B

babel [14] According to Genesis 11: 1–9, the tower of Babel was built in Shinar by the descendants of Noah in an attempt to reach heaven. Angered at their presumption, God punished the builders by making them unable to understand each other’s speech: hence, according to legend, the various languages of the world. Hence, too, the metaphorical application of babel to a ‘confused medley of sounds’, which began in English in the 16th century. The word has no etymological connection with ‘language’ or ‘noise’, however. The original Assyrian bb-ilu meant ‘gate of god’, and this was borrowed into Hebrew as bbel (from which English acquired the word). The later Greek version is Babylon.

BABYLON

baboon [14] The origins of baboon are obscure, but it seems that the notion underlying it may be that of ‘grimacing’. Baboons characteristically draw back their lips in snarling, revealing their teeth, and it has been speculated that there may be a connection with Old French baboue ‘grimace’. However that may be, it was certainly in Old French that the word first surfaced, as babuin, and originally it meant ‘gaping figure’ (as in a gargoyle) as well as ‘ape’. This alternative meaning was carried over when the Old French word was borrowed into English, where it remained a live sense of baboon until the 16th century.

baby [14] Like mama and papa, baby and the contemporaneous babe are probably imitative of the burbling noises made by an infant that has not yet learned to talk. In Old English, the term for what we would now call a ‘baby’ was child, and it seems only to have been from about the 11th century that child began to extend its range to the slightly more mature age which it now covers. Then when the word baby came into the language, it was used synonymously with this developed sense of child, and only gradually came to refer to infants not yet capable of speech or walking.

bacchanalian [16] Bákkhos was the Greek god of wine. Son of Zeus and Semele, he was also known as Diónsos. The Romans adopted him, amending his name to Bacchus, and his worshippers went in for a brand of licentious revelry, in his honour, known as Bacchanalia. Hence the metaphorical application of the English adjective to anything drunkenly orgiastic.

bachelor [13] The ultimate origins of bachelor are obscure, but by the time it first turned up, in Old French bacheler (from a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *baccalris), it meant ‘squire’ or ‘young knight in the service of an older knight’. This was the sense it had when borrowed into English, and it is preserved, in fossilized form, in knight bachelor. Subsequent semantic development was via ‘university graduate’ to, in the late 14th century, ‘unmarried man’. A resemblance to Old Irish bachlach ‘shepherd, peasant’ (a derivative of Old Irish bachall ‘staff’, from Latin baculum, source of English bacillus and related to English bacteria) has led some to speculate that the two may be connected.

English baccalaureate [17] comes via French baccalauréat or medieval Latin baccalaureatus from medieval Latin baccalaureus ‘bachelor’, which was an alteration of an earlier baccalrius, perhaps owing to an association with the ‘laurels’ awarded for academic success (Latin bacca lauri meant literally ‘laurel berry’).

back [OE] Back goes back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bakam, which was represented in several pre-medieval and medieval Germanic languages: Old High German bah, for example, and Old Norse bak. In most of them, however, it has been ousted by relatives of English ridge, originally ‘spine’ (such as German rücken and Swedish rygg), and only English retains back.

BACON

backgammon [17] Backgammon appears to mean literally ‘back game’, although the reason for the name is far from clear (gammon had been used since at least the early 18th century for a particular type of victory in the game, but it is hard to say whether the term for the victory came from the term for the game, or vice versa). Either way, gammon represents Old English gamen, the ancestor of modern English game. The game backgammon goes back far further than the 17th century, of course, but before that it was called tables in English.

GAME

bacon [12] Originally, bacon meant literally ‘meat from a pig’s back’. It comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *bakkon, which was related to *bakam, the source of English back. It reached English via Frankish báko and Old French bacon, and at first meant ‘a side of pig meat (fresh or cured)’. Gradually it narrowed down to ‘a side of cured pig meat’ (bringing it into competition with the Old English word flitch, now virtually obsolete), and finally to simply ‘cured pig meat’.

BACK

bacterium [19] Bacterium was coined in the 1840s from Greek baktérion, a diminutive of ‘stick’, on the basis that the originally discovered bacteria were rod-shaped. At first it was sometimes anglicized to bactery, but the Latin form has prevailed. Related, but a later introduction, is bacillus [19]: this is a diminutive of Latin baculum ‘stick’, and the term was again inspired by the microorganism’s shape. Latin baculum is also responsible, via Italian bacchio and its diminutive form bacchetta, for the long French loaf, the baguette.

BACILLUS, BAGUETTE, DÉBACLE, IMBECILE

bad [13] For such a common word, bad has a remarkably clouded history. It does not begin to appear in English until the end of the 13th century, and has no apparent relatives in other languages (the uncanny resemblance to Persian bad is purely coincidental). The few clues we have suggest a regrettably homophobic origin. Old English had a pair of words, and , which appear to have been derogatory terms for homosexuals, with overtones of sodomy. The fact that the first examples we have of bad, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, are in the sense ‘contemptible, worthless’ as applied to people indicates that the connotations of moral depravity may have become generalized from an earlier, specifically anti-homosexual sense.

badger [16] The Old English term for a ‘badger’ was brock, a word of Celtic origin, and badger does not begin to appear, somewhat mysteriously, until the early 16th century. The name has never been satisfactorily explained, but perhaps the least implausible explanation is from the word badge, in reference to the white stripes on the animal’s forehead, as if it were wearing a badge (a term originally applied to a distinctive device worn by a knight for purposes of recognition); the early spelling bageard suggests that it may have been formed with the suffix -ard, as in dullard and sluggard. (Badge itself is of even more obscure origin; it first turns up in Middle English, in the mid 14th century.) Other early terms for the badger were bauson (14th– 18th centuries), from Old French bausen, and grey (15th–17th centuries).

badminton [19] The game of ‘battledore and shuttlecock’ has been around for some time (it appears to go back to the 16th century; the word battledore, which may come ultimately from Portuguese batedor ‘beater’, first turns up in the 15th century, meaning ‘implement for beating clothes when washing them’, but by the 16th century is being used for a ‘small racket’; while shuttlecock, so named because it is hit back and forth, first appears in the early 16th century, in a poem of John Skelton’s). This was usually a fairly informal, improvised affair, however, and latterly played mainly by children; the modern, codified game of badminton did not begin until the 1860s or 1870s, and takes its name from the place where it was apparently first played, Badminton House, Avon, country seat of the dukes of Beaufort. (A slightly earlier application of the word badminton had been to a cooling summer drink, a species of claret cup.)

baffle [16] The etymology of baffle is appropriately baffling. Two main candidates have been proposed as a source. The first is the medieval Scots verb bawchill or bauchle, meaning ‘discredit publicly’. This fits in with the way baffle was first used: ‘I will baffull your good name, sound with the trumpet your dishonour, and paint your pictor with the heeles vpward, and beate it in despight of yourselfe’, Churchyardes chippes 1570. The other strand is represented by French bafouer ‘hoodwink, deceive’, which perhaps comes from Old French beffer. This corresponds more closely to the present-day meaning of baffle, and it may well be that there are two distinct words here.

bag [13] English acquired bag from Old Norse baggi ‘bag, bundle’, but it does not appear in any other Germanic language, which suggests that it may have been borrowed at some point from a non-Germanic language. Forms such as Old French bague, Italian baga, and Portuguese bagua show that it existed elsewhere. A derivative of the Old French word was bagage, from which in the 15th century English got baggage; and Italian baga may have led, by a doubling of diminutive suffixes, to bagatella ‘insignificant property, trifle’, which entered English in the 17th century via French bagatelle (although this has also been referred to Latin bacca ‘berry’ – see BACHELOR).

BAGATELLE, BAGGAGE

bail There are now three distinct words bail in English, although they may all be related. Bail ‘money deposited as a guarantee when released’ [14] comes from Old French bail, a derivative of the verb baillier ‘take charge of, carry’, whose source was Latin bjulre ‘carry’, from bjulus ‘carrier’. Bail ‘remove water’ [13], also spelled bale, probably comes ultimately from the same source; its immediate antecedent was Old French baille ‘bucket’, which perhaps went back to a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *bjula, a feminine form of bjulus. The bail on top of cricket stumps [18] has been connected with Latin bjulus too – this could have been the source of Old French bail ‘cross-beam’ (‘load-carrying beam’), which could quite plausibly have been applied to cricket bails; on the other hand it may go back to Old French bail, baille ‘enclosed court’ (source of English bailey [13]), which originally in English meant the ‘encircling walls of a castle’ but by the 19th century at the latest had developed the sense ‘bar for separating animals in a stable’.

BAILEY

bailiff [13] Latin bjulus meant literally ‘carrier’ (it is probably the ultimate source of English bail in some if not all of its uses). It developed the metaphorical meaning ‘person in charge, administrator’, which passed, via the hypothetical medieval adjectival form *bjulvus, into Old French as baillif, and hence into English.

BAIL

bain-marie [19] In its origins, the bain-marie was far from today’s innocuous domestic utensil for heating food over boiling water. It takes its name from Mary, or Miriam, the sister of Moses, who according to medieval legend was an adept alchemist – so much so that she had a piece of alchemical equipment named after her, ‘Mary’s furnace’ (medieval Greek kaminos Marias). This was mistranslated into medieval Latin as balneum Mariae ‘Mary’s bath’, from which it passed into French as bain-marie. English originally borrowed the word in the 15th century, in semi-anglicized form, as balneo of Mary. At this time it still retained its original alchemical meaning, but by the early 19th century, when English adopted the French term, it had developed its present-day use.

bairn see BEAR

bait [13] Etymologically, the verb bait means ‘cause to bite’. It comes from Old Norse beita, a causative version of bita ‘bite’ (related to English bite). This took two semantic paths in English. In its aggressive mode, it meant literally ‘set dogs on someone’, and hence by figurative extension ‘harrass, persecute’. More peaceably, it signified ‘feed an animal’. And this sense of ‘food provided’ is reflected in the noun bait, which comes partly from the verb, partly from the related Old Norse nouns beit ‘pasturage’ and beita ‘fish bait’.

Old Norse beita was probably borrowed into Old French as beter, which with the prefix aproduced abeter, source of English abet [14], originally meaning ‘urge on, incite’.

ABET, BITE

bake [OE] The Old English verb bacan goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *bak, which also produced German backen, Dutch bakken, and Swedish baka; its ultimate source was the Indo-European base *bhog-, another descendant of which was Greek ‘roast’. Derivatives of the English verb include batch [15], which comes from Old English *bæcce, literally ‘something baked’, and the name Baxter, which originally meant ‘female baker’.

BATCH

balance [13] The underlying etymological meaning of balance is of a weighing apparatus with ‘two pans’ for holding things. In Latin this was a lbra bilanx, literally ‘scales with two pans’ – bilanx being compounded from bi- ‘two’ and lanx ‘plate, pan’. Bilanx passed, in its stem from bilanc-, via Vulgar Latin *bilancia into Old French balance, the source of the English word.

balcony [17] Balcony entered English from Italian balcone, but it seems to be ultimately of Germanic origin. It was probably borrowed into Old Italian, with the meaning ‘scaffold’. from Germanic *balkon ‘beam’, source of English balk – perhaps from the notion of a platform or scaffold being built from beams of timber, although the connection is not altogether clear.

BALK

bald [14] In Middle English times, bald was ballede, which suggests that it may have been a compound formed in Old English with the suffix -ede ‘characterized by, having’. It has been conjectured that the first element in the compound was Old English *ball-, meaning ‘white patch’ or ‘blaze’ on an animal’s head; this may be supported by isolated examples of the use of the adjective to mean (of a horse) ‘white-faced’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and by the obsolete dialectal ball meaning both ‘white patch on the head’ and ‘white-faced horse’. This would have produced the Old English adjective *bællede or *beallede, which, from ‘having a white blaze’, progressed naturally in meaning to ‘hairless’.

The compounds piebald [16] and skewbald [17] are both based on bald: piebald means ‘having black and white patches like a magpie’, while skewbald may be based on Middle English skew ‘(cloudy) skies’ or on Old French escu ‘shield’.

PIEBALD, SKEWBALD

balk [OE] There are two separate strands of meaning in balk, or baulk, as it is also spelled. When it first entered English in the 9th century, from Old Norse bálkr, it meant a ‘ridge of land, especially one between ploughed furrows’, from which the modern sense ‘stumbling block, obstruction’ developed. It is not until about 1300 that the meaning ‘beam of timber’ appears in English, although it was an established sense of the Old Norse word’s Germanic ancestor *balkon (source also of English balcony). The common element of meaning in these two strands is something like ‘bar’, which may have been present in the word’s ultimate Indo-European base *bhalg- (possible source of Greek phálagx ‘log, phalanx’).

BALCONY, PHALANX

ball There are two distinct words ball in English. The ‘round object’ [13] comes via Old Norse böllr from a prehistoric Germanic *balluz (source also of bollock [OE], originally a diminutive form). A related form was Germanic *balln, which was borrowed into Italian to give palla ‘ball’, from which French probably acquired balle. Derivatives of this branch of the family to have reached English are balloon [16], from French ballon or Italian ballone, and ballot [16], from the Italian diminutive form ballotta (originally from the use of small balls as counters in secret voting). The Germanic stem form *bal-, *bul- was also the ultimate source of English bowl ‘receptacle’.

The ‘dancing’ ball [17] comes from French bal, a derivative of the now obsolete verb bal(l)er ‘dance’, which was descended via late Latin ballare from Greek ballízein ‘dance’. Related words in English include ballad(e) [14], which came via Old French from Provençal balada ‘song or poem to dance to’, and ballet.

BALLON, BALLOT, BOLLOCK; BALLAD, BALLET

ballast [16] Originally, ballast appears to have meant literally ‘bare load’ – that is, a load carried by a ship simply for the sake of its weight, and without any commercial value. English probably acquired it, via Low German, from a Scandinavian language; Old Swedish and Old Danish had not only ballast but also barlast, which appears to betray the word’s component parts: bar, related to English bare, and last ‘burden’ (Old English had hlæst ‘burden’, related to lade, which survived into the 20th century as a measure of weight for various commodities).

BARE, LADE

ballet [17] Etymologically, a ballet is a ‘little dance’. English acquired the word, via French ballet, from Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo ‘dance’, related to English ball (the diminutive of Italian balla ‘spherical ball’ is ballotta, whence English ballot). The noun ballo came from the verb ballare (a descendant via late Latin ballre of Greek ballízein ‘dance’), of which another derivative was ballerino ‘dancing master’. The feminine form, ballerina, entered English in the late 18th century. Balletomane ‘ballet enthusiast’ is a creation of the 1930s.

