#etymonline.com

[thinksandthings]

Heya! Your recent dino etymology was super fun to read (≧▽≦)

I'll be really interested to read more of it :))

Also purely out of curiosity, but is there any story behind your knowledge of dino etymology?

I'm so glad you liked it! x) Here's another one:

So there is currently a dinosaur referred to as the Edmontosaurus, which means the not-so interesting "dinosaur from Edmonton," however, one of its earlier classifications was anatotitan, which much more interestingly means "giant duck." If I am being entirely honest, duck is not the first thing I would have likened to the pictures I've seen, but I guess with a layer of feathers it might make a little more sense.

The word is a compound in two parts, the first being the Latin anas which means "duck," and I've seen it be credited to a few different Indo-European roots, but the clearest connection looks like anat- for "duck" or "water bird." This particular root was what gave rise to the original Old English term for duck, ened, which was eventually replaced by a different Old English term duce, meaning "diver, dipper or ducker."

The second half is actually the same as one of the components of a previous dinosaur post, being titan which means "large, grand" coming from the Ancient Greek Τιτάν titan, which refers to the race of mythical, pre-Olympian giants.

To be honest, I'm not sure how I've learned so many of these. On more than one occasion I've fallen down an internet rabbit-hole finding increasingly bizarre names for sometimes otherwise innocuous or sometimes utterly entirely absurd creatures. Scientists are much more creative people than they get credit for.

[thinksandthings]

banshee

The current Britannica article describes them as a “supernatural being in Irish and other Celtic folklore whose mournful “keening,” or wailing screaming or lamentation, at night was believed to foretell the death of a member of the family of the person who heard the spirit.” Although modern stories make them out to be twisted spirits or demons, the original Irish folklore painted them more as heralds of death, allowing the family to prepare. 

They are described in all different manners of apparition, from beautiful young women to old, ragged crones, but one of the most consistent features is painful eyes red from crying. 

The word is actually made up of two from Irish, which are ben, or “woman” and sid, or “fairy hill.” The Old Irish was bean sidhe, with the same breakdown, meaning more precisely, “woman of the fairy mounds.” The sidhe were the hills in Irish and other Scots folklore where fairies and other mythological creatures dwelt. That particular morpheme can be interestingly tied to the Proto-Indo-European root sed-, meaning “to sit.”  

[thinksandthings]

elf

Elves are fun because there are so many vastly different interpretations. Everything from Santa's toymakers to Elrond and his court qualify into our concept of elven forms.

Generally speaking, we might define elf as being a "spirit, sprite, fairy or goblin; some kind of usually mischievous supernatural creature." This same definition existed for the Middle English term elf, alternately recorded as alfe or elfe. In Old English, the word was ælf, still retaining its meaning of "sprite, incubus or fairy," but specifically with a masculine connotation. The feminine version of the word was ælfen, which interestingly is the predecessor to our modern adjectival form elven.

The word branches out of the Germanic family, and we can point to some other connected words in Old High German, like alp which meant "nightmare." There is actually an Old English cognate which is ælfádl, also meaning "nightmare," but more literally, "elf-disease." Another interesting elf-induced sickness was though to be hiccups, which is reflected in the OE translation ælfsogoða.

Beyond this era of the Old English and German there is some debate about where the words originally sprouted from. The trail may be related to albus or alphoús ἀλφούς, the Latin and Ancient Greek terms for "white" respectively. The cultural theory implies that elves were considered beings of light, brightness and beauty, and thus as this concept evolved from those ideas, so did the English form out of the adjectives.

[thinksandthings]

ferret

Ferrets are very cute. This is a scientific fact. They are a long, furry, domesticated subtype of the European polecat. They have a look on their face like they are ever so slightly irritated at having been recently woke up, and I love them very dearly. 

Anyways, the Middle English feret (also documented as fyrette), was borrowed from the Old French firet, which is a derivative of the Latin fūr, meaning “thief.” This is also a cognate to the Ancient Greek φώρ phṓr, also “thief.” 

