Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from. ”. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking ...
Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”
Rest “repose” is a Germanic word with cognates among other related languages, that is, for instance, in Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. At one time, it had the form rasta, as still in Gothic, a fourth-century language, known to us from a translation of parts of the New Testament into it. Yet the Gothic word rasta meant “a mile,” not “rest”! One Germanic mile was equal to two Gaul leagues or five kilometers, a bit over three miles, the distance a walker is supposed to cover on foot in an hour. Consequently, in those days, “rest” had a more concrete sense (namely, “a distance after which one rests”) than “relief from activity.” The history of all abstract words in language runs along similar lines.
This first step in searching for the etymology of rest looks convincing. But we may perhaps go the proverbial extra mile, to obtain a deeper solution. In this blog, I have more than once referred to the old German journal Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). It featured many papers about how words developed their meanings in the process of labor activities. Some such conjectures did not stand the test of time, while others have weathered well. One of the most active contributors to that journal was its founder RudolfMeringer (1859-1931), for whose contributions I have unbounded admiration. Among other things, he suggested (but in a different periodical) that rasta is related to Gothic razn “house.” This was a great idea. One can find guarded positive mentions of it in all dictionaries, but I doubt that caution is needed here. Meringer guessed well.
Those interested in the origin of other Germanic words designating human habitats will find some information in my posts for January 21 and February 4, 2015 (the essays deal with house and home). Among other things, I noted that the grammatical gender of some such words tends to be neuter. Germanic neuter nouns had the same form in the singular and the plural (like Modern English sheep: one sheep ~ many sheep), so that when we deal with Old English hūs (ū designates a long vowel, as in the modern word who), we cannot know whether the reference is to one building or several “houses” linked together, as is the case with the Old Icelandic word hús (here, ú designates a long vowel).
Characteristically, Gothic razn was also neuter, a circumstance hardly ever discussed in the scholarly literature on this word. In any case, razn, which must have been a place for rest, probably consisted of two or even more adjoining structures, rather than being a separate building. Old English ræsn, a word obviously related to razn, meant “plank, beam,” which means that the Old Germanic razn was made of wood. However, a few non-Germanic cognates of razn refer to branches, switches, and the like. Thus, we get a glimpse of the way old houses were constructed, but hardly of why speakers chose the sound complex raz– (from ras-) to designate one type of their habitat.
This is approximately how they lived. Village Street, hay stacked in front of a farm. Public domain via The Met.
Perhaps ras– (a verb, not unlike rush and dash) imitated the sound a branch makes when waved through the air? Unless a word is an obvious onomatopoeia, like puff, hush, grunt, and so forth, we never learn why it has the form that has come down to us. But I find some support for my idea in the fact that quite a few non-Germanic cognates of rest refer to “rush (!), attack.” As HenryCecil Wyld put it in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language: “We might suppose that the primary meaning of the base was ‘movement’, whether into action or away from it, from which latter sense we later got the sense retreat, cessation from action, rest.”
Disregard the inelegant phrasing and note: “into action or away from it”! The related forms of ras-, as they appear in Greek and elsewhere, are treated with caution or even distrust in some dictionaries and as certain in others. I tend to agree with those who trace English rest, German Ruhe, and Dutch rust (they all have the same meaning) to the root erē– ~ rē– and share Wyld’s interpretation of the root (“movement into or AWAY from action”). I would therefore be happy if my sound-imitative treatment of the Germanic root ras– could find some support: swish branches, build a house, and have a rest!
The old word for “house” can still be discerned in English saltern “saltworks” (that is, a place where salt is prepared commercially), from sealtærn; in barn, from berern, a building for storing “bern,” that is, barley; and in ransack, from Scandinavian (rann-saka, “to search a house,” but the “searching” was performed then, as now, for the purpose of plundering.
Restive, though it now means “restless, fidgety,” once meant the opposite, namely, “inactive, inert”! A restive horse refuses to move. The word goes back to the root of the Romance verb having the sense “to remain in the same position,” from Latin restāre “to rest.” Closely related is English arrest. One wonders at the erratic history of this late borrowing, which emerged in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century: “intractable,” then “stubborn,” and finally, “restless, unruly.” The OED presents, as always, a full picture of this history. The most common sense today (that is, “restless”) surfaced in books only in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, in Dickens’s days! And we show surprise when unexpected semantic leaps are said to have occurred in the remotest past.
A restive horse is not just at rest. Symptoms of Restiveness, Henry William Bunbury, 1807. Public domain via The Met.
I am sincerely grateful to the readers of this blog who responded to my plea for comments. Indeed, there was a break between August and February. It was caused by personal reasons and had nothing to do with paucity of responses. The rest is of course silence.
My grandmother was one of those speakers who had an r in the word wash, pronouncing it warsh. For her, the nation’s capital was Warshington, D.C., and the vegetable was a squarsh. That r-ful pronunciation is known as an intrusive r. I’ve got it too, though mine is variable. Sometimes I have an r in wash, washcloth, and Washington, and sometimes I don’t.
There is also something called the intrusive l, which occurs when someone pronounces the word both as bolth. You can also find the intrusive l in mouth and south, though that is less common. I noticed it in the speech of my students in the Pacific Northwest. Typically, about 15% of any given class pronounced both with an l. So what’s going on?
One possibility is that the l is a naturally occurring co-articulation. What does that mean? Well, notice how the o is a vowel produced in the back of the mouth, with the tongue at mid-height and the lips rounded. The b is also a sound made with rounded lips—a bilabial stop in the lingo. Your lips close the airflow and then open it to produce the buh-sound. Go ahead and make some b-sounds and o-sounds and bo-sounds.
