Category: Etymology

Newspapers and magpies

By Simon

Magpie reading a newspaper

What’s the connection between newspapers and magpies?

Well, apparently the first newspapers published in Venice and were known as gazeta de la novità and cost one gazeta (Venetian) or gazzetta (Italian), a small coin which had a picture of a magpie on it. A magpie is gazza in Italian and the name of the coin is a diminutive form of that name. Another possibility is that the newspaper was named after the magpie, a bird renowned for chattering.

The word gazette was first used in English in 1665 for a newspaper published in Oxford [source].

Spench, spence and sbens

By Simon

Recently a friend told me that in North Wales the area under stairs is know as the spench – I hadn’t heard it before and didn’t know how to write it so this spelling is a guess. I found spench in the Urban Dictionary, which defines it as “the area under the stairs (often a cupboard) where things are stored. Used in North Wales.”

Cupboard under the stairs

In the Geiriadur Mawr, one of my Welsh dictionaries, I found the Welsh word sbens, which is defined as “twll dan y grisiau” (a hole under the stairs) and is translated as spence.

The OED defines spence as “a room or separate place in which victuals and liquor are kept; a buttery or pantry; a cupboard.” and says that it is dialectal or archaic. It comes from the Old French word despense (to dispense), from the Latin word dispendere (to dispense, weigh out; pay out; open, spread out), from the Latin word pendere (to hang; depend; weigh out; pay) plus the prefix dis-.

Have you heard this word before, or do you have another word for the area/cupboard under the stairs?

Downies, duvets and slumberdowns

By Simon

While listening to a programme on Radio Scotland today I heard mention of downies, which seems to be a Scottish word for duvet. These days I usually call these things duvets, but when I was a child I had a slumberdown, which I think might be a trade name. I’ve also heard them called quilts or continental quilts, and think they’re called comforters in the USA.

The definition of duvet in the OED is “A quilt stuffed with eider-down or swan’s-down”, and it comes from the French word duvet (down), from dumet, a diminutive of Old French dum (down).

What do you call these things?

Spontus

By Simon

Spontus is a Breton word I learnt recently that means scary or terrible, as in spontus eo an amzer hiziv (the weather is terrible today). It doesn’t sound like it comes from a Welsh or Cornish root, and I wondered where it came from.

According to the Wikeriadur spontus comes from the word spont (to faint/wake with terror) plus the suffix -us. Unfortuantely it doesn’t say where spont comes from. Does any one have any ideas?

Handles, sleeves, tails and legs

By Simon

Yesterday I discovered that there are quite a few different words for handle in French, depending on what kind of handle you’re referring to:

– poignée /pwa.ɲe/ is a door handle or the handle on the lid of something. It also means handful, as in une poignée de sel (a handful of salt) or Ils n’étaient qu’une poignée (There were only a handful of them). In can also refer to love handles (poignée d’amour) and a break handle (poignée de frein). [source]. It comes from poing /pwɛ̃/ (fist), from the Latin pugnus (fist) [source].

– anse /ɑ̃s/ is the handle of a cup, or a cove, and comes from the Latin ansa (handle, tiller).

The Welsh equivalents are dolen (bow, handle, link, loop, ear, noose) and trontol (handle).

– manche /mɑ̃ʃ/ is the handle of a tool or a saucepan, and also a sleeve, or neck (of a violin or guitar).

The Welsh equivalents are coes (leg, stalk, handle) and carn (hoof, hilt, handle).

– queue /kø/ = is the handle of a frying pan, and also a tail, stalk and queue (line of people). It comes from the Latin word coda, a variant of cauda (tail) [source].

Are handles metaphorically linked to the same words in other languages?

Tchatter

By Simon

Recently I came across a couple of French words I hadn’t seen before – tchatter /tʃa.te/ (to chat) and tchat /tʃat/ (chat). As far as I can tell, they seem to refer particularly to online chat. The definition of tchatter on Reverso is “discuter avec d’autres personnes en temps réel depuis un ordinateur.” (to talk with other people in real time via a computer).

Similar words include:

– tchatche /tʃatʃ/, which Reverso defines as ‘jabberism’ (have you heard that one before?), patter, loquacity, verbosity, blather, etc. and which appears in the phrase avoir (de) la tchatche or ‘to have the gift of the gab’.

– tchatcher /tʃa.tʃe/ – to talk a lot and charmingly

– tchatcheur /tʃa.tʃœʁ/ – a great boaster; a voluable or talkative person.