Another word ballet, also a diminutive, exists, or at least existed, in English. It meant ‘little [spherical] ball’, and was used in the 18th century as a technical term in heraldry.

BALL

ballistic see PARABLE

balloon see BALL

ballot see BALL

ballyhoo [20] Ballyhoo remains an etymological mystery, but there is no shortage of suggested candidates as its source: an Irish village called Ballyhooly; an old nautical slang word ballyhoo meaning ‘unseaworthy vessel’, which seems to have been an anglicization of Spanish balahú ‘schooner’; and the bizarre late-19th-century ballyhoo bird, a fake bird made of wood and cardboard and intended to fool a bird-hunter. None of them, alas, seems remotely relevant to ballyhoo’s original American sense, ‘barker’s patter outside a circus tent, to encourage people to enter’.

balm [13] In origin, balm and balsam are the same word. Both come via Latin balsamum from Greek bálsamon, an ‘aromatic oily resin exuded from certain trees’. Its ultimate source may have been Hebrew ‘spice’. Latin balsamum passed into Old French, and thence into English, as basme or baume (hence the modern English pronunciation), and in the 15th to 16th centuries the Latin l was restored to the written form of the word. The new borrowing balsam, direct from Latin, was made in the 15th century.

BALSAM

baluster [17] Etymologically, baluster and banister are the same word. Both come ultimately from Greek balustion ‘pomegranate flower’, which reached English via Latin balaustium, Italian balaustro, and French balustre. The reason for the application of the term to the uprights supporting a staircase handrail is that the lower part of a pomegranate flower has a double curve, inwards at the top and then bulging outwards at the bottom, similar to the design of some early balusters. A balustrade [17], from Italian balaustrata via French, is a row of balusters. Already by the mid 17th century a transformation of the l to an n had taken place, producing the parallel banister.

BALUSTRADE, BANISTER

bamboo [16] Bamboo appears to come from a Malay word mambu. This was brought back to Europe by the Portuguese explorers, and enjoyed a brief currency in English from the 17th to the 18th century. However, for reasons no one can explain, the initial m of this word became changed to b, and it acquired an s at the end, producing a form found in Latin texts of the time as bambusa. This appears to have passed into English via Dutch bamboes, so the earliest English version of the word was bambos. As so often happens in such cases, the final s was misinterpreted as a plural ending, so it dropped off to give the new ‘singular’ bamboo.

bamboozle [18] Bamboozle is a mystery word. It first appears in 1703, in the writings of the dramatist Colly Cibber, and seven years later it was one of a list of the latest buzzwords cited by Jonathan Swift in the Tatler (others included bully, mob, and sham). It is probably a ‘cant’ term (a sort of low-life argot), and may perhaps be of Scottish origin; there was a 17th-century Scottish verb bombaze ‘perplex’, which may be the same word as bombace, literally ‘padding, stuffing’, but metaphorically ‘inflated language’ (the variant form bombast has survived into modern English).

BOMBAST

ban [OE] Ban is one of a widespread group of words in the European languages. Its ultimate source is the Indo-European base *bha-, which also gave English fame (from a derivative of Latin fr ‘speak’) and phase (from Greek phsis). The Germanic offshoot of the Indo-European base, and source of the English word, was *bannan, which originally probably meant simply ‘speak, proclaim’. This gradually developed through ‘proclaim with threats’ to ‘put a curse on’, but the sense ‘prohibit’ does not seem to have arisen until as late as the 19th century.

The Germanic base *bann- was borrowed into Old French as the noun ban ‘proclamation’. From there it crossed into English and probably mingled with the cognate English noun, Middle English iban (the descendant of Old English gebann). It survives today in the plural form banns ‘proclamation of marriage’. The adjective derived from Old French ban was banal, acquired by English in the 18th century. It originally meant ‘of compulsory military service’ (from the word’s basic sense of ‘summoning by proclamation’); this was gradually generalized through ‘open to everyone’ to ‘commonplace’.

BANAL, BANDIT, BANISH, CONTRABAND, FAME, PHASE

banana [16] Banana comes from a West African language – possibly Wolof, a language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. The original European discoverers of the word – and the fruit – were the Spanish and Portuguese, who passed them on to England. The term bananas ‘mad’ is 20th-century, but its origins are obscure; some have compared banana oil, a 20th-century slang term for ‘mad talk, nonsense’.

band There are two distinct words band in English, but neither of them goes back as far as Old English. The one meaning ‘group of people’ [15] comes from Old French bande, but is probably Germanic in ultimate origin; the specific sense ‘group of musicians’ developed in the 17th century. Band ‘strip’ [13] comes from Germanic *bindan, source of English bind, but reached English in two quite separate phases. It first came via Old Norse band, in the sense ‘something that ties or constrains’; this replaced Old English bend, also from Germanic *bindan (which now survives only as a heraldic term, as in bend sinister), but is now itself more or less obsolete, having been superseded by bond, a variant form. But then in the 15th century it arrived again, by a different route: Old French had bande ‘strip, stripe’, which can be traced back, perhaps via a Vulgar Latin *binda, to the same ultimate source, Germanic *bindan.

BEND, BIND, BOND, BUNDLE, RIBBON

bandit [16] Etymologically, a bandit is someone who has been ‘banished’ or outlawed. The word was borrowed from Italian bandito, which was a nominal use of the past participle of the verb bandire ‘ban’. The source of this was Vulgar Latin *bannre, which was formed from the borrowed Germanic base *bann- ‘proclaim’ (from which English gets ban). Meanwhile, in Old French, bannre had produced banir, whose lengthened stem form baniss- gave English banish [14].

BAN, BANISH

bandy [16] To ‘bandy words with someone’ may go back to an original idea of ‘banding together to oppose others’. The word comes from French bander ‘oppose’, which is possibly a derivative of bande ‘group, company’ (source of English band). The rather complex semantic development goes from ‘taking sides’, through ‘opposing a third party’, ‘exchanging blows’, ‘exchanging hits’ (in the 16th and 17th centuries it was a term in tennis), to ‘exchanging hostile words’.

The adjective bandy [17], as in ‘bandy legs’, probably comes from the noun bandy ‘curved stick used in an early form of hockey’ (the game was also known as bandy). It may ultimately be related to the verb bandy, the connection being the notion of knocking a ball to and fro.

BAND

banish see BANDIT

banister see BALUSTER

banjo [18] The origins of banjo are uncertain, but its likeliest source seems to be bandore, the name of a 16th-century stringed instrument similar to the lute. It has been argued that in the speech of Southern US blacks, amongst whom the banjo originated, bandore became banjo, perhaps under the influence of mbanza, a term for a similar instrument in the Kimbundu language of Northern Angola (although it might be more plausible to suggest that mbanza is the immediate source, altered by English-speakers more familiar with bandore).

Bandore itself appears to be a variant of pandore or pandora, which comes from Greek pandoura ‘three-stringed lute’. A more far-reaching modification produced mandore, likewise a term for a lutelike instrument. The Italian version of the word, mandola, is familiar in English from its diminutive form, which has given us mandolin [18].

MANDOLIN

bank [12] The various disparate meanings of modern English bank all come ultimately from the same source, Germanic *bangk-, but they have taken different routes to reach us. Earliest to arrive was ‘ridge, mound, bordering slope’, which came via a hypothetical Old Norse *banki. Then came ‘bench’ [13] (now obsolete except in the sense ‘series of rows or tiers’ – as in a typewriter’s bank of keys); this arrived from Old French banc, which was originally borrowed from Germanic *bangk- (also the source of English bench). Finally came ‘moneylender’s counter’ [15], whose source was either French banque or Italian banca – both in any case deriving ultimately once again from Germanic *bangk-. The current sense, ‘place where money is kept’, developed in the 17th century.

The derived bankrupt [16] comes originally from Italian banca rotta, literally ‘broken counter’ (rotta is related to English bereave and rupture); in early times a broken counter or bench was symbolic of an insolvent moneylender.

The diminutive of Old French banc was banquet ‘little bench’ (perhaps modelled on Italian banchetto), from which English gets banquet [15]. It has undergone a complete reversal in meaning over the centuries; originally it signified a ‘small snack eaten while seated on a bench (rather than at table)’.

BENCH

banner [13] Banner is of Germanic origin, but it reached English via Latin. Early forms which show its Germanic antecedents are Gothic bandwo ‘sign’ and the related Old Norse benda ‘give a sign’, but at some stage it was acquired by Latin, as bandum ‘standard’. This passed via Vulgar Latin *bandria into various Romance languages, in some of which the influence of derivatives of Germanic *bann- (source of English ban) led to the elimination of the d. Hence Old French baniere and Anglo-Norman banere, source of English banner.

BAN

bantam [18] When these diminutive chickens were first imported into Europe in the middle of the 18th century, it was thought that they had originated in a village called Bantam in Java, now in Indonesia, and they were named accordingly. This version of their history has never been firmly established, but the name stuck. Bantamweight as a category of boxing weights dates from the 1880s.

banyan [17] Banyan originally meant ‘Hindu trader’. It is an arabization of Gujarati vaniyan ‘traders’, which comes ultimately from Sanskrit vanija ‘merchant’ (the Portuguese version, banian, produced an alternative English spelling). When European travellers first visited Bandar Abbas, a port on the Persian Gulf, they found there a pagoda which the banyans had built in the shade of a large Indian fig tree. They immediately applied the name banyan to this particular tree, and the term later widened to include all such trees.

baptize [13] The underlying notion of baptize is of ‘dipping’, as those baptized were originally (and sometimes still are) immersed in water. It comes from Greek báptein ‘dip’, whose derivative baptízein ‘baptize’ passed via Latin baptizre and Old French baptiser into English. Old Norse kafa ‘dive’ is a Germanic relative.

bar [12] The history of bar cannot be traced back very far. Forms in various Romance languages, such as French barre (source of the English verb) and Italian and Spanish barra, point to a Vulgar Latin *barra, but beyond that nothing is known. The original sense of a ‘rail’ or ‘barrier’ has developed various figurative applications over the centuries: in the 14th century to the ‘rail in a court before which a prisoner was arraigned’ (as in ‘prisoner at the bar’); in the 16th century to a ‘partition separating qualified from unqualified lawyers in hall’ (as in ‘call to the bar’); and also in the 16th century to a ‘counter at which drink is served’.

Related nouns include barrage [19], originally an ‘artificial obstruction in a waterway’, and barrier [14], from Anglo-Norman barrere.

BARRAGE, BARREL, BARRIER, BARRISTER, EMBARGO

barb see BEARD

barbarous [15] Originally, a barbarous person was a ‘foreigner’, anyone who did not speak your own language. Greek bárbaros meant ‘foreign, ignorant’, and it has been speculated that its ultimate signification was ‘unable to speak intelligibly’ (the related Sanskrit barbaras meant ‘stammering’). English acquired the word from Latin barbarus, a modified Vulgar Latin version of which, *brabus, produced Italian bravo and hence, via French, English brave.

BRAVE

barbecue [17] Barbecue originated in the language of the now extinct Taino people of the West Indies. It first emerges in the Haitian creole term barbacoa, which meant simply ‘wooden framework’ (used for other purposes than roasting meat – for example, as a bed). American Spanish adopted the word, and passed it on to English. Compare BUCCANEER.

barbel BEARD

barber see BEARD

bard [14] Bard is of Celtic origin. A prehistoric Old Celtic *bardos produced Scottish and Irish Gaelic bárd and Welsh bardd, which meant ‘poet-singer’. It appears to have been the Scottish form which introduced the word into English, in the sense ‘strolling minstrel’. The modern, more elevated meaning ‘poet’ is 17th-century.

bare [OE] Bare is an ancient word, traceable back to an Indo-European *bhosos. Descendants of this in non-Germanic languages include Lithuanian basas ‘barefoot’, but for the most part it is the Germanic languages that have adopted the word. Germanic *bazaz produced German and Swedish bar, Dutch baar, and, via Old English bær, modern English bare.

bargain [14] Bargain appears to be distantly related to borrow. Its immediate source was Old French bargaignier ‘haggle’, but this was probably borrowed from Germanic *borganjan, a derivative of *borgun (from which ultimately we get borrow). The sense development may have been as follows: originally ‘look after, protect’ (the related Germanic *burg- produced English borough, which to begin with meant ‘fortress’, and bury); then ‘take on loan, borrow’; then ‘take or give’; and hence ‘trade, haggle, bargain’.

BELFREY, BOROUGH, BORROW, BURY

barge [13] Barge comes in the first instance from Old French barge, but speculation has pushed it further back to medieval Latin *barica, which would have derived from báris, a Greek word for an Egyptian boat. This hypothetical *barica would have been a by-form of late Latin barca, which came into English via Old French as barque, also spelled bark, ‘sailing vessel’ [15] (source of embark). The metaphorical use of the verb barge, ‘move clumsily or rudely’, is barely a hundred years old; it comes from the ponderous progress made by barges.

BARK, BARQUE, EMBARK

baritone see GRAVITY

barium see GRAVITY

barley [OE] The Old English word for ‘barley’ was bære or bere. It came from an Indo-European base *bhar- which also gave Latin farna ‘flour’ (from which English gets farinaceous [17]) and Old Norse farr ‘barley’. Barley (Old English bærlic) was in fact originally an adjective formed from this (like princely based on prince), and it was not until the early twelfth century that it came to be used as a noun.

A barn [OE] was originally a building for storing barley. The Old English word ber(e)n was a compound formed from bere and ern or ærn ‘house’ (which may be related to English rest).

BARN, FARINACEOUS, FARRAGO

barnacle [12] The term barnacle was originally applied to a type of goose, Branta leucopsis, which according to medieval legend grew on trees or on logs of wood. Various fanciful versions of its reproductive cycle existed, among them that it emerged from a fruit or that it grew attached to a tree by its beak, but the most tenacious was that it developed inside small shellfish attached to wood, rocks, etc by the seashore. Hence by the end of the 16th century the term had come to be applied to these shellfish, and today that is its main sense. The word was originally bernak (it gained its -le ending in the 15th century) and came from medieval Latin bernaca, but its ultimate source is unknown.

baron [12] The earliest historical sense of baron, ‘tenant under the feudal system who held his land and title directly from the king’, can be traced back to its probable source, medieval Latin bar, which originally meant simply ‘man’, and hence ‘vassal’ or ‘retainer’. The word was of course brought into English by the Normans, as Anglo-Norman barun, and from earliest times was used as a title for someone belonging to the lowest order of peerage. Some have suggested an ultimate Germanic origin, and compared Old High German baro ‘freeman’.

barque see EMBARK

barrage see BAR

barricade [17] 12 May 1588 was known as la journée des barricades ‘the day of the barricades’, because in the course of disturbances in Paris during the Huguenot wars, large barrels (French barriques) filled with earth, cobblestones, etc were hauled into the street on that day to form barricades – and the term has stuck ever since. Barrique itself was borrowed from Spanish barrica ‘cask’, which was formed from the same stem as that from which English gets barrel [14]. It has been speculated that this was Vulgar Latin *barra ‘bar’, on the basis that barrels are made of ‘bars’ or ‘staves’.

