The American Heritage® Dictionary Blog

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Interview with Conscious Style Guide

American Heritage Dictionary editor Steve Kleinedler was recently interviewed by Sarah Grey for Conscious Style Guide. They discuss pronoun usage, the use of die by suicide in place of commit suicide, and Latinx, among several other topics.

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Getting down to the nitty-gritty of reduplication

Have you ever been to Baden-Baden or Walla Walla? Have you worn a tutu or a lava-lava? Have you eaten a bonbon or suffered from (let’s hope not!) beriberi? All of these words display reduplication, the repetition of a smaller element to form a word. Reduplication can be found in languages from around the world; the examples above come from French, German, Sahaptin, Samoan, and Sinhalese, though all of them have been naturalized as English words. And in English too, reduplication is a productive process, responsible for giving us the nouns boo-boo, ha-ha, dum-dum, and no-no, the verb pooh-pooh, and the adjective rah-rah, among others.

But exact reduplication, in which a single element is repeated in its entirety, isn’t the most common form of reduplication in English. More often, the element is repeated with variation. For instance, in “rhyme reduplication,” the two elements are the same except for their initial consonant sound (or lack thereof). The popular 1959 song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” contains not one but two such rhyme reduplications; other examples include fuddy-duddy, hurdy-gurdy, hoity-toity, lovey-dovey, okey-dokey, razzle-dazzle, roly-poly, super-duper, and tussie-mussie.

In other cases the reduplicated elements are identical except for their vowel sounds. This kind of reduplication, sometimes called “ablaut reduplication” by linguists, is especially common in English; it occurs in chitchat, crisscross, dilly-dally, ding-dong, fiddle-faddle, flimflam, flipflop, hee-haw, hip-hop, jimjams, knickknack, mishmash, ping-pong, riffraff, riprap, seesaw, shilly-shally, sing-song, teeter-totter, tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tittle-tattle, wishy-washy, and zigzag. Do you notice a pattern in this list? In nearly every instance, the first element has the (ĭ) vowel of pit. The exceptions (hee-haw, see-saw, and teeter-totter) all have the (ē) vowel of be. Both (ĭ) and (ē) are formed with the tongue relatively far forward and raised in the mouth. By contrast, the second element in each case has (ă) as in pat, (ä) as in father, (ŏ) as in pot, or (ô) as in paw—a group of closely related vowels that are all produced with the tongue further back or lower in the mouth. In linguistic terms, we would say that each of these reduplications involves a shift from a generally close front vowel to a more open or more back vowel. Why should this be? Nobody really knows, although the phenomenon is probably related to other patterns of vowel shift in English, such as the rule that irregular verbs tend to have more close or front vowels for their present tense (e.g. bring, give, see, think) and more open or back vowels for their past tense forms (e.g. brought, gave, saw, thought).

Bye-bye—or, if you prefer, ta-ta!

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January 2018 Content Update

The American Heritage Dictionary editorial staff is pleased to announce that the most recent round of revisions and additions has been incorporated into our online dictionary at ahdictionary.com! All of these revisions and additions will also be included in the AHD app’s next update.

During the last nine months, the dictionary staff and consultants have reviewed over 2,000 entries and revised over 1,000 entries, including the addition of over 200 words and senses.

New words and senses include:

               cryptocurrency

               framboise

               postapocalyptic 

               rando

Revisions include:

               the styling of cellphone as a single word (although cell phone is still an acceptable variant) 

               the pronunciation of quinoa 

Updated usage notes include:

               author 

               banal 

               comparable 

If you’re interested in the history of words, you’ll want to check out the expanded etymologies at these entries:

               calendula    

               kurgan  

               melisma 

               vapor   

In the weeks to come, we’ll be posting essays about particular revisions and additions that we’re adding this week. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the entries for the words shown above!

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Functional shift again

In a post several years ago, we discussed the phenomenon of functional shift, the process in which words belonging to one part of speech are repurposed as other parts of speech. That post primarily focused on the “verbing” of nouns, as when the noun contact begat the verb contact, but functional shift can follow countless other paths.

