteen-gun Salute (1989): “It was then … that we were in the greatest danger of being pooped, and broaching to.”

As we imagine struggling sailors, worn out and drenched to the skin, battling to keep their vessel afloat, we wonder: Could there be a connection between the two senses of “pooped”—being exhausted and being swamped by heavy seas? Well, it’s a compelling question, but we haven’t found any evidence of a link.

Finally, we’ll conclude with an example from the July 7, 2016, issue of the New York Post that combines nautical and excretory usages:

“New Yorkers who want to sail across the pond with Fido on the Queen Mary 2 will now be able to make their pooches feel right at home, thanks to the British cruise ship’s new kennel lounge and refurbished poop deck—which has been fitted with an authentic city fire hydrant.”

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 9, 2019.]

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Q: We’re having a big storm in Grand Rapids and I’ve battened down the hatches. I assume this originated as a nautical expression. When did it come ashore?

A: Yes, “batten down the hatches” does indeed come from seafaring lingo. The nautical expression showed up at the turn of the 19th century, and took on a figurative sense for landlubbers in the mid-20th century.

However, the story begins on land with the noun “baton,” which meant a staff or stick used as a weapon when English borrowed the term from the French bâton around 1550.

A century later, an offshoot of “baton” showed up in writing as the carpentry term “batten,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When “batten” appeared in 1658, it meant a small beam or piece of wood used to strengthen, support, or fasten. And to “batten” (1675) was to strengthen or fasten with battens.

In the 18th century, to “batten down” took on the nautical sense of to nail strips of wood (“battens”) around the edges of a tarp placed over the hatch to keep water out.

The noun appeared first. The earliest written example in the OED is from An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769), by William Falconer:

“The battens serve to confine the edges of the tarpaulings close down to the sides of the hatches.”

The earliest example we’ve found for the expression “batten down the hatches” is from Vocabulaire des Termes de Marine, a 1799 French-English dictionary of sailing terms published in Paris.

The dictionary translates “to batten down the hatches” as “mettre des listeaux aux panneaux des écoutilles.”

The identical translation appeared soon afterward in a general French-English dictionary published in London, Abel Boyer’s Royal College Dictionary (20th ed., 1802).

In a few decades, the expression was appearing regularly in accounts of storms at sea.

Here’s an example from A Brief Narrative of an Unsuccessful Attempt to Reach Repulse Bay, an 1824 account of the voyage by Capt. George F. Lyon of the Royal Navy:

“These soon wetted every one thoroughly, and the lower deck was flooded before we could batten down the hatches.”

The OED hasn’t yet updated its entry for “batten down the hatches.” The dictionary’s earliest example is from One False, Both Fair, an 1883 novel by John B. Harwood:

“Batten down the hatches—quick, men.” (Serialized in Chambers’s Journal, London. The quotation appeared in the Jan. 13, 1883, issue.)

We haven’t discussed “hatch,” a very old word that the OED says was “inherited from Germanic.” In Old English, it meant a half-door or gate, or part of a divided door.  Since then, “hatch” has had many meanings associated with openings or entries.

The first nautical use came along in the middle to late 1300s, when “hatches” were movable planks forming the floor of a ship, above the hold.

Soon afterward, the OED says, a “hatch” in a ship came to mean “a trapdoor or grated framework covering an opening on a deck.”

The earliest OED citation is “brystis the hetches” (the Middle English can be translated as “break open the hatches”). It’s found in a translation, dated around 1440 and perhaps earlier, of the poem Morte Arthure.

The noun “hatch” has been used this way on boats ever since. And that nautical meaning, used figuratively, gave us the 20th-century drinking expression “down the hatch” (that is, down the throat).

Getting back to your question, the OED doesn’t discuss the figurative use of “batten down the hatches,” though it has one recent example in a discussion of “lock up your daughters,” a humorous reference to the arrival of a sexy man:

“Batten down the hatches, lock up your daughters, tie down the bassbins: this is a monster of a drum’n’bass affair” (from the Aug. 25, 2004, issue of Time Out).

The earliest figurative example we’ve found is from an article about hurricane forecasts, in the February 1955 issue of the Bulletin of the General Contractors Association, published in New York:

“ ‘Batten down the hatches!’ will be a general cry next summer and many summers to come, and it will be only a part of the new verbiage that contractors will add to their vocabulary.”

And here’s an example from Woman in Levi’s, a 1967 memoir by Eulalia Bourne, a rancher and schoolteacher in Arizona:

“I hurried my horse in an effort to get home, batten down the hatches, and give welcome to the rain. It outraced us.”

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Q: I just finished reading your dispatch about whether a “blown rose” is in bloom or has finished blooming. I’m surmising the adjective “blowsy” is related to the “past-its-prime” meaning of “blown.” Yes?

A: Etymological bloodhounds have tracked the adjective “blowsy” (sometimes spelled “blowzy”) to the noun “blowze,” but the scent ends there. Here’s what little we know—and what else we suspect—about these two words.

Let’s begin with “blowze,” which originally meant a farmer’s wife when it showed up in the 1500s, but later came to mean a beggar woman or a prostitute, as well as a woman who’s pudgy, red-faced, or scruffy.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary for the noun (spelled “blouse”) is from Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry Vnited to as Many of Good Huswiferie, a 1573 book by Thomas Tusser:

“Whiles Gillet his blouse, is a milking thy kow: sir Hew, is a rigging, thy gate or the plow.”

