IN THE STONE Age, lab meant pendulous or dangling, like the lobe of an ear. Today, a lab is a place of scientific research and experiment. It’s the same spelling, but the two words couldn’t seem more different … except that one leads directly to the other.
That early sense of something hanging down lingers in dewlap, the farmer’s term for the flap of loose skin drooping at the throat of cattle. Animals lap water with their tongues hanging out. Flames that lick over a log are lambent.
In medieval times, to lap a baby was to swaddle it in folds of cloth, and we still talk of being in the lap of luxury – it suggests swathes of satin and silk. An object that partly lies on top of another is overlapping it. In early English, the skirts of a dress or coat, the hemmed part that hung low, was the lap or lappet; it could also be the hanging part of an apron, covering the upper legs – the part of the body we now call the lap.
In motor racing, the drivers loop round and round the track, doing laps – going over and over the same ground, as if overlapping it.
We imagine that lip-studs are a recent fashion, but the Victorians had a word for them: labret. Reports of African women who distended their upper lips by inserting plates were sent back to England by the explorer Dr David Livingstone. He met the Makololo tribe of Malawi and asked a tribal chieftain why they did this. The chief replied: ‘For beauty! They are the only beautiful things women have. Men have beards, women have none.’
A label is a piece of cloth or paper that hangs down, like the brown paper ticket tied to Paddington Bear’s duffle coat when he arrived from Peru in England: it said, ‘Please look after this bear.’ A labial, on the other hand, is a sound made with the lips, like ‘m’ or ‘p’. And a laburnum is a tree that is festooned in spring with hanging garlands of yellow flowers.
But by far the most important lab word is a Roman word that describes what hard work looks like – a man bent forwards under the burden of a sack or a hod of bricks across his shoulder. Labor means a heavy weight, and laborare means to do hard labour. The place of work is, in medieval Latin, a laboratorium.
It’s been a laborious journey, but we got there: a laboratory, or lab for short, is a lab word.
Working together is collaboration, and any plan worked out in detail must be elaborate. Lapse is a related word: it comes from lapsus, a stumble, a falling down. That gives us elapse (to slip away), relapse (to slip back), collapse (to slip down) and prolapse (to slip forward). It is also the root of labile, meaning unstable.
Labradors are a breed of Newfoundland dog, from the northeast part of Canada called Labrador. According to the master etymologist Eric Partridge, the region was named in 1500 when the Portuguese explorers took a shipload of Inuit people prisoner and carried them back to Europe as forced labour. The frozen country they came from became known as Terra del Laboratores, the land of the slave workers.
The early French word lamper meant to lap up ale, and so lampons was a toast, meaning let us drink. English took the word lampon to be a coarse drinking song, the kind soldiers sing about the enemy or their own generals. Lampons were usually scurrilous and satirical – lampoon now means any kind of mockery and send-up.
Astrolabes were invented around 150 BC, probably by the Greek mathematician Hipparchus of Nicaea, who invented trigonometry. The earliest were tools to track the movement of the planets; as they became more sophisticated, astrolabes could be used to calculate the time at different latitudes, discover the direction of Mecca and compile astrological charts. A pointer or label hangs over the rim or the device, to indicate the exact reading.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s essay A Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in the late 1300s, is regarded as the first scientific work in English.
The orloj or astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square features a fantastically ornate astrolabe, made in 1490. Every hour, the skeletal figure of Death turns an hourglass and tugs a rope, the signal for the chimes and a procession of the Apostles. The dials of the clock tell the date and reveal where the sun and moon are in the star signs. It was the clockmaker Jan Ruze’s masterpiece – after it was finished, Prague’s guildsmen and town councillors were so jealously proud of their mechanical marvel that they had Ruze blinded, to make sure he could never build another. Ruze took his revenge … he crept inside the clocktower with a hammer and smashed the workings. It was a hundred years before anyone could be found to repair it.
‘Dignus est operarius mercede sua,’ as the New Testament says – ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’.
IN NORTHERN ENGLAND before the Second World War, children taking turns at games often picked who would go first, second and last with a playground chant: ‘Fog, Seg, Lag!’ It sounds Norse, but the root of the words is much older than that. Lag was the Stone Age word for the last one home, the straggler at the back.
Lag still has that meaning, to fall behind. It also means a convict, but in the nineteenth century the definition was more specific: a lag was a prisoner facing transportation to the colonies aboard a lag ship, which was the penalty for stealing. Five hundred years earlier, lagging was standard English for theft, though the word has been obsolete for so long that it does not even appear in the OED. The double meaning was originally ironic – if a sheep, for instance, didn’t come home with the flock, and its theft could not be proven, the shepherd might say heavily that it was lagging.