For instance, a noun can take on a new life as an adjective, as happened to the nouns legion and myriad, both of which originally referred to a large number of people—a legion was a Roman military unit of 3,000 to 6,000 troops, while myriad meant  “a group of 10,000, especially 10,000 troops.” Both words are now often used adjectivally to mean “very numerous,” as in The problems facing the new Middle East peace plan are legion or The speaker described the myriad difficulties of earning approval for a new vaccine.

Verbs can turn into adjectives too, as when the verb spare (spare a dime) became the adjective spare (a spare tire). Or they can turn into nouns, as when the verb kill (killed the deer) became the noun kill (skinned and butchered his kill) many centuries ago, or more recently when the verb reveal (revealed my new look) gave rise to the noun reveal (a shocking reveal in the show’s season finale).

Adjectives, for their part, can become nouns (My bad!) or verbs (attempted to better her situation) or, in a pinch, adverbs (Do not go gentle into that good night!). Adverbs  can become nouns (the great hereafter), and prepositions can become nouns (have an in at the company) or verbs (offed a rival mob boss). Both conjunctions and interjections can be redeployed as nouns as well (no ifs, ands, or buts; said our goodbyes).

Speaking of interjections, they can be formed out of almost any other part of speech. They can be nouns (Rats!), verbs (Damn!), adjectives (Cool!), adverbs (Well!), or conjunctions (As if!). Could even a preposition be used as an interjection? If it hasn’t happened yet, there’s no reason why it couldn’t at some point in the future…

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Waking and watching

In its most usual form nowadays, a wake is a gathering of people in the presence of a dead body to honor the deceased and to console one another. Most often such a gathering takes place during visiting hours at a funeral parlor. But historically, a wake involved one or more people who remained in the presence of the body continuously until the time of burial. It was thus a kind of vigil—someone would have to stay up all night near the body, possibly for several nights. Thus the name: the noun wake comes from the Old English verb wacian, “to be awake, keep watch.”

The closely related Old English verb wæccan gave rise to the verb watch, and thus gave its name to another sort of vigil, the watch night. A watch night is a religious service held on New Year’s Eve, traditionally lasting up until midnight. Watch night services date back to 18th-century England, the first citation for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary being from the journal of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. But in the United States they are especially associated with African American churches (many but not all of which belong to the Methodist tradition) and have acquired a new significance since the 19th century.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, freeing all enslaved people in those states or parts of states currently in rebellion against the Union, the proclamation did not take effect immediately. Rather, it was to take effect on January 1st, 1863. As one might expect, that date became a matter of great interest in the intervening months, as news of the proclamation spread throughout the states of the Confederacy. On the night of December 31st, African Americans both enslaved and free celebrated the watch night with great anticipation, and ever since then the New Year’s Eve watch night vigil has had the dual character of both religious service and historical commemoration.

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Burning the midnight oil

At Hanukkah, many Jews enjoy eating latkes, pancakes usually made of grated potato, often mixed with minced onion for flavoring and egg as a binder, fried in a generous amount of oil and served with toppings such as sour cream or applesauce.

The word latke is Yiddish; it comes (via the Ukrainian oladka and, before that, the Old Russian olad'ya), from the Greek word eladia, the plural of eladion, meaning “little oily thing.” Eladion, in turn, is the diminutive form of elaion, “olive oil,” which comes from elaiā, “olive.” The English words olive and oil, too, are both distantly descended from that same elaiā—olives having been the chief source of oil for the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean. In those civilizations, olive oil was used not only for cooking but also as a cosmetic or medicinal treatment for the skin, as a lubricant for chariot wheels and machinery, and, crucially, as a source of illumination. And it is as a source of illumination that oil is of special importance to the celebration of Hanukkah.