What I find fun about the Ancient Greek, is that it also can be used to refer to a bee, specifically a “robber bee.” I absolutely love the fact that both the Latin and Greek chose to refer to tiny animals as being the perpetrators of some thievery, namely that they “carry things away,” from the Proto-Indo-European bher- meaning “carry.” 

I also particularly enjoy the fact that this Latin also gave us furtive, “done in a sneaking, secretive way,” more specifically from fūrtīvus, “stolen.”  

[thinksandthings]

ameliorate

I looked this word up a few years ago to use in an essay, and it has since become one of my favorite words. It has a lovely meaning (”to improve, perfect or enhance”), and it just feels nice to say. 

It arrived in English around the 1650s as a backformation of the French améliorer, from the Old French meillor, which you might recognize as being related to the modern French meilleur “better.” 

The Latin root melior, of the same meaning, was influenced by the Ancient Greek term μάλα mala, a term imparting an adverbial meaning of “very much, exceedingly.” Ultimately, it likely came from the reconstructed PIE mel-, “big and strong.” 

[thinksandthings]

honey

I love seeing how different trails of words end up in modern English. We have two veins to follow for “honey.” The word honey specifically came from the Old English hunig, which ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *kn̥h₂ónks, meaning “yellow.” It’s thought to be a cognate to the Welsh canecon, “gold,” and the Ancient Greek κνῆκος, knêkos, “safflower.” 

The other path to trace comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *melit-, which literally meant “honey.” This became the Ancient Greek μέλῐ, méli, which was borrowed by Latin to form mel. The Late Latin word mellifluus, “flowing with or like honey,” was adopted into English as mellifluous, meaning “sweet as honey, pleasing.” This is actually the more popular strain, and most European languages contain a derivative of *melit-, such as the Irish milis, “sweet,” Old English milisc, “honeyed, sweet,” and Gothic miliþ, French and Spanish miel, and Portuguese and Catalan mel, all of which retain the original meaning, “honey.” 

[thinksandthings]

leed

Apparently this is a more dialectally isolated term, but in some dialects of Scottish English (among others), this means "a song or poem, a strain of a song or a repeated verse," which I quite like.

Anyways, there is an Old English term for "poems or song" which is alternately recorded as either leoþ or léoð. Within the language at that point, there were several nice compounds such as léoðcræft, "poetry, the craft of song" and léoðorún "wise counsel or advice sent through song or poems" (which was apparently a thing they needed a word for?)

This is most often attributed to the PIE root leu-, an onomatopoeic root for expressives and interjections. Interestingly, this is also the base for the Latin term laudāre, which through a separate linguistic thread gives us the modern English term laud, "praise, glory, reknown, etc."

[thinksandthings]

copse

I found this word in a YA fantasy book I was reading recently (because... yeah), and it took me a bit by surprise; it sounded a little out of place. So, I thought I’d find out what place it occupies exactly and tell you all about it. 

Copse is actually a contraction of an older word coppice, meaning “a thicket of small trees or shrubs,” which emerged probably in the late 1500s. The English is a borrowing from the French copeiz, which has the same definition, but an additional connotation of “an overcut forest,” relating to a commercial, farming idea. This is present in some readings of the English. 

Admittedly I had some trouble tracking down the Old French version, and there were hints of it existing as possibly copeiz, coupiz in the 1770s, and either couppeiz or copeis in some other places. 

Nevertheless, the French was the bridge between the modern English and it’s Latin predecessor, colaphus, a noun meaning a “blow or cuff, perhaps a smack on the ear.” Although the “forest” meaning is lost here, this is where we can pick up the submeaning of “cutting down trees” which died out as the word evolved. This particular Latin word is also related to others in the language meaning “cutting,” or “being cut,” a nod to the Ancient Greek cognate κόλαφος kolaphos, which is “a blow or buffet.”