BAR, BARREL

barrier see BAR

barrister [16] A barrister is a lawyer who has been ‘called to the bar’ – that is, admitted to plead as an advocate in the superior courts of England and Wales. This notion derives from the ancient practice of having in the inns of court a partition separating senior members from students, which barrier the students metaphorically passed when they qualified. The ending -ister was probably added on the analogy of such words as minister and chorister.

BAR

barrow [OE] Barrow for carrying things and barrow the burial mound are two distinct words in English. The barrow of wheelbarrow is related to bear ‘carry’. The Old English word, bearwe, came from the same Germanic base, *ber- or *bar-, as produced bear, and also bier. Barrow the burial mound, as erected by ancient peoples over a grave site, is related to German berg ‘mountain, hill’. The Old English word, beorg, came from prehistoric Germanic *bergaz.

BEAR, BIER

base There are two distinct words base in English. Base meaning ‘lower part, foundation’ [14] came either via Old French base or was a direct anglicization of Latin basis (acquired by English in its unaltered form at around the same time). The Latin word in its turn came from Greek básis, which meant originally ‘step’ and came ultimately from the Indo-European base *gwm-, from which English gets come; the semantic progression involved was ‘going, stepping’ to ‘that on which one walks or stands’ to ‘pedestal’. The derivative basement [18] is Italian in origin (Italian basamento means ‘base of a column’), but probably reached English via early modern Dutch basement ‘foundation’.

Base meaning ‘low’ [14] comes via Old French bas from medieval Latin bassus ‘short, low’. The ultimate antecedents of this are uncertain, although some have suggested a connection with básson, the comparative form of Greek bathús ‘deep’. The adjective bass is historically the same word as base, but since the 16th century has been distinguished from it by spelling.

BASIS; BASS

bashful see ABASH

basilisk [14] Greek basilískos meant literally ‘little king’ – it was a diminutive of basiléus ‘king’, source also of English basil [15] (probably from the herb’s use by the Greeks in certain royal potions) and of English basilica [16] (a church built originally on the plan of a royal palace). The Greeks used it for a ‘gold-crested wren’, but also for a type of serpent, and it is this latter use which developed into the fabulous monster of classical and medieval times, whose breath and glance could kill. The name was said by Pliny to be based on the fact that the basilisk had a crown-shaped mark on its head.

BASIL, BASILICA

basin [13] Basin comes via Old French bacin from medieval Latin *bacchinus, a derivative of Vulgar Latin *bacca ‘water vessel’, which may originally have been borrowed from Gaulish. The Old French diminutive bacinet produced English basinet ‘helmet’ [14] and, with a modification of the spelling, bassinette ‘cradle’ [19], which was originally applied in French to any vaguely basin-shaped object.

BASINET, BASSINETTE

bask [14] When English first acquired this word, probably from Old Norse bathask, it was in the sense ‘wallow in blood’: ‘seeing his brother basking in his blood’, John Lydgate, Chronicles of Troy 1430. It was not until the 17th century that the modern sense ‘lie in pleasant warmth’ became established: ‘a fool, who laid him down, and basked him in the sun’, Shakespeare, As You Like It 1600. The word retains connotations of its earliest literal sense ‘bathe’ – Old Norse bathask was the reflexive form of batha ‘bathe’.

BATHE

basket [13] Basket is something of a mystery word. It turns up in the 13th century in Old French and Anglo-Norman as basket and in Anglo-Latin as baskettum, but how it got there is far from clear. Some have suggested that Latin bascauda ‘washing tub’, said by the Roman writer Martial to be of British origin (and thought by some etymologists to be possibly of Celtic origin), may be connected with it in some way, but no conclusive proof of this has ever been found.

bass Bass the fish [15] and bass the musical term [15] are of course completely unrelated words, with different pronunciations. Bass meaning ‘of the lowest register’ is simply a modified spelling of the adjective base, under the influence of Italian basso. Related words are bassoon [18], from French basson, and basset-horn [19], a partial translation of Italian corno di bassetto, literally ‘bass horn’.

The bass is a spiny-finned fish, and it may be that its name is related to Old English byrst ‘bristle’. The Old English term for the fish was bærs, which survived dialectally until the 19th century in the form barse, and it is thought that it goes back to a Germanic base *bars- (source of German barsch); this may be cognate with *bors-, from which Old English byrst came. In the 15th century, barse underwent some sort of phonetic mutation to produce bass.

BASE, BASSOON

bassinette see BASIN

bastard [13] The idea underlying the word bastard appears to be that of a child born of an impromptu sexual encounter on an improvised bed, for it seems to echo Old French fils de bast, literally ‘packsaddle son’, that is, one conceived on a packsaddle pillow. If this is the case, the word goes back to medieval Latin bastum ‘packsaddle’, whose ultimate source was Greek bastázein ‘carry’; this passed via Old French bast, later bat, into late Middle English as bat, which now survives only in batman [18]. The derived form is first found in medieval Latin as bastardus, and this reached English via Old French bastard. Its modern usage as a general term of abuse dates from the early 19th century.

BATMAN

baste There are two separate verbs baste in English, one meaning ‘sew loosely’ [14], the other ‘moisten roasting meat with fat’ [15]. The first comes from Old French bastir, which was acquired from a hypothetical Germanic *bastjan ‘join together with bast’. This was a derivative of *bastaz, from which English gets bast ‘plant fibre’ [OE]. The origin of the second is far more obscure. It may come from an earlier base, with the past form based being interpreted as the present tense or infinitive.

bat Bat as in ‘cricket bat’ [OE] and bat the animal [16] come from entirely different sources. Bat the wooden implement first appears in late Old English as batt ‘cudgel’, but it is not clear where it ultimately came from. Some have postulated a Celtic source, citing Gaulish andabata ‘gladiator’, which may be related to English battle and Russian bat ‘cudgel’, but whatever the word’s origins, it seems likely that at some point it was influenced by Old French batte, from battre ‘beat’.

The flying bat is an alteration of Middle English backe, which was borrowed from a Scandinavian language. The word is represented in Old Swedish natbakka ‘night bat’, and appears to be an alteration of an earlier -blaka, as in Old Norse lethrblaka, literally ‘leather-flapper’. If this is so, bat would mean etymologically ‘flapper’, which would be of a piece with other names for the animal, particularly German fledermaus ‘fluttermouse’ and English flittermouse, which remained a dialectal word for ‘bat’ into the 20th century. It is unusual for the name of such a common animal not to go right back to Old English; in this case the Old English word was hrrems, which survived dialectally into the 20th century as rearmouse.

BATTLE

batch see BAKE

bath [OE] Bath is a word widely dispersed among the Germanic languages (German has bad, as does Swedish). Like the others, Old English bæth goes back to a hypothetical Germanic *batham, which perhaps derives from the base *ba- (on the suffix -th see BIRTH). If this is so, it would be an indication (backed up by other derivatives of the same base, such as bake, and cognate words such as Latin fovre ‘heat’, source of English foment) that the original notion contained in the word was of ‘heat’ rather than ‘washing’. This is preserved in the steam bath and the Turkish bath. The original verbal derivative was bathe, which goes back to Germanic *bathn (another derivative of which, Old Norse batha, had a reflexive form bathask, which probably lies behind English bask); use of bath as a verb dates from the 15th century.

BASK, BATHE

bathos [18] Bathos, the descent from the sublime to the commonplace, means etymologically ‘depth’. It represents Greek báthos, a derivative of the adjective bathús ‘deep’ (which has also given English such technical terms as bathyal ‘of the deep sea’, bathymetry, bathyscaphe, and bathysphere). The use of the word in English seems to have been initiated by the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), in his Bathos.

batman see BASTARD

battalion see BATTLE

battery [16] The original meaning of battery in English was literally ‘hitting’, as in assault and battery. It came from Old French batterie, a derivative of batre, battre ‘beat’ (from which English also gets batter [14]). The ultimate source of this, and of English battle, was Latin battuere ‘beat’. The development of the word’s modern diversity of senses was via ‘bombardment by artillery’, to ‘unit of artillery’, to ‘electric cell’: it seems that this last meaning was inspired by the notion of ‘discharge of electricity’ rather than ‘connected series of cells’.

BATTER, BATTLE

battle [13] English acquired battle via Old French bataille and Vulgar Latin *battlia from late Latin battulia ‘fencing exercises’. This was a derivative of the verb battuere ‘beat’ (source also of English batter and battery), which some have viewed as of Celtic origin, citing Gaulish andabata ‘gladiator’, a possible relative of English bat. Related words include battalion [16], ultimately from Italian battaglione, a derivative of battaglia ‘battle’; battlements [14], from Old French batailler ‘provide with batailles – fortifications or battlements’; and derivatives such as abate, combat, and debate.

ABATE, BAT, BATTALION, BATTERY, COMBAT, DEBATE

bawdy [15] The adjective bawdy appears on the scene relatively late, but it is a derivative of bawd ‘prostitute’ or ‘madam’, which entered English in the 14th century. Its origins are not altogether clear, but it appears to have come from the Old French adjective baud ‘lively, merry, bold’, which in turn was probably acquired from Germanic *bald-, source of English bold.

BOLD

bay There are no fewer than six distinct words bay in English. The ‘sea inlet’ [14] comes via Old French baie from Old Spanish bahia. Bay as in bay leaf [14] comes from a different Old French word baie, whose source was Latin baca ‘berry’. The ‘reddish-brown colour of a horse’ [14] comes via Old French bai from Latin badius, which is related to Old Irish buide ‘yellow’. The ‘recessed area or compartment’ [14] comes from yet another Old French baie, a derivative of the verb bayer ‘gape, yawn’, from medieval Latin batare (English acquired abash and abeyance from the same source, and it may also be represented in the first syllable of beagle). Bay ‘bark’ [14] comes from Old French abaiier, in which the element -bai- probably originated as an imitation of a dog howling. And it is the source of bay as in at bay [13] (from Old French abai), the underlying idea of which is that of a hunted animal finally turning and facing its barking pursuers.

ABASH, ABEYANCE, BEAGLE

bayonet [17] Bayonet comes from French bayonette, an early spelling of what is now baïonette. The French term is traditionally derived from Bayonne, the name of a town and port on the southwest coast of France, near Biarritz, where bayonets were supposedly first used by Basques of the area, in the 17th century. But this etymology is not universally accepted, and some have noted the resemblance to Old French bayon ‘crossbow bolt’.

bazaar [16] Bazaar is a word of Persian origin; it comes from Persian bzr ‘market’ (whose ultimate source was a prehistoric Old Persian *abcharish), and reached English via Turkish and Italian (whence the early English form bazarro). Many fanciful spellings competed in 16th- and 17th-century English, including buzzard.

be [OE] There are four distinct components that go to make up the modern English verb be. The infinitive form be comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *bheu-, *bhu-, which also produced, by other routes, future and physical. Its Germanic descendant was *bu-, which signified on the one hand ‘dwell’ (from which we get booth, bower, byre, build, burly, byelaw, and the final element of neighbour), and on the other hand ‘grow, become’, which led to its adoption as part of the verb expressing ‘being’ (in Old English particularly with the future sense of ‘coming to be’).

Am and is go back to the ancient Indo-European verb ‘be’, *es- or *s-, which has contributed massively to ‘be’ verbs throughout all Indo-European languages (third person present singulars Greek esti, Latin est, French est, German ist, Sanskrit ásti, Welsh ys, for example) The Indo-European first and third person singular forms were, respectively, ésmi and ésti.

For the present plural Old English used the related sind(on) (as found in Latin sunt, French sont, and German sind), but this died out in the 12th century, to be replaced by are, which comes from a Germanic base *ar- of unknown origin. From the same source is the now archaic second person singular art.

The past tense forms was, were come ultimately from an Indo-European base *weswhich meant ‘dwell, remain’. Related words in other Indo-European languages include Sanskrit vásati ‘dwell, remain’ and Gothic wisan ‘remain, continue’.

BOOTH, BOWER, BUILD, BURLY, BYELAW, BYRE

beach [16] Beach is a mystery word. When it first turns up, in the dialect of the southeast corner of England, it means ‘shingle’; and since long stretches of the seashore in Sussex and Kent are pebbly, it is a natural extension that the word for ‘shingle’ should come to be used for ‘shore’. Its ultimate source is obscure, but some etymologists have suggested a connection with Old English bæce or bece ‘stream’ (a relative of English beck [14]), on the grounds that the new meaning could have developed from the notion of the ‘pebbly bed of a stream’.

BECK

beacon [OE] In Old English, bacen meant simply ‘sign’; it did not develop its modern senses ‘signal fire’ and ‘lighthouse’ until the 14th century. Its source is West Germanic *baukna, from which English also gets beckon [OE].

BECKON

bead [13] The word bead originally meant ‘prayer’. It comes ultimately from Germanic *beth-, source also of English bid. This passed into Old English as gebed, which by the 13th century had lost its prefix to become bede. (German has the parallel gebet ‘prayer’.) The modern sense ‘small pierced decorative ball’ developed in the 14th century, from the use of a string of rosary beads for counting while saying one’s prayers.

BID

beadle see BID

beagle [15] The likeliest source of beagle appears to be Old French becgueule ‘noisy person’ (the supposition is that the dog had the term applied to it because of its loud bark). Becgueule itself was probably a compound formed from beer ‘gape, yawn’ (source also of English abash and abeyance and, in its later form bayer, of English bay ‘recessed area’) and gueule ‘throat’ (related to English gullet).

ABASH, ABEYANCE, BAY, BULLET

beak [13] English acquired beak via Old French bec from Latin beccus, which was probably borrowed from some Gaulish word (the original Latin word for ‘beak’ was rostrum). The Roman historian Suetonius (c. 69–140 AD) tells of one Antonius Primus, a native of Toulouse, who was nicknamed as a boy Beccus, ‘that is, hen’s beak’. The Old English term for ‘beak’ was bile ‘bill’.