According to the Talmud, after an army of Jewish rebels led by the Maccabees recaptured Jerusalem from the culturally Greek empire of the Seleucids in 164 BCE, they discovered that there was only one day’s supply of ritually pure oil left for the lamp in the newly-rededicated Temple. Miraculously, that one-day supply kept the lamp burning for eight days, until a new supply of oil had been prepared. It is in commemoration of this miracle that Hanukkah lasts eight days and is traditionally celebrated with oily foods; the branched lamp, or menorah, that is lit each night during the holiday symbolically represents the temple lamp, though modern menorahs usually use candles rather than burning oil.

If you are celebrating Hanukkah this season, here’s hoping that your oily latkes don’t burn, and that the candles in your menorah do!  

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The American Heritage Dictionary end-of-year review

Recently, executive editor Steve Kleinedler was a guest on NPR’s Here and Now to talk about new words and senses that have been added to the American Heritage Dictionary this year. We invite you to take a listen.

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The strong and the weak

You may occasionally hear people quibble (or even quarrel) over the correct pronunciation of forte in a sentence like You calculate the tip—math isn’t my forte. The most common pronunciation, and the one we list first in the dictionary, is “FOR-tay,” as if it were the same word as the musical direction forte, “in a loud, forceful manner.” Traditionalists, though, point out that the forte that means “something in which a person excels” isn’t the same word as the musical forte. The musical forte comes from Italian, a language in which final vowels are regularly pronounced; the other forte is from French forte, the feminine form of fort, meaning “strong.” In French, final vowels are most often silent, and indeed in the French forte the e is not pronounced.

Incidentally, that French adjective forte was adopted into English in the 1600s as a noun meaning not “a strong point” in general, but specifically “the strong part of a sword blade, between the middle and the hilt.” This fencing usage was soon extended into the general sense that we are familiar with today. Not surprisingly, English fencers of that time also borrowed a French adjective as a term for the weak part of a sword’s blade, the part between the middle of the blade and the point. That word was foible, which meant “weak.” And just as with forte, this fencing term was soon used in an extended sense, to mean “a minor weakness or failing of character.”

We all have our fortes and our foibles, even if we’re not fencers. As for the pronunciation of forte, even if English etymology is an area in which you excel, you may find that a pedantic insistence on preserving historical pronunciations strikes other people as a weakness or even a character flaw. Among the members of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel, nearly three out of four personally prefer the “FOR-tay” pronunciation, a figure that has remained unchanged for the past twenty years.

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The crustacean connection, continued

In a previous post we examined the origins of the word carabiner, finding that it may ultimately be derived from the ancient Greek kārabos, a word for various kinds of crustacean. But is kārabos related to the English crab? Let us examine the possibilities:

First, could crab have been derived from kārabos? This seems implausible; crab has been in the language for as long as English has been English; we can trace it back past Middle English crabbe and Old English krabba to the Indo-European root *gerbh-, whose basic meaning was “to scratch” and which is the origin of a number of Germanic words pertaining to crawling and scratching. (Crayfish, incidentally, probably comes from *gerbh- as well.)

Well, then, could kārabos have been derived from crab? Obviously it can’t come from the Modern English word, but even the Middle English crabbe and Old English krabba come too late in history to have been the source for kārabos. It’s conceivable that kārabos was originally derived from some earlier Germanic word, but we have no evidence for this. Besides, why would the ancient Greeks, who lived in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean where crustaceans of all sorts are abundant, have needed to borrow their term for crabs from the mostly forest-dwelling tribes of northern interior Europe?

A third possibility to consider is that rather than one being descended from the other, both crab and kārabos descend from the same Indo-European root *gerbh-. This is an appealing hypothesis, but it conflicts with known facts about how Indo-European roots evolved into words in different language families. Though the Indo-European <g> sound became a <k> in Germanic languages, it typically remained a <g> in Greek. And the Indo-European <bh> sound (a breathy, aspirated <b>) that became <b> in Germanic words became a <ph> (a breathy, aspirated <p>) in Greek. In fact, ancient Greek does have plenty of words derived from *gerbh- which precisely follow the expected consonant changes, and they end up looking nothing like kārabos. Instead, they wind up looking like graphē, “writing.” There’s simply no way that kārabos could be naturally derived from the *gerbh- root. The resemblances in sound and meaning are, it would seem, purely coincidental.

