Tag: Word origin

Q: My dictionary doesn’t have a past tense for “daresay.” Is it “daresaid”? Or “daresayed”? Or perhaps even “daredsay”? I daresay you’ll have an answer.

A: We haven’t found any standard dictionaries that list a past tense for “daresay,” a compound verb that means to think very likely or to suppose.

In fact, many dictionaries specifically say that “daresay” is generally used in the first-person singular present tense (“I daresay”).

However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “some dialects make the past daresaid, darsayed, dessayed.” The term is “durst say” in the OED’s only past-tense example:

“La Fleur … told me he had a letter in his pocket … which, he durst say, would suit the occasion” (from A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, a 1768 novel by Laurence Sterne).

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage cites a more recent example of the past tense—using “daresayed”—from a Sylvia Townsend Warner story published in the New Yorker in 1954:

“Philip, a courteous guest, daresayed that the hourglass was timed to town eggs—puny specimens.”

Despite that example and the one in the OED, the usage guide says, “This compound verb is used in the first person singular of the present tense. It has hardly ever  been used otherwise.”

We’ve written before on our blog about the first part in the compound verb, “dare,” including posts in 2008 and 2009 on the regional or dialectal usages “durst,” “dast,” and “dasn’t.”

As for the verb “daresay,” the editors of the M-W manual say the term can be written as either “daresay” or “dare say,” but they add that “our evidence shows the one-word styling slightly more common.”

The OED says “dare say” (it uses two words) can mean to venture to assert or to assume as probable. The dictionary has examples of the first usage dating from the 1300s and of the second from the 1700s.

The verb is in the present tense in the dictionary’s earliest citation, from a Middle English translation (circa 1350)of Guillaume de Palerme, a French poem written around 1200:

“I dar seie & soþliche do proue, sche schal weld at wille more gold þan ȝe siluer” (“I dare say and truly do prove she shall wield at will more gold than silver”).

We’ll end with a more recent example, from an essay by the author Daniel Mendelsohn in the Oct. 8, 2013, issue of the New York Times Book Review:

“Tone is everything. A novel in which characters say ‘I daresay’ is galaxies apart from one in which characters say ‘I kinda think.’ ”

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Q: My brother-in-law, who has made his home in Israel for the past 65 years, says Chardonnay wine is named for the hills of Jerusalem, not a small town in Burgundy. In his telling, crusaders returned to France with vines grown in the area, known in Hebrew as sha’har adonai (i.e., “gate of God”).

A: Your brother-in-law isn’t the first to suggest that Chardonnay—both the wine and its name—originated in ancient Israel. But we haven’t found any evidence that this is true.

It’s possible that crusaders could have brought home vine cuttings in the Middle Ages. But those cuttings couldn’t have been from Chardonnay vines and the grape couldn’t have been called anything resembling “Chardonnay.”

There are two issues here—the origin of the name and the origin of the wine grape. Let’s focus for the moment on the name “Chardonnay.”

One thing is certain. “Chardonnay” has been the name of the grape for only a century or so, though it’s been the name of a village in France since the mid-1400s.

In the centuries before the grape’s name was standardized in the 1890s, it had many names and some of them sounded similar to “Chardonnay,” but none were spelled like the village.

These names for the grape included Chardenai, Chardenay, Chardenet, Chardennet, Chardonai, Chardonnet, Chatenait, Chardonet, Chaudenay, and Chaudenet.

Yes, those names resemble the Hebrew phrase sha’har adonai, but resemblance alone doesn’t prove a word’s etymology.

More important, as far as we can tell none of these names were used in reference to wine until hundreds of years after the Crusades.

If the crusaders had brought a “Chardonnay”-sounding name home with them, we would have seen evidence of it much earlier.

The earliest example we’ve found for a Chardonnay-like word used in the wine sense is a 17th-century citation in Chardonnay, Saône-et-Loire (2004), Emmanuel Nonain’s history of the village from the 10th through the 17th centuries.

Nonain writes that inspectors visiting the region reported in 1685 that Saint-Sorlin (now La Roche-Vineuse) “fait du meilleur chardonnet mais en petite quantité” (“makes the best chardonnet  but in small quantities”).

Complicating the picture is the fact that over the centuries the grape has had a great many local French names that don’t sound remotely like the current word or that even begin with the letter c: Beaunois, Aubaine, Epinette, Meroué, and scores of others—all synonyms for the same grape.

For example, in Chablis in northernmost Burgundy, where some have speculated that French vintners originally cultivated the Chardonnay vine, it’s still sometimes called Beaunois.

And true Chablis is also made from Chardonnay grapes. The local appellation (or official geographic name for the grape grown locally) became Chablis in 1938, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine (1994), edited by Jancis Robinson.

You can see the difficulty here. It’s dicey to come up with a single etymological explanation for the name of a grape that has had so many names and that has been grown in so many places.

As for the small village of Chardonnay, located in the Mâconnais region of southern Burgundy, its name is derived from a word in medieval Latin, Cardonnacum, meaning “place of thistles.” (“Thistle” is carduus in classical Latin and chardon in French.)

Nonain writes in his book about the village that it was originally known by its medieval name, Cardonacum (we’ve also found Cardoniacum and Cardenacum in old texts).