SOUBRIQUET

beaker [14] The immediate source of beaker was Old Norse bikarr. It is widespread in the West Germanic languages (German has becher, for instance), and it seems likely that Old Norse acquired it from Old Saxon bikeri. But it was borrowed into prehistoric West Germanic from medieval Latin bicarius, which in turn goes back to Greek bikos ‘earthenware jug’ (ultimate source of English pitcher [13]).

PITCHER

beam [OE] In Old English times the word bam (like modern German baum) meant ‘tree’ – a signification preserved in tree-names such as hornbeam and whitebeam. But already before the year 1000 the extended meanings we are familiar with today – ‘piece of timber’ and ‘ray of light’ – had started to develop. Related forms in other Germanic languages (which include, as well as German baum, Dutch boom, from which English gets boom ‘spar’ [16]) suggest a West Germanic ancestor *bauma, but beyond that all is obscure.

BOOM

bean [OE] The word bean (Old English bean) has relatives in several Germanic languages (German bohne, Dutch boon, Swedish böna), pointing to a common West and North Germanic source *baun, but that is as far back in history as we can pursue it.

Beanfeast [19] apparently derived from the practice of serving bacon and beans (or, according to some, bean geese, a species of goose) at the annual dinners given by firms to their employees in the 19th century. Beano, originally a printers’ abbreviation, appears towards the end of the 19th century.

bear [OE] The two English words bear ‘carry’ and bear the animal come from completely different sources. The verb, Old English beran, goes back via Germanic *ber- to Indo-European *bher-, which already contained the two central meaning elements that have remained with its offspring ever since, ‘carry’ and ‘give birth’. It is the source of a very large number of words in the Indo-European languages, including both Germanic (German gebären ‘give birth’, Swedish börd ‘birth’) and non-Germanic (Latin ferre and Greek phérein ‘bear’, source of English fertile and amphora [17], and Russian brat ‘seize’). And a very large number of other English words are related to it: on the ‘carrying’ side, barrow, berth, bier, burden, and possibly brim; and on the ‘giving birth’ side, birth itself and bairn ‘child’ [16]. Borne and born come from boren, the Old English past participle of bear; the distinction in usage between the two (borne for ‘carried’, born for ‘given birth’) arose in the early 17th century.

Etymologically, the bear is a ‘brown animal’. Old English bera came from West Germanic *bero (whence also German bär and Dutch beer), which may in turn go back to Indo-European *bheros, related to English brown. The poetic name for the bear, bruin [17], follows the same semantic pattern (it comes from Dutch bruin ‘brown’), and beaver means etymologically ‘brown animal’ too.

AMPHORA, BAIRN, BARROW, BERTH, BIER, BORN, BURDEN, FERTILE, FORTUNE, PARAPHERNALIA, SUFFER; BROWN

beard [OE] Old English beard came from West Germanic *bartha, which was also the source of German bart and Dutch baard. A close relative of this was Latin barba ‘beard’, which gave English barb [14] (via Old French barbe), barber [13] (ultimately from medieval Latin barbtor, originally a ‘beard-trimmer’), and barbel [14], a fish with sensitive whisker-like projections round its mouth (from late Latin barbellus, a diminutive form of barbus ‘barbel’, which was derived from barba).

BARB, BARBER

beast [13] Beast replaced deer as the general word for ‘animal’ in the 13th century (deer of course remained in use for antlered animals of the family Cervidae), and was itself replaced by animal in the 17th century. It entered English via Old French beste from Latin bstia (source of English bestial [14]).

BESTIAL

beat [OE] Old English batan and the related Old Norse bauta may be traced back to a prehistoric Germanic *bautan. It has been conjectured that this could be connected with *fu-, the base of Latin conftre and reftre (source respectively of English confute [16] and refute [16]) and of Latin fustis ‘club’ (from which English gets fusty [14]).

BEETLE, CONFUTE, FUSTY, REFUTE

beauty [13] Beauty came via Anglo-Norman beute and Old French bealte from Vulgar Latin *bellitas, a derivative of Latin bellus ‘beautiful’ (this developed from an earlier, unrecorded *dwenolos, a diminutive form of Old Latin *duenos, *duonos, which is related to Latin bonus ‘good’ – source of English bonus [18], bounty [13], and bounteous [14]). Other English words from the same ultimate source are beau [17] and its feminine form belle [17]; beatific [17], which comes from Latin betus ‘blessed, happy’, the past participle of the verb bere, a relative of bellus; embellish; and bibelot ‘small ornament’ [19], originally a French word based ultimately on *belbel, a reduplication of Old French bel ‘beautiful’. English beautiful is 15th century.

BEAU, BELLE, BEATIFIC, BIBELOT, BONUS, BOUNTY, EMBELLISH

beaver [OE] Like bear, beaver appears to mean etymologically ‘brown animal’. Old English beofor or befor came from a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bebruz, which in turn went back to an Indo-European *bhebhrús, a derivative of the base *bhru- ‘brown’. Other words for ‘beaver’ from the same source include Czech bobr, Lithuanian bebrùs, and Latin fiber.

because [14] Because originated in the phrase by cause, which was directly modelled on French par cause. At first it was always followed by of or by a subordinate clause introduced by that or why: ‘The Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified’, St John’s Gospel, 7:39, 1611. But already by the end of the 14th century that and why were beginning to be omitted, leaving because to function as a conjunction, a move which would perhaps have exercised contemporary linguistic purists as much as ‘The reason is because …’ does today. The abbreviated form ’cause first appears in print in the 16th century.

CAUSE

beckon see BEACON

become [OE] Become is a compound verb found in other Germanic languages (German bekommen, for instance, and Dutch bekomen), which points to a prehistoric Germanic source *bikweman, based on *kweman, source of English come. Originally it meant simply ‘come, arrive’, but the modern senses ‘come to be’ and ‘be suitable’ had developed by the 12th century. A parallel semantic development occurred in French: Latin dvenre meant ‘come’, but its modern French descendant devenir means ‘become’.

COME

bed [OE] Bed is common throughout the Germanic languages (German bett, Dutch bed), and comes from a prehistoric Germanic *bathjam. Already in Old English times the word meant both ‘place for sleeping’ and ‘area for growing plants’, and if the latter is primary, it could mean that the word comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhodh-, source of Latin fodere ‘dig’ (from which English gets fosse and fossil), and that the underlying notion of a bed was therefore originally of a sleeping place dug or scraped in the ground, like an animal’s lair.

FOSSE, FOSSIL

bedizen see DISTAFF

bedlam [15] The word bedlam is a contraction of Bethlehem. It comes from the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem founded in 1247 by Simon FitzMary, Sheriff of London, as the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem. Situated outside Bishopsgate, in the City of London, the hospital began to admit mental patients in the late 14th century. In the 16th century it officially became a lunatic asylum. The word bedlam came to be used for any ‘madhouse’, and by extension for a ‘scene of noisy confusion’, in the 17th century.

bee [OE] Old English bo ‘bee’ came from a prehistoric West and North Germanic *bon, source also of German biene, Dutch bij, and Swedish bi, which may all be traceable back to an Indo-European base *bhi- ‘quiver’. This, if it is true, means that the bee was originally named as the ‘quivering’, or perhaps ‘humming’ insect. Latin fucus ‘drone’ appears to be related.

beech [OE] Like many other tree-names, beech goes back a long way into the past, and is not always what it seems. Among early relatives Latin fgus meant ‘beech’ (whence the tree’s modern scientific name), but Greek phgós, for example, referred to an ‘edible oak’. Both come from a hypothetical Indo-European *bhagos, which may be related to Greek phagein ‘eat’ (which enters into a number of English compounds, such as phagocyte [19], literally ‘eating-cell’, geophagy [19], ‘earth-eating’, and sarcophagus). If this is so, the name may signify etymologically ‘edible tree’, with reference to its nuts, ‘beech mast’. The Old English word bce’s immediate source was Germanic *bkjn, but this was a derivative; the main form bk produced words for ‘beech’ in other Germanic languages, such as German buche and Dutch beuk, and it survives in English as the first element of buckwheat [16], so named from its three-sided seeds which look like beech nuts. It is thought that book may come ultimately from bk- ‘beech’, on the grounds that early runic inscriptions were carved on beechwood tablets.

BOOK, BUCKWHEAT, PHAGOCYTE, SARCOPHAGUS

beef [13] Like mutton, pork, and veal, beef was introduced by the Normans to provide a dainty alternative to the bare animal names ox, cow, etc when referring to their meat. Anglo-Norman and Old French boef or buef (which of course became modern French boeuf) came from Latin bov-, the stem of bs ‘ox’, from which English gets bovine [19] and Bovril [19]. Bs itself is actually related etymologically to cow.

The compound beefeater ‘yeoman warder of the Tower of London’ was coined in the 17th century; it was originally a contemptuous term for a ‘well-fed servant’.

BOVINE, COW

beer [OE] Originally, beer was probably simply a general term for a ‘drink’: it seems to have come from late Latin biber ‘drink’, which was a derivative of the verb bibere ‘drink’ (from which English gets beverage, bibulous, imbibe, and possibly also bibber). The main Old English word for ‘beer’ was ale, and beer (Old English bor) is not very common until the 15th century. A distinction between hopped beer and unhopped ale arose in the 16th century.

BEVERAGE, BIBULOUS, IMBIBE

beetle English has three separate words beetle. The commonest, beetle the insect, comes from Old English bitula, which was a derivative of the verb btan ‘bite’: beetle hence means etymologically ‘the biter’. Beetle ‘hammer’, now largely restricted to various technical contexts, is also Old English: the earliest English form, btel, goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *bautilaz, a derivative of the verb *bautan, from which English gets beat (the cognate Old Norse beytill meant ‘penis’). The adjective beetle [14], as in ‘beetle brows’, and its related verb are of unknown origin, although it has been speculated that there is some connection with the tufted antennae of certain species of beetle, which may suggest eyebrows.

BITE; BEAT

before [OE] Before is a Germanic compound, made up of *bi- ‘by’ and *forana ‘from the front’ (the resulting *biforana entered Old English as beforan). The second element, *forana, is a derivative of *fora, source of English for; this originally meant ‘before’, and only gradually developed the senses we are familiar with today.

FOR

beg [OE] Beg first turns up in immediately recognizable form in the 13th century, as beggen, but it seems likely that it goes back ultimately to an Old English verb bedecian ‘beg’. This came from the Germanic base *beth-, from which English also gets bid.

BID

begin [OE] Begin comes from a prehistoric West Germanic compound verb *biginnan, which also produced German and Dutch beginnen; the origin of the second element, *ginnan, is not known for certain. The form gin was common in the Middle Ages and up until about 1600; this was a shortening, perhaps not so much of begin as of the now obsolete ongin ‘begin’, which was far more widespread than begin in Old English.

behalf [14] Behalf was compounded from the prefix be- ‘by’ and the noun half, in the sense ‘side’. The latter had been used in such phrases as on my half, that is, ‘on my side, for my part’, since late Old English times, and the new compound began to replace it in the 14th century. (That particular use of half had died out by the end of the 16th century.) The modern sense of ‘representing or in the interests of someone’ was present from the beginning.

HALF

behave [15] To ‘behave oneself’ originally meant literally to ‘have oneself in a particular way’ – have being used here in the sense ‘hold’ or ‘comport’. The be- is an intensive prefix. Of particular interest is the way in which the word preserves in aspic the 15th-century pronunciation of have in stressed contexts. For much of its history behave has been used with reference to a person’s bearing and public dignity (‘He was some years a Captain, and behaved himself with great gallantry in several engagements’, Richard Steele, Spectator Number 2, 1711), and the modern connotations of propriety, of ‘goodness’ versus ‘naughtiness’, are a relatively recent, 19th-century development.

The noun behaviour [15] was formed on analogy with the verb from an earlier haviour, a variant of aver ‘possession’ [14], from the nominal use of the Old French verb aveir ‘have’.

HAVE

behind [OE] Behind was compounded in Old English times from the prefix bi- ‘by’ and hindan ‘from behind’. This second element, and the related Old English hinder ‘below’, have relatives in other Germanic languages (German hinten and hinter ‘behind’, for example), and are connected with the English verb hinder, but their ultimate history is unclear. Modern English hind ‘rear’ may come mainly from behind.

HIND, HINDER

behold see HOLD

belch [OE] Belch first appears in recognizable form in the 15th century, but it can scarcely not be related to belk ‘eructate’, which goes back to Old English bealcan and survived dialectally into the modern English period. Belch itself may derive either from an unrecorded variant of bealcan, *belcan (with the c here representing a /ch/ sound), or from a related Old English verb belcettan ‘eructate’. But whichever route it took, its ultimate source was probably a Germanic base *balk-or *belk-, from which German got bölken ‘bleat, low, belch’. Belch was originally a perfectly inoffensive word; it does not seem to have been until the 17th century that its associations began to drag it down towards vulgarity.

beleaguer see LAIR

belfry [13] Etymologically, belfry has nothing to do with bells; it was a chance similarity between the two words that led to belfry being used from the 15th century onwards for ‘bell-tower’. The original English form was berfrey, and it meant ‘movable seige-tower’. It came from Old French berfrei, which in turn was borrowed from a hypothetical Frankish *bergfrith, a compound whose two elements mean respectively ‘protect’ (English gets bargain, borough, borrow, and bury from the same root) and ‘peace, shelter’ (hence German friede ‘peace’); the underlying sense of the word is thus the rather tautological ‘protective shelter’. A tendency to break down the symmetry between the two rs in the word led in the 15th century to the formation of belfrey in both English and French (l is phonetically close to r), and at around the same time we find the first reference to it meaning ‘bell-tower’, in Promptorium parvulorum 1440, an early English-Latin dictionary: ‘Bellfray, campanarium’.

AFFRAY, BARGAIN, BORROW, BOROUGH, BURY, NEIGHBOUR

believe [OE] Believing and loving are closely allied. Late Old English belfan took the place of an earlier gelfan ‘believe’ (with the associative prefix ge-), which can be traced back to a prehistoric West and North Germanic *galaubjan (source also of German glauben ‘believe’). This meant ‘hold dear, love’, and hence ‘trust in, believe’, and it was formed on a base, *laub-, which also produced, by various routes, English love, lief ‘dear’, leave ‘permission’, and the second element of furlough.

FURLOUGH, LEAVE, LIEF, LOVE

bell [OE] The Old English word was belle. Apart from Dutch bel it has no relatives in the other main European languages (many of them use words related to English clock for ‘bell’: French cloche, for instance, and German glocke). It has been speculated that it may be connected with the verb bell, used of the baying call made by a hound or stag, which itself is perhaps related to bellow, a descendant of a hypothetical Old English *belgan. The ultimate source may possibly be the same as for bellows.