The OED says “blowze” is “of unknown origin,” but adds, “Perhaps originally a cant term”—that is, insider dialect. The dictionary also notes similar “Dutch and Low German words with the sense of ‘red’ or ‘flushed.’ ”

Oxford goes on to say that “some of the uses appear to be influenced” by the verb “blow” used in the sense of moving air. It doesn’t give any details, but this may refer to the inflated face of a chubby woman or the wind-blown hair of one who’s disheveled.

The OED editors apparently don’t believe that the verb “blow” used in the blooming sense influenced the noun “blowze” or the adjective “blowsy.”

However, this plump, ruddy example from Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus (1594) caught our attention: “Sweete blowse you are a beautious blossome sure.”

We’ll leave “blowze” with this example of the noun used to mean a beggar woman or prostitute:

“His bonny Blouze or dainty doxie, being commonly a collapsed Tinkers wife, or some high way commodity, taken up upon trust” (from The Whimzies, a 1631 book of character sketches by Richard Brathwait.)

When the adjective “blowsy” showed up in the 1700s, it meant “dishevelled, frowzy, slatternly,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest example uses the adjective to describe a man’s messy hair: “Long his beard, and blouzy hair.” (From “The Barber,” circa 1770, a parody by Thomas Erskine in the form of an ode.)

The OED says the adjective soon took on the additional sense of “having a bloated face; red and coarse-complexioned; flushed-looking.”

The dictionary’s first citation for this sense is in a Dec. 8, 1778, letter from Samuel Crisp to the novelist Fanny Burney:

“Thinking herself too ruddy & blowsy, it was her Custom to bleed herself.” (Crisp, a family friend, addresses Burney as “My dear Fannikin.”)

Finally, a disheveled example from Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice. Here Miss Bingley is abusing Elizabeth Bennet (behind her back, naturally) for walking through muddy fields to see her ailing sister Jane at Netherfield:

“Why must she be scampering about the country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair, so untidy, so blowsy!”

In case you’re wondering, “blowze” and “blowsy” are not related to the “blouse” that one wears, despite similar spellings above. English borrowed “blouse” in the early 1800s from French, where it referred to a blue workman’s shirt.

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Q: In your recent post about “cold feet,” you refer to a character in Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus as a “font of academic gobbledygook.” Don’t you mean “fount”?

A: Both “font” and “fount” are derived from the Latin fons (a spring or fountain) and its combining form, font-. One figurative meaning of both “font” and “fount” in American dictionaries is a source of something.

That said, we didn’t intend to use “font” in our post. Although both words can mean a source in standard American English, we use “fount” for that sense and have changed it on the blog. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

“Fount” is the traditional usage for this figurative sense, and the only one considered standard in British dictionaries. The UK version of Oxford Dictionaries online, for example, considers “font” a variant when used to mean a source.

However, a page on the Oxford Dictionaries blog hints that the situation may be changing, even though a poll of its readers supports the traditional usage:

“The standard accepted form is fount of knowledge, and this was also the term chosen by the majority of voters in our poll (67%) despite the Oxford English Corpus suggesting that font of knowledge is now the more common form.”

The corpus, a database of contemporary English that includes nearly 2.1 billion words, surveys web pages and printed text in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and the rest of the English-speaking world.

Our own searches of the even larger NOW Corpus at Brigham Young University had similar results. NOW (for “news on the web”) contains 4.2 billion words used by web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present.

Now, let’s look at the history of these words.

“Font,” the older of the English terms, originally meant (and still does) a “receptacle, usually of stone, for the water used in the sacrament of baptism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The ecclesiastical Latin is font-em or fontes baptismi.

The earliest OED citation for “font” (fante in Old English) is from the Canons of Ælfric, a pastoral letter written around 1000 by the English abbot Ælfric of Eynsham:

“Ne do man nænne ele to þam fante” (Ælfric here is explaining the proper use of oil, ele, with a baptismal font.)

When the word “fount” showed up nearly six centuries later, it meant a spring. It apparently developed as a shortening of “fountain,” which appeared in writing in the early 1400s as fownteyne, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. (“Fountain,” like “font,” ultimately comes from the Latin fons, for a spring or fountain.)

The OED’s earliest example of “fount” is from “The Rape of Lucrece,” a 1594 poem by Shakespeare. We’ve expanded the citation to convey the flavor of the poem:

Why should the worme intrude the maiden bud?
Or hatefull Kuckcowes hatch in Sparrows nests?
Or Todes infect faire founts with venome mud?
Or tyrant follie lurke in gentle brests?

By the early 1600s, “fount” was being used figuratively to mean a source. The first OED example is from an English translation of “Eclogue IV,” a Latin poem by Virgil:

“From this fount did all those mischiefes flow.” (In Michael Drayton’s Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall, circa 1605.)

Soon, “font” was being used to mean “fount” in the sense of a spring, as in this OED example from Coryate’s Crudities, a 1611 collection of travel writing by Thomas Coryate: “Delicate fonts and springes.”

In the 1700s and 1800s, English writers began using “font” figuratively to mean a source, though “fount” was more common in this sense, according to our database searches.

Here’s an example from “Childish Recollections,” an 1806 poem by Byron:

Friend of my heart, and foremost of the list
Of those with whom I lived supremely blest,
Oft have we drain’d the font of ancient lore;
Though drinking deeply, thirsting still the more.

We should note here that in typography, the British generally use “fount” and Americans “font” to refer to a typeface, a usage that showed up in the late 1600s.

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Q: When did we change from saying “around the world” to “across the world”? Doesn’t “across” contradict our notion that the world is round?