This name, Nonain says, evolved into Chardenay in the 13th century, then into Chardonay, with either one n or two, in the middle of the 15th century. From about the 18th century, it has consistently had two n’s.

While many people assume the grape was named for the village, the relationship between the names is murky at best.

Nonain says the name of the grape was standardized in 1896 at the suggestion of “certain members” of a national congress of wine authorities, meeting in Chalon-sur-Saône in southern Burgundy.

Why name it “Chardonnay”? Perhaps because some of the grape’s earlier names sounded like the village of Chardonnay, which just happened to be in southern Burgundy, the site of the wine congress.

Before 1896, Nonain says, the vine was most commonly known as Chardenet, Chaudenet, Chardonnet, or Chardenay.

“Although there are similarities between these names and the successive names of the village,” he adds, “one can hardly draw conclusions about the geographical origin of the famous grape.”

Which brings us to the origins of the famous grape itself.

In a joint study published in 1999, American and French scientists said DNA research had proved that the Chardonnay vine was a cross between two others—Pinot and Gouais blanc.

And where did the parent vines come from?

Pinot, the oldest grape variety in Burgundy, “may already have been present in the Burgundy region at the time of the Roman conquest,” the scientists said.

But Gouais blanc, according to the authors of the study, probably came from Croatia and was introduced to ancient Gaul by Romans in the third century.

“The third century Roman emperor Probus, a Dalmatian, encouraged viticulture in the provinces and is said to have given the Gauls a grape from his homeland,” the scientists said. “It is reasonable to consider that perhaps Probus’ gift to the Gauls was Gouais blanc.”

This is speculative, of course, and it leaves the question of who crossed the parent vines to create what we now call Chardonnay. The scientists suggest that the crossing happened spontaneously—that is, by natural causes.

A wine writer, Hugh Johnson, author of Vintage: The Story of Wine (1989), says Cistercian monks in Chablis in the 1100s may have been the first to cultivate the Chardonnay grape.

But now we’re entering into even more speculation. Sometimes, the more we learn about a subject, the more questions arise. This is one of those times.

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Q: Just now, the chairman of the board of a financial institution with several hundred billion dollars of assets under management used “dimunition” where he  meant “diminution.” I don’t often hear either word, but I hear “dimunition” about as often as “diminution.” Do you OK this usage?

A: No, we don’t recommend using “dimunition” to mean a decrease or the act of decreasing. Although Google searches indicate that thousands of people use “dimunition” that way, many thousands more prefer “diminution.”

More important, we haven’t found “dimunition” in a single standard dictionary, either as an entry or as a variant of “diminution,” the accepted spelling of the word.

Although the spelling of “diminution” has varied a bit since it entered English in the 1300s, none of the forms have included “dimunition” or something pronounced like it, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

English borrowed the word from the Anglo-Norman term diminuciun, but the ultimate source is deminutio, classical Latin for a decrease.

The earliest example in the OED is from Chaucer’s Middle English poem Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1374): “To encrece or maken dyminucioun / Of my langage.”

Here’s an example, with the modern spelling, from an article by Joseph Addison in the Sept. 23, 1712, issue of the Spectator: “I shall give my reader a Copy of his Letter, without any Alteration or Diminution.”

The usage you’ve noted seems to be relatively new. The earliest example we could find in a search of Google Books was from Communicating Ideas: The Politics of Scholarly Publishing (1991), by Irving Louis Horowitz:

“Less speculative is that the new information technology represents not a dimunition but an addition to what now exists in the way of publishing potential.”

For what it’s worth, most of the early examples were from academic, scientific, or political writing. And, no, we didn’t find a military example of “dimunition” in the sense of a weapon with a double whammy.

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Q: Bill O’Reilly said on Fox News the other day that a man who’s a strong leader in America today can expect to be called a bully, a tyrant, a martinet, and other negative terms. Where does ”martinet” come from?

A: John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins traces the usage back to “the name of Jean Martinet, a 17th-century French army officer who invented a system of drill.”

Ayto notes that the first appearance of the term in English—in The Plain-Dealer, a 1677 play by William Wycherley—was a reference to the drill system devised by Martinet, a lieutenant colonel:

“What, d’ye find fault with Martinet? Let me tell you, sir, ’tis the best exercise in the world; the most ready, most easy, most graceful exercise that ever was us’d.”

By the 1700s, the term meant a military drillmaster as well as “a rigid, inflexible, or merciless disciplinarian,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an example of the more general sense, from Tancred; or The New Crusade, an 1847 novel by Benjamin Disraeli:

“She knew that the fine ladies … were moral martinets with respect to any one not born among themselves.”

The most recent OED example is from The White Dove, a 1986 novel by Rosie Thomas (pen name of the British romance writer Janey King):

“The grey, starched martinet in her office lined with bound copies of nursing journals.”

As you may be aware, the word “martinet” has had many other meanings since it showed up in English in the early 1400s.

It has meant a bird (a martin or swift), a student at the University of Paris, a watermill, a siege engine, a demon, and a cat-o’-nine-tails once used in French schools.

Why a cat-o’-nine-tails?