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*Here and in the dictionary, we use an asterisk to indicate that the root, stem, or word in question is not attested in any surviving documents but has been hypothetically reconstructed by linguists based on known forms and grammatical principles.

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The crustacean connection

The spring-loaded metal clips called carabiners have been familiar to the general public at least since the 1990s, when lightweight versions of them became popular as keyrings or simply as fashionable accessories, but mountaineers and rock climbers have been using carabiners for much longer, since the early 1900s. And carabiners remain an essential item of gear for technical climbing, used so regularly that climbers often refer to them simply as “crabs” for short.

Climbers weren’t the first to use these metal clips, though. European cavalrymen apparently made use of them to fasten their weapons to their bodies while riding. The name carabiner comes from the German Karabiner, itself a shortened form of Karabinerhaken, “hook for a carbine.” Karabiner is also the German word for a carbine itself, adapted from the French carabine.

Carabine, in turn, comes from the Old French carabin, “soldier armed with a musket.” The origins of carabin are obscure, but it may be from escarrabin, “gravedigger.” Gravediggers got this name from the scarabee or dung beetle, an insect that is famous for taking bits of refuse and burying them in the ground as food for its larvae. In Latin, this beetle was a scarabaeus, from the Greek kārabos, a term used for various beetles but also for crustaceans such as spiny lobsters or crayfish.

At this point, you may find yourself wondering whether Greek kārabos is related to English crab—a supposition that looks plausible given the similarities in pronunciation and meaning. It would be nice to think that when climbers began referring to their carabiners as “crabs,” they were unwittingly harking back to an ancient Greek word for crustaceans.

To be continued…

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Cakes and ale

Though tea is the drink now most stereotypically associated with England, no drink has been part of English culture for so long as ale, a concoction made by malting barley, brewing up a mash of that malt in water, and allowing the mash to ferment. Ale appears numerous times in Beowulf, in the Canterbury Tales (the Cook, Chaucer tells us, was very familiar with the taste of “londoun ale”), and in Shakespeare’s plays, including one memorable passage in Twelfth Night in which the rowdy Sir Toby Belch taunts the steward Malvolio by saying, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

In Shakespeare’s day and for some time thereafter, a distinction was drawn between ale and beer; “ale” was made without the addition of hops, while “beer” was made with hops—a continental European innovation that was only introduced to England in the 1500s. Eventually, though, ale-brewers began using hops in their product too, eroding the distinction between the two beverages. In the 1896 poem “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” for instance, A.E. Housman uses “ale” and “beer” indiscriminately as synonymous names for the same drink, commenting drily that “malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man.”

A new distinction arose in the 1800s and early 1900s, especially in America, where German immigrants popularized the lager style of beer. Having a lighter color and a cleaner taste than British ale, it was generally thought of as a distinctly different (though obviously related) beverage. As late as 2011 when the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary was published, the entries for beer and ale reflected this distinction: beer was defined as “A fermented alcoholic beverage brewed from malt and flavored with hops,” while ale was defined as “A fermented alcoholic beverage containing malt and hops, similar to but heavier than beer.”

But the commercial predominance of German-style beer over British-style ale eventually resulted in some semantic assimilation: ale is now more generally thought of as a subcategory of the larger category that is beer. Several years ago, we revised the definition for ale to “A usually full-bodied beer that has been fermented at a relatively warm temperature,” in contradistinction to lager, “A beer of German origin that is fermented for a relatively long time at a low temperature.” As for beer, we’ve broadened its definition slightly to “A fermented alcoholic beverage brewed from malt, usually flavored with hops”—the “usually” being included so that the definition covers not only hopped malt beverages but also hopless medieval English ale and other malt beverages such as gruit, a beer flavored with herbs such as ground ivy, yarrow, or sweet gale.    