A: “Across” doesn’t always mean in a straight line. It can also mean distributed “throughout, all over, in all or many parts,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Similarly, “around” doesn’t just mean encircling something. It can also mean in “every direction from a central point; on every side, all about.”

So we see nothing wrong with the phrase “across the world.” (We also have no quibble with “across the globe,” and “globe” implies roundness even more than “world,” since Earth isn’t a perfect sphere.)

As for actual usage, “around the world” is overwhelmingly more popular than “across the world,” according to a comparison of the two phrases in the millions of books tracked by Google’s Ngram Viewer.

As you can see, “around” leaves “across” in the dust and continues to trend upward in the latest results. Breakdowns of British and American English show much the same results.

For the bigger picture—use on the Internet up until today—simple Google searches also show “around the world” is way ahead: And for what it’s worth, “around the globe” leads “across the globe.”

So whether people are talking about the world or the globe, they prefer “around” to “across.” But as we said, there’s nothing wrong with “across” in this context.

The Ngram comparison we mentioned above shows that both “around the world” and “across the world” are found in writing published since at least as far back as 1800.

In our own searches, we haven’t found any examples of “across the world” older than 1800, but we found “around the world” in an obscure play first acted in 1680.

Here’s the rather overwrought passage, from Elkanah Settle’s tragedy Fatal Love: or, The Forc’d Inconstancy:

Nay, tho you scatter all my sprinkled Ashes
Around the World, each Atom of my Dust
Shall find a Soul, and flye into his Bosom.

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Q: I recently came across a blogger’s statement that “there is a plethora of entries” for derogatory terms in dictionaries. My ear tells me it should read “there are a plethora of entries.” Am I right?

A: You’re right—and so is the blogger.

“Plethora” is a singular noun, like “plenitude” or “abundance,” so it’s quite normal to write “there is a plethora of,” no matter what comes after “of.”

However, it’s also quite normal to use “plethora” with a plural verb like “are.”

It all depends on whether the writer views the plethora as a collection of things or as the things in the collection.

This is called notional agreement—agreement based on a writer’s meaning rather than on grammatical form.

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, when the subject of a verb is “a plethora of followed by a plural noun,” then “notional agreement holds sway.”

“Writers who view the plethora as a lump use a singular verb; those who view it as a collection of discrete items use a plural verb,” Merriam-Webster’s adds.

So the writer of your sentence viewed “plethora of entries” as a “lump” rather than as the “discrete items” making up the lump.

We’ve discussed notional agreement several times on the blog, including posts in 2016, 2013, and 2012.

“Plethora” has an interesting history in English. It first showed up in 16th-century medical usage, where a “plethora” meant an excess of fluid in the body, especially an accumulation of blood.

Not until the 17th century did “plethora” begin to acquire more general, nonmedical meanings.

In both medieval Latin and ancient Greek, plethora meant fullness, medically or in general, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Greek verbs meaning to fill or to be full are the ultimate source.

The French adopted the medical term (as pléthore) in the 1530s. The English “plethora” may have been influenced by French or it may have come directly from Latin or Greek.

At any rate, the earliest OED example of “plethora” in English is from John Banister’s A Needefull, New and Necessarie Treatise of Chyrurgerie (1575). We’ve inserted medical definitions in the citation:

“In curing these kyndes of Ulcers, the causes must first be diligently searched, to witte whether it be Plethora [excess of fluids], Cacochymia [diseased fluids], or Cachexia [wasting].”

The medical sense of “plethora” has lasted into our own time. Here’s a modern OED example: “patients with congestive heart failure and inferior vena cava plethora” (from the journal Clinical Cardiology, 2000).

The figurative use of “plethora” as a glut of something bad began turning up in the mid-1600s. Here’s an example from Joseph Beaumont’s drama Psyche (1648):

“Whose never-failing Virtue did displace / Griefs vast Plethora which had her opprest.”

In the early 1800s, the figurative sense began mellowing and by the end of the century “plethora” was appearing “more usually” in neutral and positive ways, according to the OED.

Now, the dictionary says, it usually conveys a “neutral or favourable sense: a very large amount, quantity, or variety.”

Here’s a positive example from a fashion article in the August 1882 issue of Ballou’s Monthly Magazine (Boston): “There is a perfect plethora of white and twine-colored thick muslin.”

In this sporting example from the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911, the word is either neutral or positive: “Of [yacht] races there was a plethora; indeed no fewer than 400 matches took place.”

Finally, here’s a clearly positive example from The Long View, a 1956 novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard: “An attractive woman will automatically collect a plethora of men.”

Some usage commentators still insist that a “plethora” is not just an abundance, but an undesirable overabundance. However, a plethora of historical evidence contradicts this.

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Q: While playing oboe for a D’Oyly Carte tour, I heard that Little Buttercup may really mean “disassembled” when she tells the Boatswain in Pinafore that she has “dissembled.” Have you ever come across this alternate definition?

A: Does Little Buttercup use “dissembled” to mean “disassembled” in H.M.S. Pinafore after the Boatswain describes her as “the rosiest, the roundest, and the reddest beauty in all Spithead”?

Red, am I? and round—and rosy! Maybe, for I have dissembled well! But hark ye, my merry friend—hast ever thought that beneath a gay and frivolous exterior there may lurk a canker-worm which is slowly but surely eating its way into one’s very heart?

One could perhaps make a case that Buttercup is using “dissembled” here to mean “disassembled,” but we wouldn’t make it.