The OED suggests that tails of the whip supposedly resembled the forked tail of a swallow (a martin is a swallow). However, we wonder if the name of that 17th-century drillmaster may have influenced the usage.

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Q: My favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees song is “Kiss Them for Me,” which contains the line “It’s divoon, oh it’s serene.” Did the band coin “divoon” or is it a real word? It sounds like something Noel Coward made up so he could complete a difficult rhyme.

A: No, the English rock band Siouxsie and the Banshees didn’t coin the word “divoon.” It’s been around since at least the 1930s. And Coward apparently didn’t use the term, though he and his work have sometimes been described as divoon.

The 1991 song by the Banshees is a homage to the actress Jayne Mansfield. (“Divoon” was a Mansfield catchword and Kiss Them for Me was a 1957 film she did with Cary Grant.)

Is “divoon” a real word? Well, it’s as real as any other slang word. You won’t find it in standard dictionaries, but a lot of slang dictionaries have entries for “divoon,” defining the term as lovely, delightful, divine, or wonderful.

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang describes “divoon” as an intentional alteration of “divine.”

The earliest example of the word in Random House is from Lonely Boy Blues, a 1944 novel by Alan Kapelner: “Oh, say, that soldier boy was utterly divoon!”

We’ve found an earlier example in The Happy Island, a 1938 novel by Dawn Powell: “they had both gone from mahogany toenails to a deep tearose and smoked tiny Cuban cigars and said things were ‘divoon’ one week and ‘gallicious’ the next.”

Margaret Reed discusses the intentional mangling of words in “Deliberate Mispronunciations,” a paper published in a 1932 issue of the journal American Speech.

Reed cites “anteecue” for “antique,” “genu-wine” for “genuine,” “a norange” for “an orange,” a “k-nife” for a “knife,” and many more examples.

She attributes the usage to “light-hearted youth.” But we—two not-so-tender punsters—don’t want to give youth all the credit (or discredit) for taking liberties with the language.

In a July 7, 2010, post on the Oxford Etymologist blog, Anatoly Liberman offers an explanation  of why someone would turn a word like “divine” into “divoon” (though he doesn’t actually discuss “divoon”).

“The vowel sound oo has the ability of giving a word an amusing appearance,” Liberman writes.  “Whoever hears snooze, canoodle, and nincompoop begins to smile; add boondoggle to this list.”

Liberman cites “Ooglification in American English Slang,” a 1977 article by the linguist Roger Wescott in the journal Verbatim:

“Hence the idea of the ‘ooglification of American slang,’ formulated in this form by American linguist Roger Wescott: if you want a word to sound slangy, substitute oo for its stressed vowel.”

[Update, Aug. 2, 2014: A reader of the blog writes us to point out that on a 1936 recording of “Let’s Sing Again,” Fats Waller refers to two of his sidemen, who have just played solos, as the “clarinoot” and the “tromboon.”]

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Q: Most of us were taught that the yellow part of an egg, though pronounced like “yoke,” is spelled “yolk.” But a recent AP story called it “yoke” many times. And the Webster unabridged lists “yoke” as a variant spelling. Does that mean it’s perfectly OK?

A: We’ve checked eight standard dictionaries and only two of them list “yoke” as a variant spelling of “yolk.”

Those two dictionaries—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (11th ed.) and Webster’s Third New International, Unabridged—consider both “yolk” and “yoke” to be standard English for the yellow stuff in an egg.

The fine print in the front of those dictionaries explains what the wording within an entry means.

M-W Collegiate treats the “yoke” spelling as a “secondary variant” that “occurs appreciably less often” than “yolk.”

However, Webster’s Third treats “yolk” and “yoke” as “equal variants,” though the first one “may be slightly more common.”

No matter what the editors at those two dictionaries say, we wouldn’t recommend using “yoke” for the yellow part of an egg.

The lexicographers at most standard dictionaries online (Collins, Macmillan, Cambridge, Oxford, Webster’s New World, etc.) don’t consider “yoke” a variant of “yolk,” either standard or nonstandard. (The old Webster’s Second lists “yoke” as a dialectal variant of “yolk.”)

The Associate Press stylebook doesn’t have entries for “yolk” or “yoke,” and we suspect that the people who wrote and edited the AP story and its photo captions simply misspelled “yolk.” (We wouldn’t be surprised if the misspelling is corrected online after the appearance of this post.)

Interestingly, the word “yolk” was occasionally spelled “yoke” in the 1800s, and the word “yoke” was occasionally spelled “yolk” in the 1700s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, the only contemporary variant for “yolk” in the OED is “yelk,” a spelling that is found in some scientific and technical works but that “appears to have ceased to be frequent since the third quarter of the 19th century.”

Oxford  lists “yoke” as the only contemporary spelling for the device that’s used to couple oxen together for pulling a plow or wagon, as well as for the many figurative senses of the word.

Both “yolk” and “yoke” date back to Anglo-Saxon times, when “yolk” was geolca, geoloca, or gioleca in Old English, and “yoke” was geoc, gioc, ioc, or iuc.

The OED’s earliest citation for “yolk” (spelled gioleca) is from the Metres of Boethius, Old English poems based on the writings of the Roman philosopher Boethius. Some scholars think King Aelfred (849-899) was the author of the metres, or narrative poems.