It is likely that leg comes from lag, probably because a lame animal, lagging behind, would limp or drag its leg.
The word must also be closely related to the Old English laet, meaning slow, sluggish and tardy. That became late and lately. To be more late is later, and then latest. In medieval English, latest was pronounced latst, and turned into last.
The Latin lassus also seems linked – it means ready to collapse, exhausted and faint, and it gives us lassitude, a world-weary absence of enthusiasm. The Old French, ah lassus, meaning ‘I am worn out’, became alas in English.
Delay comes about from lagging: it is caused ‘of lag’ or, in French, de + lag. A relay, where the baton is passed by the hind-most runner to the next, shares the root.
Because straggling animals were prone to getting lost, if not stolen, they might be roped together. In Latin, laxa was a thong or a noose, and laxare was to loosen or slacken a bond. By the time it reached French a thousand years later, it was laisser, to allow – it gives us lease, a legal permit. To release an animal is to slip it off its leash.
Lax can also mean loose or slack; laxity is the opposite of moral and physical rigour, and laches is culpable negligence. A laxative loosens the bowels, though in the seventeenth century it could also ease emotional constipation and encourage conversation, as alcohol does – playwright Ben Jonson admired good talkers, ‘Fellowes of practis’d, and most laxative tongues’. A drink or two helps us relax. To slacken off a thirst is to slake it.
Lasche in Old French survives in English as a dialect word – lash is soft and wet. Blend lash with luxuriant and you get lush, which used to mean verdant and is current slang for really good.
In Greek, the prefix lago-meant drooping. Rabbits and other lagomorphs have floppy ears.
When lag has a nasal twang, it becomes lang, which gives us languish and languid. The Old English lange is the source of long, with the sense that a laggard is a long way behind. Andlang, another word dating back to Saxon times, became along. Long becomes lengthen, following the same grammatical quirk that turns strong into strengthen.
A lance is a long weapon. A lunge is a long thrust. An oblong is an elongated square. To linger is to hang around, not leaving. To indulge is to tolerate or enjoy someone or something for a long while.
To lounge is to move without urgency, from the medieval French longis, a man of slow movements. A lounge used to mean a saunter or a stroll, but by the eighteenth century it was a room with loungers or easy chairs, where people could recline as they talked, especially in a clubhouse or hotel. As the middle classes grew, it became the elegant term for a sitting room at home.
The idea that lagging was a euphemism for cattle-rustling and other animal thefts came round again in medieval France. Purloigner meant to slow things down or prolong them – pro + long was to place at a distance. The sense developed, of course, that this was exactly what an old lag did for a living: he helped himself to somebody else’s property and retired with it to a safe distance. And that’s how we get purloin.
THE SHINY, WET dew on a dawn meadow is summed up in the syllable li – the Greek word for that morning phenomenon was leimon. Or perhaps it was the slick, slippery mud on the banks of a tidal river – the Latin word is limus. It might even have been the silvery trail of a snail, or leimax in Greek. But the most useful kind of li to Neolithic hunters was the sap that oozed from trees. It could be spread on twigs to snare thrushes and sparrows – birdlime.
In Old English, liman meant to stick and geliman was to stick together – which became glue. If you’re gluten intolerant, that’s where the problem started, etymologically. Glutinous means sticky, and deglutination is a messy word for unsticking things.
A floor covering patented in 1860 by Frederick Walton in Staines, Middlesex, made from canvas coated with linseed oil, was trade-named Linoleum, which got trimmed down to lino. That doesn’t come from the Latin linere, to smear, but from the source of linseeds – flax, or linum. Flax also gives us linen.
Middle Eastern oil came from olives long before the oil wells were discovered: the Latin for an olive tree was olea, which gives us oleaginous or oily. Petrol is also a li word: it is petra + oleum, rock and oil.
Etymologists argue about the origin of letters. Some trace the word to the past tense of linere, which is litus – meaning smeared, or perhaps scrawled. If that’s right, literature, alliteration and illiteracy are all literally li words. When the first Greek scribes began to scratch words on slate with a stylus, their mistakes could easily be obliterated with a trickle of water – they were deleted.
In northern Europe, an ‘s’ was prefixed to lime, to make slime. It also became sleek, slither, slink, slide and slice – all words that describe different kinds of slipping.
The origin of slight is the early Dutch slicht, a level plain – the Netherlands were full of mud flats. It acquired a sense of being slightly inclined, and thus became anything that was nearly-but-not-quite.