Although the verb “dissemble” did indeed once mean “disassemble,” the Oxford English Dictionary has only one example for the usage—from the late 1500s or early 1600s.

And in our searches of literary databases, we couldn’t find any examples for the usage from the late 19th century, when W. S. Gilbert wrote the words and Arthur Sullivan the music for the comic opera.

It seems perfectly clear to us that Little Buttercup has indeed “dissembled” in the usual way—she’s disguised her true feelings by putting a happy face on the remorse eating at her heart.

And in a duet with the Captain, she uses that sense of “dissemble” several times, as in this example: “Though to catch my drift he’s striving, / I’ll dissemble—I’ll dissemble.”

Interestingly, the verb “disassemble” was rarely seen before the 20th century, and Gilbert may not have been aware of it when he wrote the libretto for the opera, which opened in London in 1878.

Standard dictionaries didn’t have entries for “disassemble” until well into the 20th century, and the earliest modern citation for it in the OED is from the 1920s, though we’ve found some 19th-century examples in our searches.

Now, let’s assemble the history of these words.

The first to show up in English, “dissemble,” is an alteration of the earlier (and now obsolete) verb “dissimule,” which was borrowed from the Old French dissimuler (to hide one’s intentions) in the 14th century, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The ultimate source is the Latin dissimulāre (to disguise or conceal). The Latin verb combines dis- (completely) with simulāre (to pretend), Chambers adds.

(Dissimulāre is also the source of “dissimulate,” to conceal one’s feelings, and “dissimulation.”)

Why did “dissimule” morph into “dissemble”? The OED suggests that the transformation was “influenced perhaps by resemble.”

The first citation for the “dissemble” spelling in the OED is from Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (1513-18):

“Some … not able to dissemble theyr sorow, were faine at his backe to turne their face to the wall.” More’s history was the main source for Shakespeare’s Richard III, according to scholars.

Oxford defines “dissemble” as to “alter or disguise the semblance of (one’s character, a feeling, design, or action) so as to conceal, or deceive as to, its real nature; to give a false or feigned semblance to; to cloak or disguise by a feigned appearance.”

As for the old use of “dissemble” to mean “disassemble,” the OED describes it as rare and obsolete. It defines this sense as to “separate, disperse: = disassemble,” and traces the usage to the Old French dessembler (to separate).

The only Oxford citation for this sense of “dissemble” is from a memoir by Sir Jerome Horsey, a British diplomat, about his travels in Russia during the late 1500s:

“The chieff bishops … assembled and disembled often tymes together, much perplexed and devided.” The dictionary says the citation was written sometime before 1626, and appears in a version of the memoir edited by E. A. Bond in 1856.

As to “disassemble,” Oxford has an obsolete sense from the early 1600s, but the first example for the word in its usual modern sense (“to take to pieces, to take apart”) is from a 1922 collection of short stories:

“This generating plant was partly disassembled.” The OED doesn’t cite the author or publisher of the story.

However, we’ve found several 19th-century examples for “disassemble,” including this one from an 1893 report to Congress by the Secretary of the Navy:

“The breech mechanism was disassembled and thoroughly examined immediately after this firing and found to be cool and comparatively clean, what little dirt there was having come from the leaky primer test.”

The usage must have been uncommon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, since we didn’t find entries for “disassemble” in An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), The Century Dictionary (1889-91), or Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913).

However, the verb “assemble,” the opposite of “disassemble,” has been around since the Middle Ages. The earliest example in the OED is from The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (1297):

“And amorwe hem lete asemly wyþ mylde herte ynou” (“And in the morning let them assemble with enough mercy in their hearts”). Oxford notes that the Middle English “asemly” was misprinted as “asely” in the manuscript.

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[Note: This post was updated on Nov. 1, 2021.]

Q: Is there a connection between the noun “egg” and the expression “egged on”?

A: No, the “egg” in the phrasal verb “egg on,” as in “Please don’t egg him on,” didn’t come from a chicken. It’s a different word entirely—no yolk! Shell we proceed? (OK, no more egg jokes, we promise.)

This particular “egg” was once a verb meaning to incite or provoke. Dating from around 1200 in early Middle English, it has since died away and now exists only as part of the phrase “egg on,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The other “egg,” the noun for the ovoid reproductive body, was recorded as long ago as 805, when it was ǽg in Old English, the dictionary says.

The only connection is that English acquired both words “egg” largely from Old Norse, a language that had separate but lookalike (and unrelated) words egg. Our obsolete verb is from the Old Norse noun egg (meaning an edge or blade), which is derived from the verb eggja (to incite or goad). Our other “egg” is related to the Old Norse noun egg (meaning the reproductive body).

[On May 12, 2017, a Norwegian-American reader wrote to point out that in modern Norwegian, egge means to “incite,” “urge,” or “egg on.”]

Ultimately, each Norse egg has its own distinct source in prehistory, before written language. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots traces the sharp-edged, bladelike egg to an ancient Indo-European root reconstructed as ak- (sharp), and the reproductive egg to a different root, awi- (bird), source of the English “avian,” “aviary,” “aviation,” etc.

The bare verb “egg,” before “on” was added, was first recorded in English around 1200.

The earliest OED citation, which we’ll expand for context, is from Trinity College Homilies, a collection held at the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The passage is a reference to Job: “gief [he hadde] werred wið god alse þe deuel him to eggede” (“if [he had] warred with God as the devil egged him to do”).

And this Oxford example is from Hali Meidenhad (Holy Maidenhood), another religious homily written around the same time: “& eggeð þe to brudlac” (“and egged thee to bridelock”). The archaic “bridelock” meant marriage or a wedding ceremony.