The first Oxford citation for “yoke” (spelled iuc) in its oxen sense is an entry from around 1050 in Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabulary (1884), by Thomas Wright and Richard Wülcker.

A somewhat earlier entry in the Anglo-Saxon lexicon from sometime before the year 1000 uses the word (spelled geoc)  for “a similar appliance anciently placed on the neck of a captive or conquered enemy.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the word “yoke” is ultimately derived from jug-, jeug-, or joug-, an Indo-European root meaning “join” and the source of such English words as “conjugal,” “join,” “junction,” “subjugate,” and “union.”

Ayto says “yolk” is ultimately derived from ghel- or ghol-, the Indo-European root for the color yellow. A “yolk,” he writes, “is etymologically a ‘yellow’ substance.”

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Q:  When did “dumb” go from meaning “mute” to “stupid”?

A: To begin at the beginning, the word “dumb” has been traced back to dheubh-, a prehistoric Indo-European root indicating confusion, stupefaction, or dizziness, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

“The notion underlying dumb is of sensory or mental impairment,” Ayto writes, adding that “two strands of meaning” developed when the term showed up in ancient Germanic languages: “slow-wittedness” and “the inability to speak.”

In Old English and Old Saxon, for example, dumb meant unable to speak, while in Old High German (spelled tumb or tump), it meant stupid, speechless, or deaf, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

When the word first showed up in Old English around the year 1000, the Oxford English Dictionary says, it meant “destitute of the faculty of speech.” The first citation is a reference to a dumbne man in the West Saxon Gospels.

The English word “dumb” didn’t develop its stupid sense until the 19th century, according to Ayto, “presumably under the influence of” the German dumm and the Dutch dom, adjectives meaning stupid.

The OED has two 18th-century citations by the English Roman Catholic priest Alban Butler for “dumb” meaning stupid. But we feel that the examples, from The Lives of the Saints (1756), are ambiguous.

The first definite Oxford example of “dumb” meaning stupid is from The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea, an 1823 novel by James Fenimore Cooper: “‘They’re a dumb race’ said the cockswain.” (A sailor is referring to a soldier here.)

And here’s a blatantly sexist example from the February 1892 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “My, but men are dumb. A woman would have caught on long ago.”

By the way, most standard dictionaries consider it offensive to use the term “dumb” for some someone unable to speak.

A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) adds that the use of the terms “mute” and “deaf-mute” for people unable to speak is also “now usually considered objectionable.”

“Unlike blind and deaf, which are straightforward terms that need not be avoided out of fear of causing offense, mute and deaf-mute have fallen out of use and are likely to evoke older stereotypes of helplessness or pitiableness,” the usage note says.

American Heritage doesn’t offer an alternative, but the online Macmillan Dictionary says the “more usual” way of referring to someone unable to speak is “speech impaired.”

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Q: When we accountants write about the “methodology” for cost allocations, we are trying to make our work sound more important than if we had used “method.” How do you feel about the use of “methodology” to mean, as it often does, a fancy method; a complex method, a glorified method, rather than, based on its roots, the study of method?

A: Etymologically, “methodology” does mean the study of method, and that was the word’s original meaning in the early 19th century. But it has grown and prospered since then.

In 1800, when it was first recorded in English, “methodology” meant “the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Subsequently, the OED says, the word also came to mean “the study of the direction and implications of empirical research, or of the suitability of the techniques employed in it.”

And more generally, Oxford adds, “methodology” simply means “a method or body of methods used in a particular field of study or activity.”

In our opinion, many people use “methodology” as a bigger and fancier word for a method or methods. But they’re not incorrect in doing so, as you can see from that OED definition.

Nevertheless, we’d use the word “method” if we were referring to a method. If the simpler word would do, why not use it?

The fancier word is made up of the noun “method” plus “-ology,” which the OED says is used in “forming nouns with the sense ‘the science or discipline of (what is indicated by the first element).’ ”

The word element “-ology” (like the shorter “-logy”) is Greek in origin and is used to form nouns meaning a branch of study or knowledge.

The ultimate source is the Greek logos (variously meaning word, speech, discourse, reason). Added to the end of a word, –logos means one who discourses about or deals with a certain subject, as in astrologos (astronomer).

As for “method,” the noun entered English in the early 1400s by way of French (méthode). Its classical ancestors are the Latin methodus (mode of proceeding), and the earlier Greek methodos (pursuit).

As John Ayto explains in discussing “method” in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “ ‘Pursuit’ of a particular objective gradually developed into a ‘procedure for attaining it,’ the meaning which the word had when it entered English.”

The word “method” still has that general meaning: “a procedure for attaining an object,” as the OED says, or “a way of doing anything, esp. according to a defined and regular plan.”

But Oxford also includes this: “A special form of procedure or characteristic set of procedures employed (more or less systematically) in an intellectual discipline or field of study as a mode of investigation and inquiry, or of teaching and exposition.”

Hmm. That definition of “method” sounds a lot like the general  meaning of “methodology.”

While “methodology” is a perfectly legitimate word, the OED points out that many “-ology” nouns were jokes.