The wettest li is liquid. In Latin there are three forms: liqui means to flow; liquere to be liquid or, by extension, clear; and liquare means to filter or melt. The first gives us liquor – or, if your preferred libation is a crème de menthe to a whisky on the rocks, liqueur. Flowing speech is prolix or verbose. The second gives us liquidation and liquidity, and the third deliquesce, meaning to dissolve into liquid, and also dilute.
By adding a gutteral sound to li, early Indo-European speakers made ligh, which meant then what it means today – to lick, or make wet with the tongue. A smooth-tongued figure of speech is litotes, which is a downbeat way of giving upbeat praise – using a double negative to state a positive: ‘That isn’t a bad idea, and you’re not as stupid as you look!’
When good manners are polished to a high shine, they become polite. Politeness has nothing to do with politics or the police, obviously – they both stem from polis, the Latin for a city.
Think of the Victorian city and you’re in Limehouse, the dockside streets of London’s East End, where the Regent’s Canal feeds into the Thames. It’s in Limehouse that Lizzie Hexam and her father Gaffer go trawling the river for the bodies of drowned suicides, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and that supervillain Fu Manchu had his hideout in an opium den in the novels by Sax Rohmer. It wasn’t only the centre of the nineteenth-century drugs trade in Britain; the first cholera epidemic in London took hold here too, brought by sailors from Hamburg in the early 1830s. Eight hundred people died in the initial outbreak. The district takes its name from the oasts where lime for the building trade was dried during the fifteenth century and later.
David Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1909 when he made a tub-thumping, rabble-rousing speech in Limehouse – and that kind of populist, crowd-pleasing oratory is still called Limehousing. Lloyd George, after all, was a very slick politician.
ONE OF THE songwriting hooks that made The Beatles so successful was their trick of using pronouns in titles: they made their songs sound personal. ‘From Me to You’, ‘Please Please Me’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ … ‘All our early songs always had this very personal thing,’ Paul McCartney once said to a newspaper. And it wasn’t just the early hits – the last song the band recorded was George Harrison’s ‘I Me Mine’.
But even more pervasive than pronouns is a word that hasn’t changed in 8,000 years – love. The Beatles had US number ones with ‘She Loves You’, ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘All You Need Is Love’, and McCartney had more with ‘My Love’ and ‘Silly Love Songs’. In fact, in the past seventy years, from Benny Goodman’s ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ to Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ and beyond, there have been more than 120 American chart-toppers with ‘love’ in the title. It’s the most powerful word in pop.
In medieval English a loveday, or dies amoris in Latin, was a counselling session, a meeting to find an amicable end to a quarrel. Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI, staved off civil war in 1458 by staging a mass loveday in London, when the sons of noblemen killed in the Battle of St Albans three years earlier walked arm in arm to St Paul’s Cathedral in procession behind the king – a very public reconciliation.
A love-apple is a Tudor name for the tomato; in German the equivalent Liebesapfel is a toffee apple. Lovelocks were sported by courtiers in Elizabethan England – one curled tress, much longer than all the rest, draped over the shoulder. Shakespeare is supposed to have worn one. These days, love locks are a menace – instead of carving their initials on a tree, couples scrawl them on a padlock and hook it onto railings, especially on bridges, before throwing away the key. The Pont des Arts over the Seine is buckling under the weight of countless thousands of love locks, and in Rome police will fine young lovers on the spot for vandalism if they add to the glut of padlocks on the Ponte Milvio.
The Latin for desire is libet, which is not the root of liberty – that comes from liv, to grow. Libertine, though it now means a debauchee with depraved sexual desires, originally meant a freed slave: it stems from liv too. But libidinist is a lubh word, meaning a lecher. Libido is a word coined in 1912 by Carl Jung, to mean sexual energy: it’s Latin for lust, and libininous has meant lustful and lewd since medieval times. Lust isn’t a lubh word either: it stems from las, eager. And lecher comes from ligh, to lick, and literally means a licker – which makes lecherous old men sound even more horrible.
No, lubh isn’t related to the coarser, more wanton words; its etymological descendents are far subtler. In Old English, leof meant dear or pleasing, and became lief – now an archaic word, though its meaning is still understood: ‘I’d lief as not do that’ is a pompous way of saying ‘I would rather not’. Another little-used word is livelong, as in the livelong day: it has nothing to do with long life, and simply means very long. A leofman in Old English was a suitor: it became leman, or lover. The word is forgotten now, but it suggests that Hercule Poirot’s devoted secretary Miss Lemon was not a sour old spinster but a would-be paramour.