The OED defines “egg” here as to “incite, encourage, urge on; to provoke, tempt.” At first, the dictionary says, people were simply “egged” to do something (or were “egged” by others). It wasn’t until the 16th century that they were “egged on.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the phrasal verb is from A Medicinable Morall (1566), by Thomas Drant, the first English translation of Horace’s Satirae, a collection of satirical poems: “Ile egge them on to speake some thyng, / Whiche spoken may repent them.”

As we mentioned, the old verb “egg” is now defunct, though its ghost lurks in the fixed expression “egg on.”

Now for the noun “egg,” which most of us associate with breakfast. It’s defined in the OED as “the (more or less) spheroidal body produced by the female of birds and other animal species, and containing the germ of a new individual, enclosed within a shell or firm membrane.”

The earliest citation in the OED, recorded in the Old English plural ægera, is from a land grant generally known as Oswulf’s Charter and dated from 805:

“gif hit ðonne festendæg sie, selle mon unege cæsu and fisces and butran and ægera” (“if it then be a fast-day, they are to give a wey of cheese, and fish, butter and eggs”). From a gift of land by a wealthy Kent alderman, Oswulf, and his wife, Beornthryth, to Christ Church in Canterbury in exchange for masses and ceremonies remembering them.

The word also appears in Metres of Boethius, an Old English translation (probably done between 880 and 950) of the verse sections of Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman scholar Boethius: “On æge bið gioleca on middan” (“In an egg there’s a yolk in the middle”).

The first written example with a more familiar spelling (with “eggs” spelled “egges”) is from Piers Plowman (1377), William Langland’s allegorical poem:

“And ȝet me merueilled more how many other briddes / Hudden and hileden her egges ful derne / In mareys and mores for men sholde hem nouȝt fynde” (“And yet I found myself marveling more at the many other birds / That hid and covered their eggs in secret spots / In marshes and moorland so men should not find them”). We’ve expanded the citation to add context.

[An aside: The “egg” that means to cover or pelt with egg is a mid-19th-century invention. The dictionary’s earliest written use for the culinary meaning (to coat with egg or an eggy mixture), dates from 1834. The earliest for the vandalizing sense (to throw eggs at someone or something, like a house at Halloween), is from 1857.]

Finally, a few words about the English word “edge,” which has a finger in this pie.

The English noun “edge” first referred to the sharp edge of a blade, while the verb originally meant to sharpen a blade. Some of the early spellings of “edge” reflected the word’s Old Norse origin in egg (the noun for an edge or blade).

The first OED example for the noun (ecge in Old English) is from Beowulf, which may have been written as early as 725:

“Breostnet broden Þæt gebearh feore wið ord ond wið ecge ingang forstod” (“The mesh of mail that saved his life stood fast against point and edge”).

The first example for the noun’s usual modern sense (“the line which forms the boundary of any surface”) is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe. His instructional manual for the device used in astronomy was written sometime before 1400:

“And sett þou þere þe degre of þe mone according wiþ þe egge of þe label” (“And set thou there the degree of the Moon with the edge of the label”). A “label” was a narrow metal rule that revolved across the face of an astrolabe.

The verb “edge”was recorded early on, before the year 800, with a meaning that’s now obsolete. Yes, it meant the same thing as the old English verb “egg,” to incite, goad, provoke, and so on. It was also used literally (as egide in Old English) to mean “harrow,” that is, to plough or cut into the soil.

A meaning that’s not obsolete today is simply “give an edge to” (an ax, blade, etc.).

The OED’s earliest citation for that sense of the verb is from The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (1297): “I-egged yt [the sword] ys in on alf” (“I sharpened it on one side”).

In the 16th century, the verb “edge” took on the modern sense of “to furnish with a border or edging.”

The dictionary’s first example, from a 1555 translation of a book by the Italian historian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, describes a helmet “edged with belles and plates of golde, and vnder euery bell two knobbes of golde.” (We’ve expanded the citation to add more of the decorative edging.)

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Q: Where do you stand on the debate in academia over whether Jane Austen winkingly used the name “Fanny Price” for her Mansfield Park heroine?

A: There’s no chance that Jane Austen was slyly winking at her readers when she used that name in Mansfield Park (1814).

The British use of “fanny” to mean the female genitalia (here in the US it means the buttocks) didn’t appear until Austen had been dead for 20 years.

And if she had been familiar with this use of “fanny,” she wouldn’t have used it for such a shy, upright, and conscientious character as Fanny Price.

The feminine name “Fanny,” a diminutive of “Frances,” was very common in England at the time Austen was writing. Before the slang usages came along, “Fanny” was no more suggestive than “Annie.”

“Frances” was the feminine version of the men’s name “Francis,” and it used to be very popular in both Britain and the United States.

Many famous and admired women were officially named “Frances” and known by the pet name “Fanny” from the 16th through the early 20th centuries.

Popular authors included Fanny Burney (1752-1840), and Fanny Trollope (1779-1863), Anthony’s mother. Well-known actresses included Fanny Kemble (1809-93) and Fanny Brice (1891-1951).

All of them had been given the formal name “Frances” except for Brice, who was originally named Fania Borach.

However, “Fannie” was the original name of the American cooking expert and food writer Fannie Farmer (1857-1915). Her name was borrowed with a different spelling in 1919 by the candy company Fanny Farmer.

In his book Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538-1700, Scott Smith-Bannister writes that “Frances” held a mean ranking of 17.8 in a selected list of women’s names that were popular during that 162-year period.