“The earliest formations on purely native elements are mainly humorous and nonce words,” the dictionary says. It mentions “trickology” (trickery, first recorded in 1723); “caneology” (the doctrine of using the cane for punishment, 1837); as well as the self-explanatory “dogology” (1820), “bugology” (1843), and “noseology” (1819).

We’ll close with a quotation, given in the OED, from William John Locke’s novel The Wonderful Year (1916): “Much might be written on noses. The Great Master of Noseology, Laurence Sterne, did but broach the subject.”

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Q: My question is about the disappearance of “customer” and the overuse of “guest,” as in “May I help the next guest?” when you’re buying your ticket at the movies. Why is this happening?

A: We agree that “guest” is being overused these days as a euphemism for a paying customer. We don’t think of ourselves as “guests” when we fork over money to a ticket-seller at a movie theater. Generally it’s the host who pays, not the guest.

There are a couple of established uses of “guest” that we all accept. The word has long been used to mean someone paying to stay in a hotel, and many dictionaries say it can also mean a restaurant customer.

Those usages are reasonable, since it’s bed and board—not merchandise—that’s being provided.

For more than a thousand years, “guest” has meant “one who is entertained at the house or table of another,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the use of the term for a moviegoer is questionable in our opinion, though one could argue that the theater customer is being entertained at a movie house.

However, we think that calling a retail shopper a “guest” is clearly going too far, and lexicographers generally agree with us.

Here’s what some leading dictionaries include among their definitions of “guest”:

“Someone who is paying to stay at a hotel or eat in a restaurant,” from Macmillan Dictionaries online;

“a person who pays for the services of an establishment (as a hotel or restaurant),” Merriam-Webster‘s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.);

“one who pays for meals or accommodations at a restaurant, hotel, or other establishment; a patron,” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.);

“a patron of a hotel, boarding house, restaurant, etc.” (Collins Dictionaries online);

“any paying customer of a hotel, restaurant, etc.,” Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.).

Obviously, the editors of those dictionaries didn’t have retail customers in mind. Nevertheless, Google searches show that companies—including Target, Toys “R” Us, Kwik-Trip, and 7-Eleven—all refer to their customers as “guests.”

Somehow we doubt the shoppers think of themselves that way—unless the merchandise is being given away.

The word “guest” is part of an interesting history. As John Ayto writes in the Dictionary of Word Origins, it ultimately comes from the same source as “host,” and “their family tree diverged in ancient times.”

Their common ancestor was a prehistoric Indo-European word reconstructed as ghostis (stranger).

This is the ancestor of the Latin hostis (enemy, stranger), the Greek xenos (guest, stranger), and the old Germanic sources that gave English the word “guest.”

Thus English words including “hospitable,” “hostile,” “xenophobia,” “hotel,” and “hospital” (as well as “guest” and “host”) are all derived from the ancient notion of receiving a stranger.

The Old English “guest” (written gæst, giest, etc.) was recorded as early as 725 in Beowulf. Originally it could mean either a stranger or a guest—that is, someone who was owed hospitality.

In the 1200s, the OED says, it was used to mean “a temporary inmate of a hotel, inn, or boarding house.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The South English Legendary, a medieval collection of lives of the saints compiled around 1290 (some scholars date it to 1265).

At around the same time (1290 or thereabouts), “host” entered English by way of Old French with the sense of someone who entertains another, either in his home or at a public inn.

(Since we never pass up a chance to quote P.G. Wodehouse, here goes: “I entered the saloon bar and requested mine host to start pouring,” from Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934.)

In the early 20th century, people began using “guest” to mean something like a visiting performer, as in “guest artist,” “guest soloist,” “guest conductor,” “guest star,” “guest speaker,” and so on.

Then of course there’s “guest host,” which sounds like a contradiction in terms but is familiar to fans of Saturday Night Live.

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Q: Your article on the many uses of “nick” on British crime shows reminds me of the way cops in the UK call perps “villains.” That has to go back—to Shakespeare, at least.

A: You’re right. The word “villain” does go back a long way. It crossed the Channel with England’s Norman conquerors (in Anglo-Norman and Old French, the word was vilein, vilain, or villain).

But the specific usage you’ve mentioned (the slang use of “villain” to mean a career criminal) is relatively recent, dating back no further than the mid-20th century. Here’s the story.

When “villain” first showed up (spelled vyleyn in Middle English), it meant “a low-born base-minded rustic; a man of ignoble ideas or instincts,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from Handlyng Synne (1303), a long devotional poem by the medieval monk Robert Manning of Brunne:

“Goddys treytour, and ryȝt vyleyn! Hast þou no mynde of Marye Maudeleyn.” (God’s traitor, and right villain! Hast thou no mind of Mary Magdalene?)

Over the years, the OED says, the word “villain” came to mean “an unprincipled or depraved scoundrel; a man naturally disposed to base or criminal actions, or deeply involved in the commission of disgraceful crimes.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology adds that “the extended (and now usual) sense of an unprincipled scoundrel or knave, evil person, is implied in the earliest uses of this word.”