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Free rein or reign?

Fill in the blank: I gave my friend free _____ to plan the party.

a.       rein

b.      reign

Which did you choose?

The homophones rein and reign have different meanings and etymologies. Rein can be traced back to the Latin retinēre, “to retain.” The word refers to the straps that a rider uses to restrain or control a horse, and also more generally to any means of restraining or controlling something.

Reign, on the other hand, derives ultimately from the Latin rēx, rēg- which means “king.” Reign refers to a sovereign power, such as that of a monarch, as well as the period of time during which a monarch rules, and the reach of a monarch’s influence or dominance.

And that brings us to the expression that is pronounced (frē rān). The expression means “unlimited freedom to act or make decisions.” Do you wish to revise your answer, knowing what you do now?

The expression is free rein. To grant someone free rein (or less commonly full rein) was originally a metaphorical extension of letting slack both reins on a horse, allowing the horse to go at its own pace and in the direction it found suitable. Since giving free rein or full rein is thus granting control or power to another, it is not surprising that these expressions have been understood as free reign or full reign, when the metaphor evokes the power that a monarch has over his or her dominion. But the expressions remain properly free rein or full rein.

If you enjoyed this exploration of the origin of a commonly confused expression, you’ll be excited to hear we have a whole book full of explanations of often-mixed-up words and idioms, including this one and 99 others. 100 Words Almost Everyone Mixes Up or Mangles, by the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, was recently released in a revised edition!

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Status and the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel

Two weeks ago, we sent out the 2017 ballot to the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Among many other topics, we’re surveying their opinion about the use of reticent for reluctant, the word thusly, and their preferred pronunciations of banal and comparable. Results will be available in early 2018.

In the meantime, here’s another finding from last year’s usage ballot, regarding the members’ preferred pronunciation of status:

In our 2016 survey, 85 percent of the Usage Panel preferred the pronunciation STAT-us and 15 percent preferred STAY-tus, although both forms were considered acceptable by large margins. This is a noticeable shift from our 1997 survey, which was the first time the Panelists, by a narrow margin, preferred STAT-us over STAY-tus. The pronunciation STAY-tus is the older pronunciation, and it remains the most common one in British English.

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The History of Kiosks

The first meaning of kiosk in English was “A small open gazebo or pavilion.” Over time, the use of this term has expanded to refer to other architectural structures, such as

A small structure, usually open in front, used as a newsstand or a place for selling goods or conducting transactions, as at a bank.

A small structure housing an electronic terminal for public use, as for purchasing tickets or accessing information.

A usually cylindrical structure on which advertisements are posted.

Kiosk comes from the Turkish word köşk, which originally referred to a kind of open pavilion or summerhouse in Turkey and Persia, often built on a hexagonal or many-sided base. The upper classes of the Ottoman Empire would enjoy entertainments and view their gardens in the comfort of such buildings.

When the word first began to appear in English, kiosk referred to these Middle Eastern pavilions, which Europeans imitated in their own gardens and parks. In France and Belgium, the word kiosque was applied to something lower on the scale, structures resembling these pavilions but used as places to sell newspapers or as bandstands.

When such structures began to be built in England for these purposes, the word kiosk was reborrowed from French in the middle of the 1800s with the meaning “A place where newspapers are sold.”

The full etymology of kiosk is:

[Ultimately (partly via French kiosque and Italian chiosco, with French ki- and Italian chi- representing Turkish palatalized k-) from Turkish köşk, gazebo, pavilion, from Persian kōšk, palace, from Middle Persian, of unknown origin.]

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The clip of an eclipse

During a solar eclipse, like the one happening on this coming Monday, the moon passes between the earth and the sun, and for the places on earth that fall in the path of the moon’s shadow, the sun disappears. It is figuratively clipped from view. Etymologically, though, the word eclipse and clip have nothing to do with one another.