At its peak during that period, “Frances” was ranked 13, Smith-Bannister says. (In case you’re interested, the names generally ranked ahead of Frances in Smith-Banister’s statistics were Elizabeth, Mary, Anne, Margaret, Jane, Alice, Joan, Agnes, Catherine, Dorothy, Isabel, Elinor, and Ellen.)

In “New Influences on Naming Patterns in Victorian Britain,” a 2016 paper, Amy M. Hasfjord classifies “Frances” and “Fanny” among England’s “classic” names.

Her statistical ranking places “Frances” 13th among names given to girl babies born between 1825 and 1840.

However, Hasfjord says both “Frances” and “Fanny” dropped in popularity during the period from 1885 to 1900.

In the United States, meanwhile, surveys of the popularity of “Fanny” show that the use of the name dwindled from a peak in 1880 to relatively uncommon in 1940.

In both cases—British and American usage—it seems that the name “Fanny” dropped in popularity just as the slang word “fanny” increased in common usage.

In British English, “fanny” was first used in writing to mean “the vulva or vagina” in the late 1830s, according to The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

Jonathan Lighter, author of the slang dictionary, cites a collection entitled Bawdy Songs of the Music Hall (1835-40): “I’ve got a little fanny / That with hairs is overspread.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example is from an 1879 issue of a pornographic magazine published in London, The Pearl: “You shan’t look at my fanny for nothing.”

And a British slang dictionary published in 1889 defined “fanny” as “the fem. pud.” (the female pudenda).

This genital usage is “always rare” in the US, Random House says. As an exception, both the OED and Random House cite the American writer Erica Jong, who used it in her novel Fanny (1980):

“ ‘Madam Fanny,’ says he, obliging me, but with the same ironick Tone. ‘D’ye know what that means in the Vulgar Tongue? … It means the Fanny-Fair … the Divine Monosyllable, the Precious Pudendum.”

However, Jong’s novel is an inventive retelling of John Cleland’s bawdy English classic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49), popularly known as Fanny Hill after its main character.

We suspect that Jong’s imaginative take on Fanny Hill as well as speculation, since debunked, by the slang etymologist Eric Partridge may be responsible for the myth in academia that “fanny” meant the vagina in Cleland’s time.

In the original, 1937 edition of his slang dictionary, Partridge wrote that the use of “fanny” for the “female pudenda” was from “ca. 1860,” but was “perhaps ex Fanny, the ‘heroine’ of John Cleland’s Memoirs of Fanny Hill [sic], 1749.”

However, the 2015 edition of Partridge’s dictionary notes that Fanny Hill’s “publication in 1749 is about a hundred years before ‘fanny’ came to be used in this sense.” (From The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor.)

Two other slang dictionaries—those by Lighter and Jonathon Green—call the reader’s attention to Fanny Hill but date the slang usage from the mid-1830s or later.

So why mention Fanny Hill in connection with the usage? The only apparent reason is that the novel’s leading character is promiscuous and is named “Fanny.” Cleland might just as well have called his protagonist “Eliza Hill.”

Nevertheless a handful of academic writers have strained to establish an 18th-century history for the usage, based on guesswork or intuition from hindsight. Their claims have been often repeated, despite the lack of any direct evidence.

A pair of literary scholars demolished their case piece by piece in 2011.

“In fact the evidence is to the contrary,” Patrick Spedding and James Lambert write in their paper “Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy,” published in the journal Studies in Philology.

They write, for example, that the terms “Fanny Fair” and “Fanny the fair” were used in 18th-century songs, “but never in an obscene context or as a synonym for vagina.”

We won’t detail their arguments, but they painstakingly document actual historical uses of the term and conclude that “fanny” was not used as a sexual term until 1837, citing the same book of music-hall songs mentioned above.

“Consequently,” they write, “it is highly unlikely that any of the fictional Fannys were named with the intention of suggesting the female sexual organs, however specified or identified (vagina, genitalia, pudenda, vulva, mons veneris, or mons pubis), or the male or female buttocks.”

“Current usage rather than eighteenth-century usage is the basis of the interpretation of fanny as a sexual term,” they write.

The milder, American sense of “fanny,” meaning the derrière, apparently dates from World War I, according to Random House. Here is the slang dictionary’s earliest example:

“They made us all get in a circle and stoop over while a guy ran around and hit us on the—never mind where—with a strap—I believe they call the game ‘Bat the Fanny’ and they sure did bat me.” (From a diary entry in a regimental history, 12th U.S. Infantry, 1798-1918, published in 1919.)

The OED’s earliest example is from the hit Broadway play The Front Page (1928), by Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur. Here’s the OED citation, which we’ve expanded for context:

“KRUGER. (To MOLLIE, who is in the swivel chair in front of the desk) What’s the idea, Mollie? Can’t you flop somewhere else?

“MURPHY. Yah, parking her fanny in here like it was her house.”

This milder usage soon caught on in Britain. The term was used in the same way by the British playwright Noël Coward in Private Lives (1930): “You’d fallen on your fanny a few moments before.”

Subsequently, the OED has examples of the “buttocks” sense of the word by both British and American writers.

Here’s the American poet Ezra Pound in The Pisan Cantos (1948): “And three small boys on three bicycles / smacked her young fanny in passing.”

And here’s the British novelist Nevil Shute in Trustee From the Toolroom (1960): “I’d never be able to think of John and Jo again if we just sat tight on our fannies and did nothing.”