As for the slang use of “villain” for a career criminal (the OED uses the phrase “professional criminal”), the earliest citation in the dictionary is from the Jan. 24, 1960, issue of the Observer:

“Suppose … a bogy did get it up for a villain now and again by making sure that some gear was found in his flat?” (A “bogy” is a detective or police officer in UK criminal slang.)

And here’s an example from Horse Under Water, a 1963 spy novel by Len Deighton: “This villain is doing a nice Cabinet Minister’s home.”

In case you’re wondering, the words “villa,” “village,” and “villain” ultimately come from the same classical source, villa, Latin for a farmhouse or farmstead.

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Q: In British crime/court shows, “nick” is used to mean jail (“the nick”) as well as the act of being arrested (“he was nicked”). Where it gets interesting, though, is the way “nick” also means to steal. What’s the history of this great word?

A: “Nick” is a tricky word, one with a lot of colloquial or slang meanings and a questionable birth. It’s not even certain which came first, the verb or the noun, though they’re undoubtedly related.

As the Oxford English Dictionary succinctly puts it: “Origin unknown.”

Although the OED’s earliest citation is for the verb, an etymology note says “the noun may in reality have priority, and it may be accidental that the oldest recorded senses of the noun are attested slightly later than the first attestation of the verb.”

When the word first showed up in print in the 13th century, according to Oxford citations, “nick” was a verb meaning to make a denial.

The OED cites the Ancrene Riwle (circa 1225), an anonymous guide for monastic women, as the source of the earliest example of the usage. However, the dictionary describes this sense as rare, so let’s move on.

By the 15th century, the verb “nick” was being used in the sense of making a notch or cut in something.

Oxford‘s earliest example (with “nicked” spelled “nikit”) comes from a 1460 entry from the Ayr Burgh Court Books, records of the Royal Burgh of Ayr in Scotland.

But we’ll skip ahead to this cutting example from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (written in the 1590s):

“My Mr preaches patience to him, and the while / His man with Cizers nickes him like a foole.” (We’ve expanded the OED citation.)

The verb took on its sense of chicanery in the 16th century, when it came to mean to trick, cheat, or defraud.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from Rocke of Regard, a 1576 collection of prose and verse translated from Italian by George Whetstone:

“I neuer nickt the poorest of his pay, / But if hee lackt, hee had before his day.”

By the early 1800s, this sense of the verb had evolved to mean to steal or pilfer. Here’s an example from an 1826 collection of the works of the Scottish poet David Anderson:

“Some there ha’e gotten their pouches picket, / Their siller an’ their watches nickit.”

We’ll have to back up a bit now. In the 17th century, the verb took on the colloquial sense of to catch or take unawares.

The OED’s first citation is from The Prophetess, a 1622 play by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger: “We must be sometimes wittie, to nick a knave.”

The dictionary says this sense evolved into the slang use of “nick” to mean to be pinched by the constabulary.

It’s hard to tell from the OED examples exactly when people began using “nick” in this slang sense, but it was probably sometime in the 18th or 19th century.

Here’s a clear example from Japhet, in Search of a Father, Frederick Marryat’s 1836 novel about a foundling’s search for his unknown parents:

“He has come to get off his accomplice, and now we’ve just nicked them both.”

Now, let’s discuss the arrival of “nick” as a noun. Although the OED has a couple of questionable 15th-century citations for the noun, the earliest definite example is from the 16th century.

When the noun first appeared in print in the early 16th century, it referred to a notch made to keep a score, but that sense is now obsolete, according to the OED.

By the late 1600s, the noun was being used in a more general way to describe a notch, groove, or slit in something.

The first example of this new usage in the OED is from a 1578 book of anatomy by the English anatomist, surgeon, and teacher John Banister: “Departyng from this corner, or deepe nicke … there riseth a certaine sharpe Processe.”

The slang use of “nick” to mean a jail, especially one in a police station, originally showed up in Australia in the 1880s. The first Oxford citation is this entry from the Sydney Slang Dictionary (1882): “Nick (The), gaol.”

Here’s a more recent example from Martin Amis’s 1995 novel The Information: “Know how much it costs to keep a bloke in nick for a week?”

Although the various cops-and-robbers senses of “nick” are more common in the UK than the US, the usage isn’t unknown among Americans.

Robert Coover, for example, uses it in The Public Burning, his 1977 novel about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In commenting on Broadway’s origins as an old Indian trail, Coover writes:

“It’s said the last to use it were the Mana-hatta tribe, who departed by it after nicking gullible old Peter Minuit, first of the tourist yokels, for twenty-four dollars.”

We’ve discussed only a few of the many meanings of “nick” here. If you’d like to read more, we had a post six years ago that also dealt with the use of “Nick” or “Old Nick” to mean the Devil.

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Q: I’ve often heard that “fiasco,” which means bottle in Italian, got its negative meaning because Italian glassblowers used to smash bottles that weren’t up to snuff. However, it strikes me that this explanation doesn’t make sense. Why would a glassblower cry out “bottle!” when he ruined one?

A: In Italian, a fiasco is literally a bottle, especially a flask encased in a straw basket, like a traditional Chianti bottle.