BELLOW

belle see BEAUTY

bellicose see REBEL

belligerent see REBEL

bellows [OE] Bellows and belly were originally the same word, Old English belig, which meant ‘bag’. This was used in the compound , literally ‘blowing bag’, a device for blowing a fire, which was replaced in the late Old English period by the plural form of the noun, belga or belgum, from which we get bellows. Meanwhile the meaning of belly developed from ‘bag’ to, in the 13th century, ‘body’ and, in the 14th century, ‘abdomen’. Ultimately the word goes back to Germanic *balgiz ‘bag’, from the base *balg- or *belg-(itself a descendant of Indo-European *bhel-‘swell’), which also lies behind billow [16], bolster, and possibly bellow and bell.

BELL, BELLOW, BELLY, BILLOW, BOLD, BOLSTER

belong [14] Old English had a verb langian, meaning ‘pertain to’. It had no immediate connection with the other Old English verb langian, modern English long, ‘desire’, but came from the Old English adjective gelang ‘pertaining, belonging’ (although ultimately this gelang and the modern English adjective and verb long come from the same Germanic source, *langgaz). The intensive prefix be- was added in the 14th century.

LONG

below [14] Below is a lexicalization of the phrase by low, replacing an earlier on low, the opposite of on high. It was perhaps modelled on beneath.

LOW

belt [OE] Old English belt and related Germanic forms such as Swedish bälte point to a source in Germanic *baltjaz, which was borrowed from Latin balteus, possibly a word of Etruscan origin. The verbal idiom belt up ‘be quiet’ appears to date from just before World War II.

bench [OE] Old English benc goes back to Germanic *bangk-, also the source of English bank (the related German bank means ‘bench’). The Northern and Scottish English versions of the word were benk and bink. The specific application to the seat on which a judge sits arose in the 13th century.

BANK

bend [OE] English band, bind, bond, and bundle are closely allied: all go back to a prehistoric Germanic base *band-. The relationship in meaning was, in the case of bend, more obvious in Old English times, when bendan meant ‘tie up’ as well as ‘curve’ (a sense preserved in the modern English noun bend ‘knot’, as in carrick bend). The rather strange-seeming meaning development appears to have come about as follows: bend in the sense ‘tie, constrain’ was used for the pulling of bow-strings, with reference to the strain or tension thereby applied to the bow; the natural consequence of this was of course that the bow curved, and hence (although not until the late 13th century) bend came to be used for ‘curve’.

BAND, BIND, BOND, BUNDLE

beneath [OE] Beneath is a compound adverb and preposition, formed in Old English from bi ‘by’ and nithan or neothan ‘below’. This came originally from Germanic *nith- (also the source of nether [OE]), a derivative of the base *ni-‘down’.

NETHER

benefit [14] The element bene- occurs in a wide variety of English words. It comes from Latin bene ‘well’, a close relative of Latin bonus ‘good’. Amongst its combinations are benediction [15], literally ‘saying well’, hence ‘blessing’, benefaction ‘doing well’ [17], and benevolent ‘wishing well’ [15]. Benefit is related to benefaction, since it too comes ultimately from Latin bene facere, but it took a more indirect route to English, from Latin benefactum ‘good deed’ via Old French bienfait and Anglo-Norman benfet.

benzene [19] The original name given to this hydrocarbon, by the German chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich in 1833, was benzine. He based it on the term benzoic acid, a derivative of benzoin, the name of a resinous substance exuded by trees of the genus Styrax. This came ultimately from Arabic lubn-jw, literally ‘frankincense of Java’ (the trees grow in Southeast Asia). When the expression was borrowed into the Romance languages, the initial lu- was apprehended as the definite article, and dropped (ironically, since in so many Arabic words which do contain the article al, it has been retained as part and parcel of the word – see ALGEBRA). This produced a variety of forms, including French benjoin, Portuguese beijoim, and Italian benzoi. English probably acquired the word mainly from French (a supposition supported by the folk-etymological alteration benjamin which was in common use in English from the end of the 16th century), but took the z from the Italian form.

Meanwhile, back with benzine, in the following year, 1834, the German chemist Justus von Liebig proposed the alternative name benzol; and finally, in the 1870s, the chemist A W Hofmann regularized the form to currently accepted chemical nomenclature as benzene.

BENZOL

bequeath [OE] Etymologically, what you bequeath is what you ‘say’ you will leave someone in your will. The word comes from Old English becwethan, a derivative of cwethan ‘say’, whose past tense cwæth gives us quoth (it is no relation to quote, by the way). The original sense ‘say, utter’ died out in the 13th century, leaving the legal sense of ‘transferring by will’ (first recorded in 1066).

The noun derivative of Old English cwethan in compounds was -cwiss. Hence we can assume there was an Old English noun *becwiss, although none is recorded. The first we hear of it is at the beginning of the 14th century, when it had unaccountably had a t added to it, producing what we now know as bequest.

BEQUEST, QUOTH

berate see RATE

bereave see ROB

beret [19] The beret originated in the southwestern corner of France, worn by the farmers and peasants of Gascony, and the word for it comes from the south-western dialect term berret (it reached English via mainstream French béret). It derives from Latin birrus ‘hooded cloak’, which is probably of Celtic origin (Middle Irish berr ‘short’ has been compared), and is thus a relative of biretta [16], the term for the square cap worn by Roman Catholic clergy, formed as a diminutive of birrus in Italian (berretta) and Spanish (birreta).

BIRETTA

berry [OE] Berry is a strictly Germanic word, not found in other branches of Indo-European (German has beere, Dutch bes, and Danish bær). Its earliest application seems to have been specifically to grapes; the only record of it in Old Saxon and Gothic is in the compound ‘wineberry’, and around 1000 Aelfric translated Deuteronomy 23:24 into Old English as ‘If you go into your friend’s vineyard, eat the berries’. But by the Middle Ages the term had broadened out to encompass the sorts of fruit we would recognize today as berries. The word goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic *basj, which it has been speculated may be related to Old English basu ‘red’.

berserk [19] Sir Walter Scott appears to be responsible for introducing this word to the English language. He mentions it in a footnote to his novel The pirate 1822, adopting it (in the form berserkar) from the Icelandic berserkr ‘frenzied Norse warrior’. Its etymology is not altogether clear. Its second syllable represents serkr ‘coat, shirt’ (a word English used to have, as sark: cutty sark meant ‘short shirt’), but the first is disputed. Scott took it to mean ‘bare’ (which would have been Icelandic berr), and in fact the anglicized form baresark was quite commonly used in the mid 19th century; the plausible-sounding notion underlying this is that the original berserkr was so called because in his battle-crazed frenzy he tore off his armour and fought in his shirt-sleeves – ‘bare-shirted’. However, 20th-century etymologists have tended to prefer the theory that ber- is ‘bear’, representing Icelandic bern-, a by-form of bjorn ‘bear’. The concept of warriors dressing themselves in animals’ skins is an ancient one, found in many mythologies.

The modern use of the word as an adjective, meaning ‘in a violent frenzy’, appears to date from the third quarter of the 19th century.

berth [17] Like birth, berth appears to be based on the verb bear, although it is a separate and much later formation. At first it meant ‘safe manoeuvring distance at sea’ (from which we get the metaphorical ‘give a wide berth to’); this seems to have come from the nautical sense of bear ‘steer in a particular direction’ as in bear away (from which we get bear down on, as well as more general applications, such as ‘bear left’). This led, via ‘convenient space for a ship to moor’, to, in the 18th century, the more familiar modern senses ‘sleeping place on a ship’ and ‘job, situation (originally on board ship)’.

BEAR, BIRTH

beseech see SEEK

beside [13] Beside was a Middle English lexicalization of the Old English phrase be sidan, literally ‘by the side of’. The -s of besides is a survival of the genitive ending added to certain adverbs in the Old English and early Middle English period (such as always). The metaphorical beside oneself originated in the 15th century.

SIDE

best [OE] Best and better, the anomalous superlative and comparative of good, go back to a prehistoric Germanic base *bat-, which is related to the archaic English boot ‘remedy’ (as in to boot) and meant generally ‘advantage, improvement’. Its comparative and superlative were *batizon and *batistaz, which came into Old English as respectively betera and betest (gradually reduced via betst to best).

The term best man originated in Scotland; it has gradually replaced the earlier bride(s)man and groomsman.

BETTER, BOOT

bestial see BEAST

bet [16] Since its comparatively late arrival, bet has ousted the earlier lay, wager, and game as the main term for ‘risking money on an uncertain outcome’ (gamble is later still). It is by no means clear where it came from; the usual explanation is that it is short for the noun abet, in the sense ‘instigation, encouragement, support’ – that is, one is giving one’s ‘support’ to that which one thinks, or hopes, may happen in the future (abet itself comes from the Old French verb abeter, and is related to English bait). It first appears in Robert Greene’s Art of Cony Catching 1592, which suggests an origin in the argot of smalltime Elizabethan criminals.

ABET, BAIT, BITE

betray [13] Betray is an English formation based on the Old French verb traïr ‘betray’, which came from Latin tradere ‘hand over, deliver up’ (originally a compound formed from trans-‘across’ and dre ‘give’). The noun formed from tradere was trditi, from which English gets, directly, tradition, and indirectly, via Old French and Anglo-Norman, the appropriate treason.

TRADITION, TREASON

betroth see TRUE

between [OE] The second syllable of between is related to two and twin; the word as a whole seems to represent an original phrase meaning something like ‘by two each’. Old English betwonum reflects a Germanic *twon, reduced from an earlier *twikhnai; this represents the base *twkh- (from which we get two) plus an -n suffix with apparently some sort of distributive function. The related betwixt comes ultimately from Germanic *twa ‘two’ and the element *-isk- ‘-ish’.

TWIN, TWO

beverage [13] Beverage goes back to Latin bibere ‘drink’, from which English also gets imbibe [14], bibulous [17], beer, and probably bibber. From the verb was formed the Vulgar Latin noun *biberticum ‘something to drink’, and hence, via Old French bevrage, English beverage. The colloquial abbreviation bevvy is at least 100 years old (it has been speculated, but never proved, that bevy ‘large group’ [15] comes from the same source).

BEER, BEVY, BIB, BIBULOUS, IMBIBE

beware see WARE

bewilder see WILD

beyond [OE] Beyond is a lexicalization of the Old English phrase be geondan ‘from the farther side’. The second element comes from a prehistoric Germanic *jandana, formed on a base *jan- which also gave English the now largely dialectal yon [OE] and yonder [13]. To German it contributed the demonstrative adjective and pronoun jener ‘that’, and there are related demonstrative forms without the initial jin other Indo-European languages, including non-Germanic ones (Old Slavonic onu ‘that’, for instance, and Sanskrit na- ‘this one’).

YON, YONDER

bias [16] English acquired bias from Old French biais, but its previous history is uncertain. It probably came via Old Provençal, but where from? Speculations include Latin bifacem ‘looking two ways’, from bi- ‘two’ and facis ‘face’, and Greek epikársios ‘oblique’. When the word first entered English it meant simply ‘oblique line’, but by the end of the 16th century it was being applied more specifically to the game of bowls, in the sense of the ‘bowl’s curved path’, and also the ‘unequal weighting given to the bowl in order to achieve such a path’. The modern figurative senses ‘inclination’ and ‘prejudice’ derive from this.

bib [16] The word bib is first mentioned in John Baret’s Quadruple dictionarie 1580, where it is described as being ‘for a child’s breast’. It appears to come from the now archaic verb bib (as in wine-bibber), perhaps from the notion that the bib protects the baby’s clothes as it drinks. The verb itself is possibly from Latin bibere ‘drink’, source of beer, beverage, bibulous, and imbibe.

BEER, BIBULOUS, IMBIBE

bibelot see BEAUTY

bible [13] Greek ta biblía meant literally ‘the books’. This was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as biblia, where the plural form came to be misanalysed as a feminine singular; hence Old French, and through it English, received bible as a singular noun. Greek biblía itself was the plural of biblíon ‘book’ (whence English bibliography [17]), which was originally a diminutive form of bíblos or búblos. This was used for ‘book’, and for the book’s forerunners, such as scrolls and papyri. It may come from Bublos, an ancient Phoenician port from which papyrus was exported to Greece.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

bicycle [19] The word bicycle, literally ‘two-wheeled’ (from Greek kúklos ‘circle, wheel’), was originally coined in French, and first appeared in English in 1868, in the 7 September edition of the Daily News: ‘bysicles and trysicles which we saw in the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne this summer’. This reflects the fact that it was in the 1860s that the bicycle first assumed the form we know it in today, with pedals and cranks driving the front wheel. (Slightly earlier was the now obsolete velocipede, literally ‘swift foot’, first applied to pedal bicycles and tricycles around 1850. Until the introduction of pneumatic tyres in the 1880s, the new cycles were known as bone-shakers – a term first encountered in 1874.)

CYCLE, WHEEL

bid [OE] Bid has a complicated history, for it comes from what were originally two completely distinct Old English verbs. The main one was biddan (past tense bæd) ‘ask, demand’, from which we get such modern English usages as ‘I bade him come in’. It goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *bithjan (source of German bitten ‘ask’), which was formed from the base *beth- (from which modern English gets bead). But a contribution to the present nexus of meanings was also made by Old English bodan (past tense bad) ‘offer, proclaim’ (whence ‘bid at an auction’ and so on). This can be traced ultimately to an Indo-European base *bh(e)udh-, which gave Germanic *buth-, source also of German bieten ‘offer’ and perhaps of English beadle [13], originally ‘one who proclaims’.

BEAD, BEADLE

bide [OE] Bide appears to be related ultimately to Old English beodan, partial source of modern English bid, but exactly how is not clear. It comes from a lengthened version of the same stem, producing a hypothetical Germanic *bthan, and to all outward appearances is connected with such non-Germanic forms as Latin fdere and Greek peithésthai; but as these mean ‘believe, trust’, it is not easy to reconstruct a semantic connection with bide ‘remain’. Bide itself is now little used, except in ‘bide one’s time’, but the derived abide [OE] remains current, especially in the sense ‘endure’, as does the noun formed from it, abode [13].

ABIDE, ABODE, BID

bier [OE] Etymologically, a bier is ‘something used for carrying’. It comes from West Germanic *br, a derivative of the same base (*ber-) as produced the verb bear. Its Old English form was br, and it was not spelled with an i until the 16th century. The original general sense ‘framework for carrying something’ (which it shares with the etymologically related barrow) died out around 1600, but already by about 1000 the modern specific meaning ‘stand for a coffin’ had developed.