In short, although there are exceptions, the OED still characterizes the “fanny” that means genitals as “chiefly British English” and the one that means the butt as “chiefly US.”

In case you’re wondering, the OED also labels the noun “fanny pack” (first recorded in 1971) as a North American usage, the equivalent of the British “bumbag” (1951).

Oxford’s definition, found under “bumbag,” is “a small bag or pouch incorporated in a belt worn round the waist or across the shoulder (orig. designed for skiers and worn at the back).”

A similar term, “fanny belt” was in American use almost a decade before “fanny pack” and today means the same.

Oxford’s earliest citation is from the journal American Speech in 1963, when the term had a more limited definition: “Fanny belt … slang for the belt on which ski patrol men carry their first aid kit. A term used by ski patrols.”

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Q: My mother used to use the expression “like a death’s head at a feast” to describe a particularly disagreeable person at a social function. I use it myself, from time to time, much to the amusement of my adult children. Can you shed any light on the origin of this expression?

A: A death’s head, as you’re undoubtedly aware, is a representation of the human skull that’s a symbol of mortality. The symbol has embellished jewelry, paintings, sculpture, tombstones, and so on since the Middle Ages.

In fact, people have worn death’s head rings since at least the 1500s as a reminder of mortality, or memento mori.

As far as we can tell, the expression used by your mother first showed up in writing in the early 1700s, but it hasn’t shown up very often. We’ve found only a few dozen examples in our searches of literary archives.

The earliest example we’ve seen is from an amusing anecdote about a fancy-dress, or costume, ball, in the Sept. 7, 1713, issue of the Guardian, a short-lived newspaper founded by Richard Steele:

“In the middle of the first Room I met with one drest in a Shrowd. This put me in mind of the old Custom of serving up a Death’s Head at a Feast. I was a little angry at the Dress, and asked the Gentleman whether he thought a Dead Man was fit Company for such an Assembly; but he told me that he was one who loved his Mony, and that he considered this Dress would serve him another time.”

And here’s an example from Denis Duval, an unfinished novel that William Makepeace Thackeray was working on when he died in 1863: “His appearance at the Count’s little suppers was as cheerful as a death’s-head at a feast.”

The Oxford English Dictionary includes the Thackeray citation in its discussion of “death’s head,” but the OED doesn’t explain the origin of the full expression. And we couldn’t find anything about it in any of the reference works, online or off, that we usually consult.

However, the expression has clearly been used the way your mother used it—to describe a killjoy at a social event—as in this example from Lodore, an 1835 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:

“She looked strangely grim and out of place among all those merry young people at the wedding breakfast—like death’s head at a feast, as they say, and she had a certain dignified air of disapprobation at times on her countenance, when she  looked at my dear, sweet Miss Thornhaugh, which made me hate her—such a contrast to her brother!”

The OED does discuss the origin of two similar expressions, “a skeleton at the feast” and “a skeleton at the banquet,” which the dictionary defines as “a reminder of serious or saddening things in the midst of enjoyment; a source of gloom or depression.”

Oxford describes the “skeleton” versions as an “allusion to the practice of the ancient Egyptians, as recorded by Plutarch in his Moralia,” a collection of writings about morality.

In “The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men,” a section in the Moralia, the first-century Greek scholar writes:

“Now the skeleton which in Egypt they are wont, with fair reason, to bring in and expose at their parties, urging the guests to remember that what it is now, they soon shall be, although it is an ungracious and unseasonable companion to be introduced at a merry-making, yet has a certain timeliness, even if it does not incline the guests to drinking and enjoyment, but rather to a mutual friendliness and affection, and if it urges upon them that life, which is short in point of time, should not be made long by evil conduct.”

(We’ve used the Loeb Classical Library’s translation of the Moralia.)

The earliest OED example for a “skeleton” expression is from Guy Livingstone, an 1857 novel by the British writer and barrister George Alfred Lawrence: “The skeleton of ennui sat at these dreary feasts; and it was not even crowned with roses.”

The dictionary’s latest example is from A Lonely Girl, an 1896 novel by the Irish writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford: “To give him leisure to act the skeleton at the feast.”

We’ll end with a more recent example from The Masters, a 1951 novel by C. P. Snow about the contested election for a new head at a Cambridge college:

“I don’t want to be a skeleton at the feast, because I’ve been feeling very gratified myself, but I think it would be remiss not to remind you that the thing’s still open.”

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Q: I’ve noticed that “hop” and “hops” seem to be used interchangeably. Thus the “Hop Growers of America” have a report entitled “USA Hops.” And “hopped” and “hopping” appear on beer menus regularly, as well as expressions like “a high-hops pale ale.” I  would be interested in your take on the “hop” family.

A: As any brewmaster can tell you, the noun “hop” can refer either to the plant Humulus lupulus or to the greenish conelike flower it produces. And the plural “hops” can mean multiple plants or multiple flowers.

But the flowers, which are dried and used in making beer, are generally referred to in the plural, “hops,” because we seldom have occasion to refer to only one.

So “hops” are what grow on the plant known as a “hop,” just as “roses” grow on on the plant known as a “rose.”

The noun “hop,” in its botanical sense, came into English in the 1400s from the term for it in Middle Dutch (hoppe), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. No history of the word is known before medieval times, and its further origin is obscure, the OED says.

However, the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology points to a prehistoric Proto-Germanic source, a word reconstructed as hup-nan, ultimately from an Indo-European base, keup– or kup-.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots says this base meant “cluster, tuft, hair of the head,” and identifies it as the source of the English “sheaf” as well as “hop,” a plant having a “tuftlike” flower.