Leaf in Old English meant permission, especially to depart or be absent – now we spell it leave. Being absent without leave is still a court-martial offence in the Forces; much safer to get an official furlough.
Logically, relieve ought to be spelled releave: it means allowing someone to leave, by taking their place.
The German for permission is Verlaub, which literally means through kindness. And the German glauben means belief, a word that in Middle English was spelled bileafe – it means by kindness or, more loosely transliterated, God willing. A thousand years ago, belief was not blind faith but a hope.
So when Doris Day had a hit in the mid-1950s with a jazz standard whose lyric was by Gus Kahn, she thought her ultimatum to her lover was a straight choice … but it turns out to be three variations on lubh: ‘Love me or leave me / Or let me be lonely / You won’t believe me, I love you only’!
NEOLITHIC FARMERS HAD many words for light. There was bhal, the blazing brilliance of the sun; arg, the shimmering reflection of sunshine on metal; and diw, the dazzle of daylight. And then there was the luminous intensity of the full moon – luh.
Luh is an unearthly radiance. The brightness of the moon is exaggerated by the black of the night sky, and most luh words convey that sense of a light in the darkness. In Sanskrit, loka means the vast unseen depths of the universe, and lokaloka are the mountains at the end of the world.
Luna was the Roman name for the moon (in Greek it was Selene – selenotropic plants turn towards the moon, and selenites are the moon’s mythical inhabitants). Lunacy was intermittent insanity, attributed to the lunar phases. A lunette was a horseshoe for the tip of the hooves, shaped like a crescent moon; it was also the semi-circular groove for the victim’s neck in the block of a guillotine.
Lux is Latin for light, directly from the root word luh, and a lucifer match (a wooden taper tipped in combustible chemicals and invented around 1830) is literally a light-bearer: lux + fer (see bher). Lucifer was poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s name for Venus, the ‘morning star’; in ecclesiastical Latin, around the fifteenth century, it became a synonym for Satan. The rebel archangel was said to be the brightest light in the heavens before his fall from grace. It’s probable that the Norse fiend and trickster Loki is so named because he was originally the god of fire. Other luh names, like Lucy and Luke and Lucian, don’t have such diabolical connotations – the Roman goddess of childbirth was Lucina, because she brought children into the light.
Lucifugous means shunning the light, like a vampire.Luciferous is another word for illuminating.
To shine was lucere in Latin, the root of lucid, which means resplendently clear. Before the introduction of modern psychology, when lunatic was a catch-all for diverse mental illnesses, the term lucid intervals referred to periods of respite. To elucidate is to make a thing clear by directing a light onto it.
Lucent, a 500-year-old English word, means shining: a bright light shines right through a translucent surface. A lucarne window is a skylight. A lucernal microscope has a light glowing beneath the glass slides. Incidentally, glow-worm, in the Provençal dialect of Occitan spoken in southern France, is a luzerno.
Luculent means full of light – it is usually applied to writing, especially dazzling or brilliant passages. Lucubration, which literally means to work by artificial light, is long and laborious study – burning the midnight oil. A lucubrator is a nocturnal student.
All that illustrates how luh lights up the language. It’s easy to see how it became lustre, which is the sheen of reflected light, and lustrous, which means burnished. Lustring or lustrine is a glossy silk fabric.
The word illustrious implies that the famous are beacons in the community – they are its luminaries, its leading lights. And luh also gives us luxury, the kind of world in which those luminaries live. Luxus in Latin meant shiny, probably in the same sense that we’d say flashy. The plural luxaria became luxuriance, and luxurious. Wallowing in luxuries is luxuriety, and a sybarite addicted to luxuriation is a luxurist. Licinius Lucullus was just such a man: a fabulous rich Roman, who was famous for the splendour of his banquets; his private bath-houses, meanwhile, were notorious for their orgies. A particularly rare black stone he favoured in his huge villa, which was raised on stilts above the Bay of Naples, is still called Lucullean marble. Deluxe was originally French, de + luxe, the height ‘of luxury’.
In Greek, leukos meant bright, and then white. Leukaemia means white blood, because it causes an excess of white corpuscles. A leukaethiop was a quasi-scientific term invented in 1819 for an albino black African, a ‘white Ethiope’ – though ‘albino’ was shorter, easier to spell and had been coined at least forty years earlier. Leucosis is a disease where some parts of the body appear bleached, and leucous just means blondes … though Gentlemen Prefer Leucouses is a rotten name for a movie.