Eclipse is derived from the Latin eclīpsis, which in turn comes from the Greek ekleipsis, a form of ekleipein, which means, “to fail to appear, to suffer an eclipse.” The ancient Greek philosophers, of course, spent time observing astronomical phenomena, so it’s no surprise that they had a word to describe the specific phenomenon of an eclipse. Ekleipein can be broken down into ek-, which means “out,” and leipein, which means, “to leave.” During an eclipse, the sun is left out of the sky.

Clip, on the other hand, comes from the Middle English word clippen and ultimately from the Old Norse word klippa and is possibly onomatopoetic in nature, referring to the sharp sound made when something is cut quickly.

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The poetic origins of popular idioms

A successful idiom—one that stands the test of time—has to be memorable, either for the truth it encapsulates or for the way it trips off the tongue. Poets have historically been among our chief benefactors when it comes to enlarging our stock of idiomatic expressions. The 17th-century poet John Milton, for instance, is the ultimate origin of the idioms every cloud has a silver lining and trip the light fantastic; the former of these derives from his masque Comus (“There does a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining”), and the latter is from his poem “L’Allegro” (“Come, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastic toe”).

In the early 1700s, Alexander Pope specialized in memorable formulations of pithy truths, many of which live on in our lexicon as familiar idioms. From his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” we get damn with faint praise; his “Essay on Criticism” gives us both a little learning is a dangerous thing and fools rush in where angels fear to tread; and his “Dunciad” is the earliest known instance of the idiom fritter away. About a century later, in the ballad “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge told a strikingly odd tale that gives us one of our most strikingly odd idioms: the mariner in that poem was the first person ever to wear an albatross around one’s neck. As for the wedding guest whom the mariner buttonholes to listen to his story, he emerges from the experience sadder but wiser (or, in Coleridge’s actual words, “a sadder and a wiser man”). And Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in her 1883 poem “Solitude,” gave us the insight laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone.

Two memorable idioms come to us from the popular works of 20th-century poet Robert Frost: his poem “The Road Not Taken” contemplates what it means to take the road less traveled, while his “Mending Wall” informs us that good fences make good neighbors. Will any 21st-century poets attain such widespread and lasting renown that their turns of phrase will be immortalized as popular idioms? It’s too early to know, but as Alexander Pope put it in his “Essay on Man,” hope springs eternal…

The idioms above, and more than 10,000 others, can be found in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, Second Edition by Christine Ammer. Thank you for visiting the American Heritage Dictionary at ahdictionary.com!

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Belgians with Castanets

Dance is a universal cultural phenomenon—sort of. That is, people in every culture dance, although the traditional dances of each culture are not all the same. The people of the Scottish Highlands developed the Highland fling, while the people of Virginia developed the Virginia reel. The habanera is historically associated with Cuba as a whole and Havana (La Habana in Spanish) in particular.

But cultural interchange has resulted in a constant cross-fertilization of different cultures’ dance traditions; again and again a dance or dance step associated with one culture has become adopted and adapted by another. As a result, there are numerous dances whose names refer to the part of the world from which they were borrowed—or were believed to have been borrowed. The French polonaise, for instance, is a dance of Polish origin, while the allemande is named for Allemagne, the French name for Germany. (The English, too, developed a dance called the german.) The Germans, for their part, named the schottische after Scotland, though it may not actually be Scottish in origin.

Sometimes the geographical connection is a little less obvious. The French pavane, a slow, stately court dance of the late Renaissance, gets its name from the Italian pavana, which in turn comes from Pava, a dialectal form of Padova—the Italian name of the city better known to English speakers as Padua.

Perhaps the most surprising is flamenco, a dance style firmly associated with Andalusia in southern Spain. Various etymologies for its name have been proposed, many of which trace it back through Old Provençal to the Latin flamma, “flame,” but the word flamenco also means “Flemish” in Spanish, so it is distinctly possible that the dance received its name because its ultimate origin was believed to lie in Flanders.

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