However, fiasco has a figurative meaning in Italian that’s the same as its usual meaning in English: an utter failure.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says this “figurative use apparently stems from the phrase far fiasco, literally ‘make a bottle.’ ”

As Ayto explains, far fiasco has been “used traditionally in Italian theatrical slang for ‘suffer a complete breakdown in performance.’ ”

How did an Italian phrase meaning “make a bottle” come to mean “have a flop”?

“The usual range of fanciful theories has been advanced for the origin of the usage, but none is particularly convincing,” Ayto concludes.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology agrees with Ayto that the linguistic evolution of fiasco in Italian is unknown.

But Chambers goes on to mention one of the theories: “the alleged practice of Venetian glassmakers setting aside imperfect glass to make a common bottle or flask.”

The Italian word fiasco is derived from flasco, a medieval Latin term that’s the source of the English word “flask.”

Interestingly, English adopted the term “fiasco” from French, not Italian. The French faire fiasco (to fail) was adopted in turn from the Italian far fiasco.

When the term “fiasco” entered English in the mid-1800s, it meant “a failure or break-down in a dramatic or musical performance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from an 1855 letter from William Lowther, second Earl of Londsale, to the Irish statesman John Wilson Croker: “Derby has made what the theatrical people call a fiasco.”

Later, the term “fiasco” showed up in English in its bottle sense. The OED has only one citation for this sense, from the Nov. 12, 1887, issue of the literary journal Athenaeum: “A fiasco of good Chianti could be had for a paul.” (A “paul” is an Italian coin.)

However, several standard dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (11th ed.) and Webster’s New World (4th ed.), still include the bottle sense among the definitions of “fiasco.”

Getting back to your question, the OED says that “Italian etymologists have proposed various guesses, and alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history” to account for the evolution of fiasco.

However, the dictionary concludes—as do we—that the evolution of fiasco in Italian from flask to flop “is of obscure origin.”

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Q: I’m already tired of soccer, and the World Cup has barely started! But I’m never tired of etymology, so here’s my question. Where did the term “soccer” come from, and why do Europeans call it “football”?

A: As everybody knows by now, the game that North Americans call “soccer” is known as “football” (or a local variation on this) in most other countries.

Sports fans in England generally don’t use the word “soccer.” But interestingly, the word originated in England more than a century ago as a slang term for the older “football.” Here’s the story.

In late 19th-century England, students at the Rugby School in Warwickshire began using the  suffix “-er” to form slang words. The practice spread to other public schools, such as Harrow, and on to Oxford University.

Typically, an existing noun would be clipped and “-er” attached to the end.

Among early examples in the Oxford English Dictionary are “footer” (for football,  1863), “ekker” (exercise, 1891), “brekker” (breakfast, 1889), “bonner” (bonfire, 1898), and “cupper” (intercollegiate cup match, 1900). Perhaps more familiar to Americans is the later example “bed-sitter” (1927, short for “bed-sitting-room”).

“Soccer” was one of these schoolboy formations. It was a slang term for association football—that is, football played according to the rules of the Football Association. In this case, the “-er” suffix was combined with a clipped form of “Assoc.”

As the OED explains, “soccer” (in early use sometimes spelled “socca” or “socker”) is derived from “Assoc., short for Association.”

The dictionary’s earliest published example comes from a letter by the poet and fiction writer Ernest Dowson, written in 1889, a year after he left Oxford: “I absolutely decline to see socca’ matches.” Note the apostrophe, signifying an abbreviation.

[Update, June 22, 2014: Fred Shapiro, editor of the wonderful Yale Book of Quotations, has informed us of earlier sightings. He found “soccer” in an 1888 issue of Oxford Magazine, and Evan Kirshenbaum discovered even older examples in boarding-school publications—“socker” in the Oldhallian (1885) and “soccer” in the Carthusian (1886).]

In Britain, the slang term “soccer” never replaced the original word, “football,” which has been in English use since the early 1400s for various games involving people kicking balls around on a field.

The conventions of the modern game of English “football” weren’t standardized until 1863, when the Football Association drew up its rules.

After that, there was a differentiation in English sports between “association football” and “rugby football” (nicknamed “rugger”), the variety of football played at Rugby.

So “soccer” and “rugger” originated as slang names for the two varieties of English football.

Today, North Americans use the former slang term “soccer” to differentiate their football from the rest of the world’s. In fact, the United States Soccer Federation was formerly called the US Football Association.

Although most of the world is watching “football” when cheering teams at the World Cup, Americans aren’t the only ones watching “soccer.” Australians use the term to differentiate the sport from Australian Rules Football (or “Footy”), a kind of mix between soccer and rugby.

So what does the world at large call North American “football”? Many English speakers outside North America use the terms “gridiron” or “grid.”

The OED has a couple of examples, including this one from Terry McLean’s book Kings of Rugby: The British Lions’ 1959 tour of New Zealand: “American, or gridiron, football.”

This later citation is from Charles Drummond’s novel Death and the Leaping Ladies (1968): “You can’t just walk into a team like you can, say, in gridiron or soccer.”

While we’re at it, the word “gridiron” got its start in the late 13th century as the name of a cooking apparatus, and is probably related to the earlier word “griddle.” It consists of bars made of made of iron or other metal, and supported on legs for cooking over a fire.