Another French word for to chat is bavarder, and alternatives to tchatter include bavarder en ligne, cyberbavarder and clavarder – the latter is apparently used in Quebec and is a portmanteau of clavier (keyboard) and bavarder.

According to Wikitionaire tchatter, which is also written chatter and chater, comes from the English word chat, which comes from the Middle English word chateren (to chatter), which is thought to be of imitative origin.

Tchatcher and related words apparently come via Pied-Noir slang from the Spanish word chachara (an animated but futile conversation).

A foreboding sky

By Simon

Last night when I went out the sky was dark with very low clouds, and I expected it to rain at any moment. It did start raining while I was outside, but fortunately I was inside by the time the heavy rain arrived. I said to a friend that the sky had looked decidedly foreboding. He agreed, and we wondered how you would say this in the past tense if you use forebode as a verb – e.g. the sky foreboded/forebod/forebad/forebid rain. It’s not a word I use every day so I wasn’t sure. Now I know that it’s foreboded.

To forebode means to warn of or indicate (an event, result, etc.) in advance; to have an intuition or premonition of (an event) [source]. Fore comes from the Old English prefix fore- (before), from the Proto-Indo-European root *per- (forward, through), and bode from the Old English word bodian from boda (messenger) [source].

Fore comes from the same root as the Latin words pro (before, for, on behalf of), prae (before) and per (through, for) [source], and related words in other languages.

I like the word bode – you could say that something bodes without specifying whether it bodes well or ill, it just bodes.

Bead houses

By Simon

There’s a village near where I live called Betws-y-Coed [ˈbɛtʊs ə ˈkɔɨd], which means ‘prayer house in the wood’. I knew the meaning of the name, but hadn’t considered where the word betws might come from. Last night a friend told me that it comes from an English word ‘bead house’, meaning a prayer house or oratory.

Wikipedia agress with this saying the word Betws or Bettws comes from the Old English bed-hus (house of prayer, oratory). The name was first recorded as ‘Betus’ in 1254.

According to this Old English Dictionary the Old English word bed means ‘prayer, supplication; religious ordinance, service’, hús means ‘house; temple, tabernacle; dwelling-place; inn; household; family, race’, and gebédhús is a house of prayer or oratory.

Apparently the Welsh words bacws (bakery) and warws (warehouse) contain the same hús root. I can’t find confirmation of this, but it sounds plausible. I guessed that these words came from English, but hadn’t made the connection with Betws before.

They must have been borrowed before the Great Vowel Shift which started during the 14th century. Before then house or hús was pronounced /hu:s/, as it still is in northern English and Scots. The /haus/ pronunciation emerged during the 18th century.

Cuddies

By Simon

An interesting Scots word I came across this week was cuddy which means coalfish or donkey and featured in the English translation of a Gaelic song. From the context I knew it was some kind of creature, but which one I wasn’t sure.

According to the Scots Language Centre website cuddy is a Scots word meaning donkey, a foolish person, a saw horse or a vaulting horse. A Scotch cuddy is a pedlar.

Another word that came up that was new to me was gaberlunzie /ɡæbərˈlʌnji/, an old Scots word for a licensed beggar who would seek fees to pray for the souls of other people [source].

Have you come across these words before?

Menhirs, dolmens and cromlechs

By Simon

A menhir from Brittany and a cromleac from Ireland

The word menhir come up in discussion yesterday and I posted it on Facebook today along with the the Welsh translation maen hir, which is what I found in this dictionary. This provoked further discussion about whether the two terms mean the same thing. So I thought I’d find out.

A menhir is a standing stone of the kind that Obelix delivers in the Asterix books. According to the Dictionary of Word Origins and the OED, menhir comes from Breton mean-hir (long stone), which is what the Welsh term maen hir means, so it seems that they are the same. The usual Breton word for such standing stones is peulvan, however.

The word dolmen (a prehistoric structure of two or more upright stones surmounted by a horizontal one), comes via French from Breton: the men part means stone, and the dol part either comes from the Breton word tōl (table), a borrowing from the Latin tabula (board, plank), or from the Cornish tol (hole). So dolmen either means ‘stone table’ or ‘stone hole’.

The word dolmen also exists in Welsh, and another word for such structures is cromlech, which exists in Welsh and English and comes from the Welsh words crwm (bent, stooped) and llech (stone), and is related to the Irish word cromleac (‘bent stone’).