BARROW, BEAR

bifurcate see FORK

big [13] Big is one of the notorious mystery words of English etymology – extremely common in the modern language, but of highly dubious origin. In its earliest use in English it meant ‘powerful, strong’, and it is not really until the 16th century that we get unequivocal examples of it in the modern sense ‘large’. It occurs originally in northern texts, only slowly spreading south, which suggests that it may be of Scandinavian origin; some have compared Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’.

bight see BOW

bigot [16] According to the 12th-century Anglo-Norman chronicler Wace, bigot was a contemptuous term applied by the French to the Normans, but it is far from clear where this came from, whether it is the same word as present-day bigot, and, if it is, how it came to mean ‘narrow-minded person’. All that can be said for certain is that the word first turned up in its modern form in the 15th century as French bigot, from which English borrowed it.

bigwig see WIG

bikini [20] For Frenchmen, the sight of the first minimal two-piece swimming costumes for women produced by fashion designers in 1947 was as explosive as the test detonation of an atom bomb by the USA at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the western Pacific Ocean, in July 1946. Hence their naming it the ‘Bikini’, the first record of which is in the August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré. English acquired the word in 1948. The monokini, essentially a braless bikini, first appeared in 1964, the inspiration for its name being the accidental resemblance of the element bi- in bikini to the prefix bi- ‘two’.

bilge see BULGE

bill There are three distinct words bill in English (not counting the proper name), and of them all, the most recent is the commonest. Bill ‘note of charges’ [14] comes from Anglo-Latin billa, which is probably a variant of Latin bulla ‘document, seal’ (as in ‘papal bull’). English billet [15], as in ‘billeting soldiers on a house’, was originally a diminutive form of billa (French billet ‘letter’ comes from the same source). Bill ‘hook-bladed weapon’ [OE], now found mainly in billhook, comes from a prehistoric West Germanic *bilja, which may be based ultimately on Indo-European *bhid-, source of English bite. Bill ‘beak’ [OE] may be related to bill ‘weapon’, but this is not clear. The verbal sense ‘caress’, as in ‘bill and coo’, is 16th-century; it arose from the courting behaviour of doves stroking each other’s beaks.

BILLET

billiards [16] Billiard comes from French billard, which is the name not only of the game, but also of the cue it is played with. And the cue is the clue to the word’s history, for it comes from French bille ‘tree trunk’, hence ‘long cylindrical bit of wood’. The import of the -ard suffix is not altogether clear, but another suffix used with bille was the diminutive -ette, from which English got billet ‘piece of wood’ [15] (not to be confused with billet ‘assignment to lodgings’; see BILL). Bille itself came from medieval Latin billa or billus, which may have been of Celtic origin.

BILLET

biltong [19] Biltong, strips of sun-dried meat – anything from beef to ostrich – used as iron rations in southern Africa, has the unpromising literal meaning ‘buttock-tongue’ (Afrikaans bil is ‘buttock’, tong is ‘tongue’). The reason for the name is supposedly that the meat for biltong was customarily cut from the hind quarters of the animal, and that the coiner found in it, perhaps rather optimistically, a resemblance to the taste of smoked ox tongue.

bimbo [20] Bimbo most recently made its mark on the English language in the 1980s, when it was in heavy use among journalists to denigrate buxom young women of limited IQ who sold the secrets of their affairs with the rich and famous to the press. It was by no means a newcomer, though. It first crossed the Atlantic to America, from Italy, in the late 1910s. In Italian it means ‘baby’, and US slang took it up in the colloquial sense of baby, for referring to a usually hapless fellow. By the 1920s it was being applied equally to young women, especially promiscuous or empty-headed ones (the latter feature probably reinforced by the appearance of dumbo ‘fool’ in the early 1930s).

bin [OE] Old English had the word bine or binne (it meant ‘manger’), but it is not clear where it got it from. Perhaps the most likely source is a word, *benna, in the Celtic language of the pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain (Welsh has ben ‘cart’). But it may also have come from medieval Latin benna, which gave French benne ‘large basket’. In English, the modern sense ‘storage container’ does not fully emerge until the 14th century.

bind [OE] Band, bend, bind, bond, and bundle can all be traced back ultimately to an Indo-European base *bhendh-, which was also the source of Sanskrit bandh ‘bind’ and Greek peisma ‘cable’. In the case of bind, the immediate precursor of Old English bindan was the Germanic stem with an i vowel, *bind-. In the 14th century the verb came to be used as a noun, for the ‘stem of a climbing plant’, from which we get bine (as in woodbine ‘honeysuckle’).

BAND, BEND, BOND, BUNDLE

binnacle [15] Binnacle ‘ship’s compass housing’ has a curious history: etymologically it means ‘place where something lives’, and it is related to habitation and inhabit. Forms with -nn- do not begin to appear before the 18th century. Until then the word had been bittacle, which came from Spanish bitácula. A close relative of the Spanish word, French habitacle, gives a clue to its ultimate provenance in Latin habitculum, a derivative of habitre ‘inhabit’.

biology [19] The modern European languages have made prolific use of Greek bíos ‘life’ as a prefix, particularly in the 20th century. The first compound into which it entered in English seems to have been biotic, in the now obsolete sense ‘of secular life’ (around 1600), but the trend was really set by biography, first recorded as being used by John Dryden in his Life of Plutarch 1683. Biology itself came along at the beginning of the 19th century, via French, having been coined in German by Gottfried Reinhold in 1802. Twentieth-century contributions have included bioengineering, biometric, bionic, biorhythm, and biotechnology. Greek bíos itself goes back to an Indo-European base *gwej-, from which English also ultimately gets quick, vital, vivid, and zoo.

QUICK, VITAL, VIVID, ZOO

birch [OE] Old English bi(e)rce came from a prehistoric Germanic *berkjn, source also of German birke. The word goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *bhergo, but as is often the case with ancient tree-names, it does not denote the same type of tree in every language in which it has descendants: Latin fraxinus, for example, means ‘ash tree’. It has been speculated that the word is related to bright (whose Indo-European source was *bhereg-), with reference to the tree’s light-coloured bark. It could also be that the word bark [13] itself is related. The verb birch ‘flog’ (originally with a birch rod or bunch of birch twigs) is early 19th-century.

BARK, BRIGHT

bird [OE] Bird is something of a mystery word. It was not the ordinary Old English word for ‘feathered flying animal’; that was fowl. In Old English, bird meant specifically ‘young bird, nestling’. It did not begin to replace fowl as the general term until the 14th century, and the process took many hundreds of years to complete. Its source is quite unknown; it has no obvious relatives in the Germanic languages, or in any other Indo-European language.

The connotations of its original meaning have led to speculation that it is connected with breed and brood (the usual Old English form was brid, but the r and i subsequently became transposed in a process known as metathesis), but no convincing evidence for this has ever been advanced.

As early as 1300, bird was used for ‘girl’, but this was probably owing to confusion with another similar Middle English word, burde, which also meant ‘young woman’. The usage crops up from time to time in later centuries, clearly as an independent metaphorical application, but there does not really seem to be an unbroken chain of occurrences leading up to the sudden explosion in the use of bird for ‘young woman’ in the 20th century.

Of other figurative applications of the word, ‘audience disapproval’ (as in ‘get the bird’) comes from the hissing of geese, and in ‘prison sentence’ bird is short for bird lime, rhyming slang for time.

birth [12] Old English had a word gebyrd ‘birth’ which survived until the end of the 13th century as birde, but it was quite distinct from (though related to) modern English birth, which was borrowed from Old Norse byrth. This came from the same Germanic stem (*ber-, *bur-) as produced bear, bairn, and indeed Old English gebyrd. The suffix -th denotes a process, or the result of a process: hence birth is ‘(the result of) the process of bearing a child’. Along with bath and death it is one of the most ancient words formed with -th.

BAIRN, BEAR, BERTH

biscuit [14] Biscuit means literally ‘twice-cooked’ – from the method of cooking, in which the biscuits are returned to the oven after the initial period of baking in order to become dry or crisp. The original source of the word was probably a medieval Latin *biscoctus, from bis ‘twice’ and coctus ‘cooked’, the past participle of coquere (which is related to English cook). It reached English via Old French biscut.

COOK

bisect see SECTION

bishop [OE] Bishop originally had no ecclesiastical connections; its Greek source, episkopos, at first meant simply ‘overseer’, from epi- ‘around’ and skopein ‘look’ (antecedent of English scope, and related to spy). From the general sense, it came to be applied as the term for various government officials, and was waiting to be called into service for a ‘church officer’ as Christianity came into being and grew. The Greek word was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as episcopus (source of French évêque), and in more popular parlance lost its e-, giving *biscopus, which was acquired by English in the 9th century.

SCOPE, SPY

bison [14] Bison appears to be of Germanic origin, from a stem *wisand- or *wisund-. This became Old English wesand, which did not survive; and it was acquired again in the 19th century as wisent, borrowed from German wisent, applied to the ‘aurochs’, an extinct species of European wild ox. The b- form came into English via Latin bison, a borrowing from the Germanic. Originally of course referring to the European bison, the term was first applied to the North American species at the end of the 17th century.

bit There are three distinct nouns bit in English, but the two most ancient ones are probably both related ultimately to the verb bite. Bit as in ‘drill bit’ [OE] originally meant simply ‘bite’ or ‘biting’. The Old English word, bite, came from Germanic *bitiz, a derivative of the verb *btan ‘bite’. The ‘drill bit’ sense did not develop until the 16th century. The bit placed in a horse’s mouth is probably the same word. Bit meaning ‘small piece’ [OE] also comes from a Germanic derivative of *bitan, in this case *bton; this gave Old English bita ‘piece bitten off’. The more general sense, ‘small piece’, developed in the 16th century. The third bit, ‘unit of computer information’ [20], is a blend formed from ‘binary digit’.

BITE

bitch [OE] The antecedents of Old English bicce ‘female dog’ are obscure. It may come from a prehistoric Germanic *bekjn-, but the only related form among other Germanic languages appears to be Old Norse bikkja. The superficially similar French biche means ‘female deer’, and is probably not related. The use of the word as a derogatory term for ‘woman’ seems to have originated in the 14th century.

bite [OE] The Old English verb btan came from prehistoric Germanic *btan, which also produced German beissen and Dutch bijten. The short-vowel version of the base, *bit-, was the source of bit, beetle, and probably bitter, and is also represented in various non-Germanic forms, such as Latin fidere ‘split’ (from which English gets fission). Bait came via Old Norse from a causal usage, ‘cause to bite’, and passed via Old French into abet (the possible source of bet).

BEETLE, BIT, BITTER, FISSION

bitter [OE] Old English biter appears to have come from *bit-, the short-vowel version of *bt-, source of bite. Its original meaning would thus have been ‘biting’, and although there do not seem to be any traces of this left in the historical record, the sense development to ‘acrid-tasting’ is fairly straightforward (compare the similar case of sharp).

It seems likely that the bitter of ‘bitter end’ comes from a different source altogether, although in its current meaning it appears to have been influenced by the adjective bitter. A bitter was originally a ‘turn of a cable round the bitts’, and a bitt was a ‘post on the deck of a ship for fastening cables to’. It is not clear where bitt came from, although it was probably originally a seafarer’s term from the north German coast, and it may be related to English boat. Thus in the first instance ‘to the bitter end’ probably meant ‘to the very end, as far as it is possible to go’.

BITE

bittern [14] The Latin word for ‘bittern’ (a marsh bird) was bti, but by the time it reached Old French it had become butor. The discrepancy has been accounted for by proposing a Vulgar Latin intermediate *btitaurus, literally ‘bittern-bull’ (Latin taurus is ‘bull’), coined on the basis of the bittern’s loud booming call, supposedly reminiscent of a bull’s. The original English forms, as borrowed from Old French, were botor and bitoure; the final -n first appeared in the 16th century, perhaps on the analogy of heron.

bitumen see CUD

bivouac [18] Bivouac appears to be of Swiss-German origin. The early 19th-century writer Stalder noted that the term beiwacht (bei ‘additional’ + wacht ‘guard’ – a relative of English watch and wake) was used in Aargau and Zürich for a sort of band of vigilantes who assisted the regular town guard. Beiwacht was borrowed into French as bivac, and came to English in a later form bivouac. Its original application in English was to an army remaining on the alert during the night, to guard against surprise attack; in so doing, of course, the soldiers did not go to sleep in their tents, and from this the term bivouac spread to ‘improvised, temporary camp’, without the luxury of regular tents.

WAKE, WATCH

bizarre [17] Bizarre can probably be traced back to Italian bizzarro, of unknown origin, which meant ‘angry’. It passed into Spanish as bizarro, meaning ‘brave’, and then found its way into French, where its meaning gradually mutated from ‘brave’ to ‘odd’ – which is where English got it from. It used to be thought that the French word might have come from Basque bizarra ‘beard’ (the reasoning being that a man with a beard must be a brave, dashing fellow), which would have made bizarre almost unique as a word of Basque origin in English (the only genuine one in everyday use now is the acronymic name ETA, standing for Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna ‘Basque Homeland and Liberty’), but this is now not thought likely.

black [OE] The usual Old English word for ‘black’ was sweart (source of modern English swart and swarthy, and related to German schwarz ‘black’), but black already existed (Old English blæc), and since the Middle English period it has replaced swart. Related but now extinct forms existed in other Germanic languages (including Old Norse blakkr ‘dark’ and Old Saxon blac ‘ink’), but the word’s ultimate source is not clear. Some have compared it with Latin flagrre and Greek phlégein, both meaning ‘burn’, which go back to an Indo-European base *phleg-, a variant of *bhleg.

blackmail see MAIL

bladder [OE] Old English bldre came from a hypothetical West and North Germanic *bldrn, a derivative of the stem *bl-, from which we get blow. The name perhaps comes from the bladder’s capacity for inflation. It was originally, and for a long time exclusively, applied to the urinary bladder.

BLOW

blade [OE] The primary sense of blade appears to be ‘leaf’ (as in ‘blades of grass’, and German blatt ‘leaf’). This points back to the ultimate source of the word, the Germanic stem *bhl, from which English also gets bloom, blossom, and the now archaic blow ‘come into flower’. However, the earliest sense recorded for Old English blæd was the metaphorical ‘flattened, leaflike part’, as of an oar, spade, etc. The specific application to the sharp, cutting part of a sword or knife developed in the 14th century.