Later, “gridiron” was used for things of a similar pattern, like a grating or grill or—in the 19th century—the  markings on a sports field.

The OED cites this example from an 1896 issue of the Daily News in London: “The ground here is marked out by white lines … thus giving it the appearance of a gigantic gridiron—which, indeed, is the technical name applied to an American football field.”

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Q: Is the “dent” in a car related to the “indent” in writing? And is a “dentist” related to either of them? He fills cavities, doesn’t he?

A: The words “dent” and “indent” have different etymological roots, but they’ve influenced each other over the years, so an offspring like “indentation” can mean either a “dent” or an “indent.” We’ll get to “dentist” later.

The noun “dent” is a cousin of dint, an Old English term for a stroke or blow, especially one with a weapon, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Old English term, dating from King Aelfred’s writings in the late 800s, is similar to dyntr or dyttr, words in Old Norse with the same meaning.

The OED describes “dent” as a “phonetic variant or doublet” of dint. “Doublet” is a linguistic term for one of two words derived in different ways from the same source—in this case, perhaps, Old Norse.

The word “dent” also meant a stroke or blow when it first showed up in Middle English, but that sense is now obsolete.

The OED’s earliest example of “dent” used in this sense is from Richard Coer de Lyon (circa 1325), a Middle English romance about the life of King Richard I of England.

Although the citation (With a dente amyd the schelde) refers to a blow against a shield, it’s easy to see how the term “dent” could evolve over the next two centuries to mean the result of such a blow.

The OED’s first example of “dent” in the modern sense is from a 1565 treatise written by John Jewel, an Anglican bishop, during a heated exchange of tracts with Thomas Harding, a Roman Catholic priest: “We haue thrust our fingers into the dents of his nailes.”

When the word “indent” first showed up in the late 1300s, Oxford says, it was a verb that meant “to sever the two halves of a document, drawn up in duplicate, by a toothed, zigzag, or wavy line, so that the two parts exactly tally with each other.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of the usage is from a May 15, 1385, document in a legal dispute between Robert, Earl of Fyfe, and John of Logy:

“To the wytnes of the qwylkis al and syndry in thir endentyt lettrys contenyt, tyl ilke parte of the forsayde endenturis I hafe put my Cele.” (The OED notes that the verb is implied here by the adjectival use of the past participle “endentyt.”)

You’re probably wondering why people would cut a legal document into two identical parts with a toothed line.

This was done, the OED explains, so that each party to a legal agreement would have an identical copy of the document, and “the genuineness of these could be subsequently proved by the coincidence of their indented margins.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that the verb “indent” is derived from the classical Latin noun dens (tooth) and the medieval Latin verb indentare, which refers to the creation of those two-part documents intended to be cut with a toothed line.

“A particular use of such documents,” Ayto writes, “was between master craftsmen and their trainees, who hence became known as indentured trainees.”

The noun “indentation” showed up in its printing sense in the mid-1800s, and the short form “indent” followed in the late 1800s.

The OED’s first citation for “indentation” used in this sense is from an entry for the word in the 1864 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language.

Here’s a fuller description of the usage from Practical Printing, an 1884 book on typography by John Southward: “The first line of the paragraph … is shorter than the two following, there being a widespace at the beginning of it. This is called an indentation.”

No, we haven’t forgotten your question about “dentist.” As you’ve undoubtedly realized by now, it’s ultimately derived from dens, the Latin word for “tooth.”

English borrowed the word in the 1700s from the French noun dentiste, but it was “at first ridiculed as a high-falutin foreign term,” Ayto points out.

In fact, the earliest citation for “dentist” in the OED is an example of such ridicule. The cite is from the Sept. 15, 1759, issue of the Edinburgh Chronicle:

”Dentist figures it now in our newspapers, and may do well enough for a French puffer; but we fancy Rutter is content with being called a tooth-drawer.”

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Q: In considering whether “troop” can refer to a single soldier, would “trooper” come into play? In my hazy understanding of things military, an individual member of a “troop” can be called a “trooper” (as in “watch your step, trooper”).

A: Where these words are concerned, we have derivations on top of derivations! It’s true that “trooper,” which entered English in 1640, was derived from the noun “troop” with the addition of “-er.”

Originally, in the mid-1500s, a “troop” was a body of soldiers, and the later word “trooper” meant “a soldier in a troop of cavalry” or “a horse soldier,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Today a “trooper” can mean a state police officer, a paratrooper, or a soldier in a horse, armored, or air cavalry troop.

And, as you’ve noticed, the singular “troop” is sometimes used to mean one soldier—a usage perhaps influenced by “trooper”!

This is ground we’ve covered before on our blog. As we wrote in 2013, the OED says the colloquial use of “troop” to mean a single member of a troop is irregular.

The usage is derived from the use of “troop” as a collective plural, or in some cases may be an abbreviation of “trooper,” according to the Oxford lexicographers.

Is the use of “troop” for a single member of a “troop” a blooper? As we say in our post last year, it’s a colloquial usage that’s not considered standard English—at least not yet. Stay tuned!

We also wrote a post in 2006, updated in 2009, explaining (among other things) the difference between “trouper” and “trooper.”

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