The word appeared in Middle English not long after the large-scale use of hops as a beer flavoring was perfected and had spread to England’s trade partners Holland and Flanders, according to A History of Beer and Brewing (2003), by Ian Spencer Hornsey.

People had been making beer since ancient times, but it probably wasn’t flavored with hops until the Middle Ages, according to evidence cited by Hornsey and others

“Certainly by 1300, hops were widely cultivated in northern Europe,” Hornsey writes, “and it is almost impossible to imagine that, with the level of trade between English and the Low Countries the knowledge of their usefulness in brewing was not appreciated by English brewers, even though they did not encompass their use immediately.”

The first uses of “hop” and “hops” in written English are references to the flowers.

The OED’s earliest known example is from the Promptorium Parvulorum, an English-Latin dictionary from around 1440, which renders the plant humulus as “Hoppe, sede [seed] for beyre.”

All the dictionary’s later references to the flower are in the plural, as in this poem from as early as 1500: “When I was a brewer longe / With hoopes I made my ale stronge.”

This 1503 example gives proportions for making beer from malt, wheat, oats, and hops: “x. quarters malte, ij. quarters wheet, ij. quarters ootes, xl. ll weight of hoppys. To make lx. barellz of sengyll beer.” (From the Chronicle of Richard Arnold, a merchant.)

But this example from 1542 has a slightly different recipe, along with an editorial comment. It comes from a physician who recommended ale (which at that time was made without hops) but opposed beer:

“Ale for an Englyssheman is a naturall drynke. …  Barly malte maketh better Ale than Oten malte or any other corne doth. … It maketh a man strong. Bere is made of malte, of hoppes, and water, it is a naturall drynke for a doche [German] man. And nowe of lete dayes it is moche vsed in Englande to the detryment of many Englysshe men. … It doth make a man fatte, and doth inflate the bely, as it doth appere by the doche mennes faces and belyes.” (We’ve expanded the OED’s citation, from A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth by Andrew Borde or Boorde.)

References to the plant “hop” began to appear in English in the 16th century. As the OED says, “The plant is believed to have been introduced into the south of England from Flanders between 1520 and 1524.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from William Turner’s Libellus de re Herbaria Novus (1538), a botanical work that uses the plural “hoppes.”

But the OED’s other citations are mostly singular, especially when the noun is used in a generic way:

“To choose your Hoppe. Ye shal choose your roots best for your Hop, in the Sommer before ye shall plant them.” (From Leonard Mascall’s A Booke of The Arte and Maner How to Plant and Graffe All Sorts of Trees, 1572.)

“A hop, for want of a strong pole, will wind it self about a thistle or nettle or any sorry weed.” (From a 1647 collection of sermons by Robert Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln.)

“The planting of hops increased much in England during this reign.” (From David Hume’s The History of Great Britain, 1754.)

“The Hop … is remarkable amongst the Nettle Family for its twining stem.” (From Daniel Oliver’s Lessons in Elementary Botany, 1872.)

The word “hop” is also a verb meaning to flavor with hops. It’s often used in the passive, as when a beer or other malt liquor is said to be “well hopped,” “highly hopped,” “over-hopped,” and so on.

The OED’s earliest reference is dated 1572: “Ale, neyther to new, nor to stale, not ouerhopped.” (From The Benefit of the Auncient Bathes of Buckstones, by John Jones, a physician.)

And the noun “hop” is also used attributively as an adjective, generally in the singular: “hop growers,” “hop plants,” “hop industry,” “hop cultivation,” “hop harvest,” “hop flavor,” and so on.

Though the OED doesn’t say so, related adjectives have sprung up to describe the degree to which a beer tastes of hops.

Any connoisseur of craft beers is familiar with the terms “hoppy,” “hoppier,” and “hoppiest.” Merriam-Webster’s online says “hoppy” was first recorded around 1889 and means “having the taste or aroma of hops—used especially of ale or beer.”

However, “hoppiness” is in the eye—or the tastebuds—of the beholder. It’s a strong, biting flavor that’s sometimes described as bitterness.

In late 19th-century America, “hop” acquired another meaning, “a narcotic drug; spec. opium,” in the words of the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a New Orleans magazine, the Lantern, in May 1887: “As long as a smoker can obtain his ‘hop.’”

The word “hophead” was used to mean an opium smoker or drug addict since as far back as 1895 in San Francisco, according to research by contributors to the ADS List, the discussion group of the American Dialect Society.

Similarly, according to OED citations, a “hop-pipe” (1887) meant an opium pipe, and a “hop-dream” (1896) was an opium stupor.

Of course, there’s a shoe waiting to be dropped here. What about the other “hop,” the noun and verb corresponding to “jump”?

It’s tempting to think that there’s a connection and that, etymologically speaking, “hopped” beer has been given an extra “jump” or “spring” that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

Unfortunately, the two kinds of “hop”—the plant and the jump—aren’t related, as far as we know.

The verb “hop” that means “to spring a short way upon the ground or any surface with an elastic or bounding movement, or a succession of such movements,” was first recorded in Old English as hoppian around the year 1000, the OED says.

The corresponding noun “hop” (a spring or leap), which was derived from the verb, came along some 500 years later, in 1508.

This “hop,” like the botanical one, is Germanic in origin. Chambers says the source is again Proto-Germanic, a verb reconstructed as hupnojanan, ultimately from an Indo-European base, keub- or kub-. 

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