BLOOM, BLOSSOM, BLOW

blame [12] Blame and blaspheme are ultimately the same word. Both come from Greek blasphmein ‘say profane things about’, but whereas blaspheme has stuck to the path of ‘profanity’, blame has developed the more down-to-earth sense ‘reproach, censure’. The radical change of form seems to have come via blastmre, a demotic offshoot of late Latin blasphmre, which passed into Old French as blasmer, later blamer (whence English blame).

BLASPHEME

blanch see BLANK

blancmange [14] Blancmange means literally simply ‘white food’. It comes from a French compound made up of blanc ‘white’ and manger, a noun derived from the verb manger ‘eat’ (related to English manger). Originally it was a savoury dish, of chicken or similar white meat in a sauce made with cream, eggs, rice, etc and often sugar and almonds. Gradually the meat content came to be omitted, and blancmange turned into a sweet dish, typically containing gelatine.

MANGER

blank [15] Although English got blank from French blanc ‘white’, its ultimate source is Germanic. Forms such as Old High German blanc ‘white’ suggest a prehistoric Germanic *blangkaz, which could have been borrowed into Romanic, the undifferentiated precursor of the Romance languages, as *blancus – hence French blanc, Italian bianco, Spanish blanco, and Portuguese branco. The word originally meant simply ‘white’ in English, but this sense had all but died out by the early 18th century, by which time the present-day ‘unmarked’ was well established.

Other derivatives of French blanc include the verb blanch [14], from French blanchier, and blanket [13], from Old French blancquet. Blanco is a trade name (based on blanc) coined in the 1890s for a whitening preparation for military webbing (subsequently applied to the khaki-coloured version as well).

BLANCH, BLANKET

blaspheme [14] Blaspheme has maintained a remarkable semantic and formal stability since its origins in Greek blásphmos, which meant ‘speaking evil or profane things’ (blas- is related to blaptikós ‘hurtful’; the -phmos element denotes ‘speaking’, and is related to phmí ‘I say’). The derived Greek verb blasphmein was transmitted via ecclesiastical Latin blasphmre to Old French and thence to English. Blastmre, an altered version of blasphmre, produced blame.

BLAME

blatant [16] Blatant appears to have been coined, or at least introduced, by the poet Edmund Spenser. In the Faerie Queene 1596 he describes how ‘unto themselves they [Envy and Detraction] gotten had a monster which the blatant beast men call, a dreadful fiend of gods and men ydrad [dreaded]’. This ‘blatant beast’ was an allegorical representation of calumny. In the 17th century the word came to be applied to offensively voluble people, but the main modern sense, ‘offensively conspicuous’, does not seem to have developed until the late 19th century. If the word was Spenser’s own introduction, it is not clear where he got it from. The likeliest candidate seems to be Latin blatre ‘babble, gossip’, of imitative origin.

blaze There are three distinct words blaze in English. The commonest, meaning ‘fire, flame’ [OE], comes from a prehistoric Germanic *blasn. Its original signification was ‘torch’ (in the sense, of course, of a burning piece of wood or bunch of sticks), but by the year 1000 the main current meaning was established. The precise source of blaze ‘light-coloured mark or spot’ [17] is not known for certain, but there are several cognate forms in other Germanic languages, including Old Norse blesi and German blässe; perhaps the likeliest candidate as far as blaze is concerned is Middle Low German bles. The verbal usage, as in ‘blaze a trail’ (that is, by making conspicuous marks on trees) originated in the mid 18th century. The related German adjective blass ‘pale’, which originally meant ‘shining’, points up the fact that ultimately these two words blaze are related, the primeval sense ‘shining’ having diverged on the one hand through ‘pale’, on the other through ‘glowing, burning’.

The third blaze, ‘proclaim’ [14], as in ‘blaze abroad’, is now seldom encountered. It originally meant ‘blow a trumpet’, and comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *bhl-(source of blow). Its immediate source in English was Middle Dutch blsen. Despite its formal and semantic similarity, it does not appear to have any connection with blazon [13], which comes from Old French blason ‘shield’, a word of unknown origin.

A blazer [19] got its name from being a brightly coloured jacket (from blaze meaning ‘fire, flame’). It originated among English university students in the late 19th century. According to a correspondent in the Daily News 22 August 1889, the word was originally applied specifically to the red jackets worn by members of the ‘Lady Margaret, St John’s College, Cambridge, Boat Club’. But by the 1880s its more general application had become widely established: in the Durham University Journal of 21 February 1885 we read that ‘the latest novelty … for the river is flannels, a blazer, and spats’.

BLOW

bleak [16] Bleak originally meant ‘pale’, and comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *bhleg-, possible source of black and a variant of *phleg-, which produced Greek phlégein ‘burn’ and Latin flagrre ‘burn’ (whence English conflagration and flagrant; flame, fulminate, and refulgent are also closely related). From *bhlegcame the prehistoric Germanic adjective *blaikos ‘white’, from which Old English got blc ‘pale’ (the sense relationship, as with the possibly related blaze, is between ‘burning’, ‘shining brightly’, ‘white’, and ‘pale’). This survived until the 15th century in southern English dialects as bloke, and until the 16th century in the North as blake. Its disappearance was no doubt hastened by its resemblance to black, both formally and semantically, since both ‘pale’ and ‘dark’ carry implications of colourlessness. Blake did however persist in Northern dialects until modern times in the sense ‘yellow’. Meanwhile, around the middle of the 16th century bleak had begun to put in an appearance, borrowed from a close relative of bloke/blake, Old Norse bleikr ‘shining, white’. The modern sense ‘bare’ is recorded from very early on.

A derivative of the Germanic base *blaikwas the verb *blaikjn, source of Old English blcan ‘whiten’, the ancestor of modern English bleach (which may be related to blight). And a nasalized version of the stem may have produced blink [14].

BLEACH, BLIGHT, BLINK, CONFLAGRATION, FLAGRANT, FLAME, FULMINATE

bleed [OE] As its form suggests, bleed is a derivative of blood, but a very ancient one. From Germanic *bltham ‘blood’ was formed the verb *blthjan ‘emit blood’, which came into Old English as bldan, ancestor of bleed.

BLOOD

blend [13] Old English had a verb blendan, but it meant ‘make blind’ or ‘dazzle’. Modern English blend appears to come from blend-, the present stem of Old Norse blanda ‘mix’ (a relative of Old English blandan ‘mix’). The ultimate source of this is not clear, but it does not seem to be restricted to Germanic (Lithuanian has the adjective blandus ‘thick’ in relation to soup), so it may not be too far-fetched to suggest a link with blind, whose Indo-European ancestor *bhlendhos meant among other things ‘confused’.

bless [OE] Bless occurs in no other language than English, and originally meant ‘mark with blood’, from some sort of religious rite in which such marking conferred sanctity. It probably goes back to a prehistoric Germanic formation *blthisjan, a derivative of *bltham ‘blood’, which was taken up by no Germanic language other than Old English. Here it produced bltsian, which by the 13th century had become blesse. The word’s connotations of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’, which go back at least to the year 1000, were probably influenced by the etymologically unrelated bliss.

BLOOD

blight [17] Blight appeared out of the blue in the early 17th century in agricultural and horticultural texts, and its origins are far from clear. It has, however, been speculated that it may be connected with the Old English words blce and blcthu, both terms for some sort of itchy skin condition such as scabies. These in turn are probably related to Old English blcan ‘bleach’, the link being the flaky whiteness of the infected skin. In Middle English, blcthu would have become *bleht, which could plausibly have been the source of blight. A related piece in the jigsaw is blichening ‘blight or rust in corn’, found once in Middle English, which may have come ultimately from Old Norse blikna ‘become pale’.

BLEACH

blighty [20] Blighty is a legacy of British rule in India. Originally a term used by British soldiers serving in India for ‘home, Britain’, it is an anglicization of Hindi bilyat, which meant ‘foreign’, and particularly ‘European’. This was actually a borrowing from Arabic wilyat ‘district, country’, which was independently acquired by English in the 19th century in its Turkish form vilayet. It was a derivative of the Arabic verb waliya ‘rule’, and is related to wali ‘ruler’.

blimp [20] The original blimp was a sort of small non-rigid military airship used in World War I. Its name is said to have come from its official designation as ‘type B (limp)’ (as opposed to ‘type A (rigid)’). Its rotund flaccidity suggested it in 1934 to the cartoonist David Low (1891– 1963) as a name for a character he had invented, a fat pompous ex-army officer (in full, Colonel Blimp) who was always cholerically airing reactionary views. The British public evidently recognized the character as an all too common type, and his name became a generic one, to the extent of inspiring spin-offs such as blimpish.

blind [OE] The connotations of the ultimate ancestor of blind, Indo-European *bhlendhos, seem to have been not so much ‘sightlessness’ as ‘confusion’ and ‘obscurity’. The notion of someone wandering around in actual or mental darkness, not knowing where to go, naturally progressed to the ‘inability to see’. Related words that fit this pattern are blunder, possibly from Old Norse blunda ‘shut one’s eyes’, blunt, and maybe also blend. By the time the word entered Old English, as blind, it already meant ‘sightless’, but ancestral associations of darkness and obscurity were retained (Pepys in his diary, for instance, writes of a ‘little blind [that is, dark] bed-chamber’ 1666), and traces of them remain in such usages as ‘blind entrance’.

BLEND, BLUNDER, BLUNT

blindfold [16] The original term for covering someone’s eyes with a bandage was blindfell [OE], which survived until the 16th century. This meant literally ‘strike someone blind’, the second element being the fell of ‘felling trees’. It appears that its past form, blindfelled, came to be mistaken for a present form, and this, together with some perceived connection with fold (presumably the ‘folding’ of the bandage round somebody’s head), conspired to produce the new verb blindfold.

bliss [OE] Despite its formal and semantic similarity, bliss has no connection with bless. It comes ultimately from Germanic *blthiz ‘gentle, kind’, which is the source of English blithe ‘happy’ [OE]. The addition of the noun suffix *-tj produced the derivative *blthsj, which entered Old English as blths ‘happiness’, later reduced to bliss.

BLITHE

blister [13] Blister and its now extinct variant blester first appear in English at the end of the 13th century, possibly borrowed from Old French blestre, blostre. It seems that this in turn may have come from Middle Dutch bluyster ‘swelling’, but further back than that it has not proved possible to trace the word.

bloat [13] Bloat has a confused and uncertain history. It seems first to have appeared on the scene in the 13th century as an adjective, blout, meaning ‘soft, flabby’, a probable borrowing from Old Norse blautr ‘soft from being cooked with liquid’. This occurs only once, and does not resurface until the early 17th century, in Hamlet as it happens, as blowt: ‘Let the blowt king tempt you again to bed’. This appears to be the same word as turns up slightly later in the century as bloat, its meaning showing signs of changing from ‘flabby’ to ‘puffed up’. Then in the 1660s we encounter bloated ‘puffed up, swollen’, which paved the way for the verb bloat, first recorded in the 1670s.

It is not clear whether bloater [19] comes from the same source. Its linguistic ancestor is the bloat herring [16], which may perhaps have been given its name on the grounds that herrings preserved by light smoking are plumper than those fully dried.

block [14] English borrowed block from Old French bloc, but its ultimate origin appears to be Germanic; French acquired it from Middle Dutch blok ‘tree trunk’. The derived verb block ‘impede’ first crops up in the early 15th century, but was not established until the later 16th century; it originally meant ‘put blocks [of wood] or obstacles in the way of’. Blockade was coined in the 17th century, perhaps on the model of ambuscade, a contemporary synonym of ambush.

BLOCKADE

blood [OE] Blood is a Germanic word, occurring as German blut, Dutch bloed, Swedish blod, etc.as well as in English (the Romance languages take their words from Latin sanguis, whence English sanguine [14], while Greek had haima, as in English haemorrhage, haemoglobin, etc). The ultimate source of all these was Germanic *bltham, a derivative of which, *blthjan, produced English bleed. Old English had the adjective bldig, from which we get bloody; its use as an expletive dates from the 17th century.

BLEED, BLESS

bloom [13] The Old English word for ‘flower’ was the probably related blossom, and English did not acquire bloom until the 13th century, when it borrowed it from Old Norse blómi. This came from Germanic *blmon, a derivative of the Indo-European *bhl- which also produced Latin fls (whence English flower), the now archaic English verb blow ‘come into flower’, and English blade.

BLADE, BLOSSOM, BLOW, FLOWER

bloomer [19] Bloomers, long loose trousers worn by women, were not actually invented by someone called Bloomer – the credit for that seems to go to a Mrs Elizabeth Smith Miller of New York – but their first advocate was Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94), a US feminist who strongly promoted their use in the early 1850s as a liberated garment for women. The extent to which this became a cause célèbre can be gauged by the fact that it gave rise to so-called Bloomerism, a movement for ‘rationalizing’ women’s dress; in 1882 Lady Harberton wrote in Macmillan’s Magazine ‘“Bloomerism” still lurks in many a memory’.

Bloomer ‘mistake’ is late 19th-century, and apparently originally Australian. Early commentators derived it, not altogether convincingly, from ‘blooming error’.

blossom [OE] Blossom probably comes ultimately from an Indo-European base *bhls, which was also the source of Latin fls, from which English gets flower. It seems reasonable to suppose, in view of the semantic connections, that this *bhls- was an extended form of *bhl, from which English gets blade, bloom, and the now archaic verb blow ‘come into flower’.

BLADE, BLOOM, BLOW, FLOWER

blow There are three distinct blows in English. The commonest, the verb ‘send out air’ [OE], can be traced back to an Indo-European base *bhl-. It came into English (as Old English blwan) via Germanic *bl-, source also of bladder. The Indo-European base also produced Latin flre ‘blow’, from which English gets flatulent and inflate. The other verb blow, ‘come into flower’ [OE], now archaic, comes ultimately from Indo-European *bhl-. It entered English (as Old English blwan) via Germanic *blo-, from which English also gets bloom and probably blade. A variant form of the Indo-European base with -s- produced Latin fls (source of English flower) and English blossom. The noun blow ‘hard hit’ [15] is altogether more mysterious. It first appears, in the form blaw, in northern and Scottish texts, and it has been connected with a hypothetical Germanic *bleuwan ‘strike’.

BLADDER, FLATULENT, INFLATE; BLADE, BLOOM, BLOSSOM, FLOWER

blubber [14] The original notion underlying blubber is of ‘bubbling’ or ‘foaming’, particularly in relation to the sea, and it may, like bubble itself, be an onomatopoeic creation, imitative of the sound of spluttering or popping water. This sense died out in the mainstream language in the 16th century (though it survived longer dialectally), but it lies behind the verbal sense ‘cry copiously’. The development of the noun to its present meaning ‘whale fat’ is not altogether clear, but it may have been via an intermediate 15th-century application to ‘fish’s entrails’, which perhaps bubbled or appeared pustular when ripped open by the fishermen.

blue [13] Colour terms are notoriously slippery things, and blue is a prime example. Its ultimate ancestor, Indo-European *bhlwos, seems originally to have meant ‘yellow’ (it is the source of Latin flvus ‘yellow’, from which English gets flavine ‘yellow dye’ [19]). But it later evolved via ‘white’ (Greek phalós ‘white’ is related) and ‘pale’ to ‘livid, the colour of bruised skin’ (Old Norse has blá ‘livid’). English had the related blw, but it did not survive, and the modern English word was borrowed from Old French bleu. This was descended from a Common Romance *blvus, which in turn was acquired from prehistoric Germanic *blwaz (source also of German blau ‘blue’).

FLAVINE

bluestocking [18] The term bluestocking ‘female intellectual’ derives from the gatherings held at the houses of fashionable mid-18th-century hostesses to discuss literary and related topics. It became the custom at these not to put on full formal dress, which for gentlemen included black silk stockings. One habitué in particular, Mr Benjamin Stillingfleet, used to wear greyish worsted stockings, conventionally called ‘blue’. This lack of decorum was looked on with scorn in some quarters, and Admiral Boscawan dubbed the participants the ‘Blue Stocking Society’. Women who attended their highbrow meetings thus became known as ‘Blue Stocking Ladies’ (even though it was a man who had worn the stockings), and towards the end of the century this was abbreviated to simply bluestockings.

bluff English has two words bluff, one or perhaps both of them of Dutch origin. The older, ‘hearty’ [17], originally referred to ships, and meant ‘having a flat vertical bow’. This nautical association suggests a Dutch provenance, though no thoroughly convincing source has been found. The sense ‘flat, vertical, (and broad)’ came to be applied to land features, such as cliffs (hence the noun bluff ‘high steep bank’, which emerged in America in the 18th century). The word’s metaphorical extension to people was at first derogatory – ‘rough, blunt’ – but the more favourable ‘hearty’ had developed by the early 19th century.

Bluff ‘deceive’ [19] was originally a US poker term. It comes from Dutch bluffen ‘boast’, the descendant of Middle Dutch bluffen ‘swell up’.

blunder [14] When blunder first entered the language, it meant ‘stumble around blindly, bumping into things’, which gives a clue to its possible ultimate connection with blind. Its probable source was Old Norse blundra ‘shut one’s eyes’, forerunner of Swedish blunda and Norwegian blunda (Jon Blund is the Swedish equivalent of ‘the sandman’), and very likely a descendant of Indo-European *bhlendhos, from which blind comes. The first record of the modern sense ‘foolish mistake’ comes in Edward Phillips’s The new world of English words 1706.

BLIND

blunderbus [17] Blunderbus was originally Dutch donderbus (literally ‘thundergun’), and its transformation is due to folk etymology: the unfamiliar donder was replaced by the English word blunder, perhaps with some reference to the fact that, with its wide muzzle, it is capable only of fairly random firing. The second part of the word (which also occurs in arquebus) is ultimately related to box, Dutch bus or buis being not just a ‘box’ but also a ‘tube’, and hence a ‘gun’. There is no connection with the 20th-century thunderbox, a colloquial term for a ‘portable loo’.

blunt [12] Blunt originally meant ‘dull, obtuse, foolish’ in English, and it has been speculated that behind it there lay an earlier ‘dull of sight’, linking the word with blind. A possible source would be a derivative of Old Norse blunda ‘shut one’s eyes’ (whence probably also blunder). The application of blunt to dull, non-sharp edges or blades developed in the 14th century.

BLIND, BLUNDER

blush [OE] Modern English blush is a descendant of Old English blyscan ‘turn red, blush’, which was related to and perhaps derived from Old English ‘firebrand, torch’. Similarities of form and meaning make it tempting to compare blaze, which meant ‘torch’ in Old English and came from a prehistoric Germanic *blasn, but no connection has ever been established. Middle Dutch blosen ‘glow’ may be an intermediate form.

board [OE] Old English bord had a wide range of meanings, whose two main strands (‘plank’ and ‘border, side of a ship’) reveal that it came from two distinct sources: Germanic *bortham and *borthaz respectively (despite their similarity, they have not been shown to be the same word). Related forms in other Germanic languages that point up the dichotomy are Dutch bord ‘shelf’ and boord ‘border, side of a ship’. The second, ‘edge’ element of board (which is probably related to border) now survives in English only in seaboard (literally the ‘edge of the sea’) and in variations on the phrase on board ship (whose original reference to the ship’s sides is nowadays perceived as relating to the deck).

Board ‘food’ (as in ‘board and lodging’), and hence boarder, are metaphorical applications of board ‘table’.

BORDER

boast [13] The immediate source of boast appears to be Anglo-Norman bost, but where it came from before that is far from clear; German dialect bauste(r)n ‘swell’ has been compared, suggesting that it could be of Germanic origin. To begin with it meant ‘loud or threatening talk’ as well as ‘bragging’.

boat [OE] In origin, the word boat seems to be restricted to northern parts of Europe: Old English bt and Old Norse beit are the only early examples (German boot was borrowed from them, and French bateau comes from the English word). They point to a common Germanic origin in *bait-. It has been speculated that this may be related to bitt ‘post for fastening ship’s cables’. If true, this could mean that boat originally referred to one or other of the structural members of a wooden vessel.

bobby [19] The British bobby ‘policeman’ gets his name from the English statesman Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) – Bobby or Bob being the pet form of Robert. Peel was Home Secretary when the Metropolitan Police Force was formed in 1828, but the term bobby is not actually recorded until 1844. A much earlier application of his name was the now obsolete Peeler, used from 1817 for members of the Irish Constabulary, founded under Peel’s auspices, and later for English policemen.

Boche see CABBAGE

bodice [16] Originally, bodice was identical with bodies – that is, the plural of body. This use of body began early in the 16th century, when it referred to the part of a woman’s dress that covered the trunk, as opposed to the arms; and it soon became restricted specifically to the part above the waist. The reason for the adoption of the plural form (which was often used originally in the phrase pair of bodies) was that the upper portion of women’s dresses was usually in two parts, which fastened down the middle. In the 17th and 18th centuries the term bodice was frequently applied to ‘corsets’.

BODY

bodkin [14] A bodkin was originally a small dagger, and only in the 18th century did it develop the perhaps more familiar sense ‘long blunt needle’. Initially it was a three-syllable word, spelled boidekyn, and its origins are mysterious. Most speculation has centred on Celtic as a source. Welsh bidog ‘dagger’ being cited (the -kin is no doubt a diminutive suffix).

body [OE] For a word so central to people’s perception of themselves, body is remarkably isolated linguistically. Old High German had potah ‘body’, traces of which survived dialectally into modern times, but otherwise it is without known relatives in any other Indo-European language. Attempts have been made, not altogether convincingly, to link it with words for ‘container’ or ‘barrel’, such as medieval Latin butica. The use of body to mean ‘person in general’, as in somebody, nobody, got fully under way in the 14th century.

bog [13] Bog is of Gaelic origin. It comes from bogach ‘bog’, which was a derivative of the adjective bog ‘soft’. A possible link between Gaelic bog and Old English bgan ‘bend’ (source of modern English bow) has been suggested. The British slang use ‘lavatory’, which dates from the 18th century, appears to be short for the slightly earlier bog-house, which may have been an alteration of the 16th-century boggard – quite possibly completely unrelated to bog ‘swamp’.

bogey [19] Bogey is one of a set of words relating to alarming or annoying manifestations of the supernatural (others are bogle, bug, bugbear, and possibly boggle and bugaboo) whose interconnections are difficult to sort out. A strand common to most of them is a northern origin, which has led some to suggest an ultimate source in Scandinavia – perhaps an ancestor of Norwegian dialect bugge ‘important man’ (which has also been linked with English big) might lie behind Middle English bugge, originally ‘scarecrow’ but later used for more spectral objects of terror. Others, however, noting Welsh bwg, bwgan ‘ghost’, have gone with a Celtic origin.

Of more recent uses of bogey, ‘policeman’ and ‘nasal mucus’ seem to have appeared between the two World Wars, while ‘golf score of one stroke over par’ is said to have originated at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in the 1890s, when a certain Major Wellman exclaimed, during the course of a particularly trying round, that he must be playing against the ‘bogey-man’ (a figure in a popular song of the time). Bogie ‘undercarriage’ [19] is a different word (of if anything obscurer origin than bogey).

boil Boil ‘large spot’ [OE] and boil ‘vaporize with heat’ [13] are distinct words. The former comes from Old English or , which became bile in Middle English; the change to boil started in the 15th century, perhaps from association with the verb. The Old English word goes back ultimately to a West Germanic *blja, whose central meaning element was ‘swelling’; from it also comes German beule ‘lump, boil’. The verb’s source, via Anglo-Norman boiller, is Latin bullre, a derivative of bulla ‘bubble’, a word which also gave us bull (as in ‘Papal bull’), bullion, bowl (as in the game of ‘bowls’), budge, bullet, bulletin and bully (as in ‘bully beef’), as well, perhaps, as bill.

BILL, BOWL, BUDGE, BULL, BULLET, BULLETIN, BULLION, BULLY, EBULLIENT

bold [OE] In Old English, bold meant simply ‘brave’; the modern connotations of immodesty or presumptuousness do not seem to have developed until the 12th century. The word goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *balthaz, based ultimately, it has been speculated, on Indo-European *bhel- ‘swell’ (the psychological link through ‘being puffed up’ via ‘adventurous courage’ to ‘audacity’ is scarcely far-fetched). If this is so it would mean bold is related to bellows, belly, billow, bolster, and possibly bellow and bell. The notion of impetuosity is perhaps retained in the related German bald ‘soon’.

BELL, BELLOWS, BELLY, BILLOW, BOLSTER

bollock see BALL

bolshevik [20] Russian bol’ shévik is a derivative of ból’ shiy, the comparative form of the adjective ból’ shoy ‘big’. It was originally applied, at the 1903 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, to those party members who wished to go for a ‘big’, or extreme, socialist programme (in contrast with the more moderate Mensheviks – from Russian mén’ shij ‘less’); but since the Bolsheviks outnumbered the Mensheviks, the word soon became interpreted as ‘those in the majority in the party’. The transferred use of the English abbreviation bolshy to mean ‘stubbornly uncooperative’ dates from around 1918.

DEBILITY

bolster [OE] The idea underlying bolster ‘long pillow’ is of something stuffed, so that it swells up. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *bolstraz, which was a derivative of *bolg, *bulg- (source also of bellows, belly, billow and possibly bell, bellow, and bold). German has the related polster ‘cushion, pillow’.

BELL, BELLOW, BELLY, BILLOW, BOLD

bolt [OE] In Old English, a bolt was an arrow, particularly of the short stout variety used in crossbows (hence the phrase shoot one’s bolt). The more familiar modern sense ‘fastening pin’ developed in the 13th century. The verbal sense ‘make a quick escape’ comes from the notion of firing a projectile. The word appears in other Germanic languages (for instance German bolz ‘bolt’), but its ultimate origin is unknown.

bomb [17] Bomb is ultimately of onomatopoeic origin, and can probably be traced back to Greek bómbos, a word for a booming or buzzing sound. This passed into Latin as bombus, the probable source of Italian bomba, which acquired more explosive connotations. English got the word via French bombe. The derivative bombard preceded bomb into English, in the 15th century.

BOUND

bombast [16] Bombast originally meant ‘cotton-wool’, especially as used for stuffing or padding clothes, upholstery, etc; hence, before the end of the 16th century, it had been transferred metaphorically to ‘pompous or turgid language’. The ultimate source of the word was Greek bómbux ‘silk, silkworm’, which came into English via Latin bombyx, bombax (source also of English bombazine [16]) and Old French bombace. The earliest English form was bombace, but it soon developed an additional final -t.

BOMBAZINE

bonanza [19] Bonanza entered the language via American English from Spanish, where bonanza means ‘prosperity’, or literally ‘good weather’. It came from an unrecorded general Romance *bonacia, a derivative of Latin bonus ‘good’. (Other English words acquired ultimately from bonus – a descendant of Old Latin duenos – include bonbon [19], bonus [18], boon [14] (as in ‘boon companion’), bounty [13] (from Latin bonitas ‘goodness’), and perhaps bonny [15].) It appears to have been formed on the analogy of Latin malacia, as if this meant ‘bad weather’, from malus ‘bad’, although it in fact originally meant ‘calm at sea’, from Greek malakós.

BONBON, BONNY, BONUS, BOON, BOUNTY

bond English has two distinct words bond, which started life very differently but have gradually grown together. Bond ‘something that binds’ [13] was originally the same word as band (from Old Norse band), and only gradually diverged from it in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. The key modern legal and financial senses began to develop in the 16th century, the underlying notion being of something one is ‘bound’ or ‘tied’ to by a promise. Bond ‘bound in slavery’ [14], as in bondservant, is an adjectival use of the late Old English noun bonda ‘householder’, which came from Old Norse bóndi (the second element of húsbóndi, from which English gets husband). This represented an earlier bóandi, which was originally the present participle of east Norse bóa ‘dwell’, a derivative of the Germanic base *b- ‘dwell’, (from which English also gets be, boor, booth, bower, build, burly, byelaw, and byre). The semantic association of ‘tying up’ and ‘servitude’ has led to the merging of the two words, as shown in the derivative bondage.

BAND; BE, BOOR, BOOTH, BUILD, BYELAW, NEIGHBOUR

bone [OE] Somewhat unusually for a basic body-part term, bone is a strictly Germanic word: it has no relatives in other Indo-European languages. It comes from a presumed Germanic *bainam, which also produced for example German bein and Swedish ben. These both mean ‘leg’ as well as ‘bone’, suggesting that the original connotation of *bainam may have been ‘long bone’.

bonfire [14] A bonfire was originally a fire in which bones were burned. References to such (presumably rather evil-smelling) fires, which were large open air affairs, continue down to the 18th century, but latterly they have a distinctly antiquarian air, as if such things were a thing of the past. By the later 15th century the word was already passing to the more general modern meaning ‘large outdoor fire’, either celebratory (as in Bonfire Night, 5 November) or for destroying refuse.