The th of both (it’s a single consonant spelled with two letters) is what’s known as an interdental fricative. What that means is that the tongue goes between the teeth (hence the interdental part) in order to obstruct the airflow and create friction (hence the fricative part). Say the th-sounds a few times.
Well, what happens to your tongue as it moves from the back-rounded bo to the word-final –th? Say both slowly a few times and see what you notice your tongue doing. Do you notice how similar the tongue movements are for both and for bolth? For me, both has a slightly lower position of the tongue blade as it goes from bo to th, so perhaps the l-sounds of bolth comes from some speakers having a slightly raised tongue during that transition from bo to –th.
The intrusive r of warsh may have a similar genesis. The consonant r holds a special, quirky place in English phonetics and phonology. There is the historical r-lessness of southern England and of certain American dialects, the linking r that shows up in words like Cuba(r) and idea(r), and the syllabic r of words like bird, which is pronounced brd. The intrusive r of warsh seems to be its own thing, most common among older, rural speakers (and their grandchildren). There’s a back-rounded w and back vowel a followed by sh. Sh is a palatal fricative, meaning the friction is produced with the tongue approaching the hard palate (the front of the roof of your mouth). Along the route from back wa to palatal sh, your tongue makes a gesture close to an r. Try saying wash and then marsh a few times, and you’ll feel where your tongue is going.
By the way, just as there is a linking r sound (as in Cuba(r) and idea(r)), there is also a linking l sound in some dialect areas of English (such that spa is is pronounced as spal is and drawing is drawling). The linguist Bryan Gick of the University of British Columbia has studied the emergence of such sounds in a 1999 article in the journal Phonology and a 2022 article in American Speech, and he shows how certain articulatory gestures can sometimes create the l-sounds and r-sounds. Gick also notes that “gestural overlap” is a likely cause of the r in warsh. The same, I think, can probably be said for bolth.
Epicurus. He was satisfied with “a little.” Photo by Dudva. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 1, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba (in those days, I was told not to exceed one page of text, and of course, there were no illustrations). Numerous comments followed. Some time later (on November 22, 2006), my topic was hullabaloo, and again multiple comments rewarded my modest effort. In those days, a stream of responses established a close tie between my readers and me (hence the now defunct section “Monthly Gleanings”). Though I have no idea why that stream has dried up, today even a single comment makes me happy, for “he who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Perhaps I should stick to the letter H. Anyway, I decided to woo my fickle luck again and will now add hubbub (see the image gracing the title) to that ancient series.
Exclamations, interjections, and war cries are usually hard to trace to their origins. Oops, upsy-daisy, drat, hurrah, hello, hi, and their likes look natural to speakers but not to language historians. Even oh and ah have nontrivial origins, because when people are in pain or are genuinely surprised, they do not emit such genteel “vocalic gestures”: they scream. Hubbub is of course not an interjection, but it makes one think of hullabaloo and other “emotional” H– words denoting noise. We can also remember hoopla and the bird name hoopoo ~ hoopoe.
“Hurrah!” (“The Apotheosis of War” by Vasily Vereshchagin). Painting by Vasily Vereshchagin, 1871. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
I usually avoid discussing nouns, adjectives, and verbs whose detailed and often transparent origin can be found online or in any good dictionary. Yet the amount of information varies from work to work. Though hubbub seems to be a case in point (nothing new, and nothing to write about), this is an illusion. All sources say approximately but not quite the same thing and not enough. Here is the etymological part of the entry hubbub from The Century Dictionary (though this monumental reference work is seldom consulted today, I treat it with great respect): “Formerly also hobub, hooboob, also whoobub (apparently, simulating whopp, hoop); also extended or reduplicated hubbub–boo, hubbleshow, hubble-shubble—words showing imitative variation of a base *hub, probably of interjectional origin, but perhaps in part of hoop, shout.” An asterisk denotes a reconstructed form.
This is all very true. However, there is a hitch in dealing with that entry. Compare the information from the last edition of Walter W. Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage, 1911: “Imitative. Cf. Gaelic ub, interjection of aversion. Formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, reduplication of hoop; and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” (Many years earlier, Skeat suggested that perhaps the source of hubbub was indeed whoop-whoop.) Surprisingly, The Century Dictionary does not mention Gaelic, and Skeat, who begins (!) with Gaelic, uses only the irritating word cf., that is, confer, compare. Old dictionaries often tell us to “compare” different forms. How are we supposed to do it?
The volume of the OED with the letter H appeared in 1901, and the entry on hubbub rather cautiously suggested the Irish (that is, Gaelic) origin of the English word, but the second edition of The Century Dictionary ignored this tip. By contrast, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), derived from the OED, states unhesitatingly: “Of Irish origin .” It then cites a few (irrelevant?) Irish words for disgust and amazement, but the alleged source is supposed to be the battle cry. Can interjections be borrowed? Yes, indeed. The bookish word alas is from Old French. Oh goes back to Latin, via Old French. So does ah, a truly international word. Upsy-daisy is from Dutch.
Hubbub, its history and etymology, attracted a good deal of attention in the nineteenth-century popular press (as usual, in Notes and Queries). The most curious analogy takes us to hubbub,a game like dice, played at one time by some Native Americans. Here is a passage from the book by Henry SpelmanRelationof Virginia (1613; I have modernized the spelling): “Drums and trumpets they have none, but when they will gather themselves together, they have a kind of howling or whopub, so differing in sound one from the other as both part (sic) very easily be distinguished.” The earliest example of English hubbub from a text in the OED goes back to 1555.
The ship Pilgrim arrived in America in 1620. By that time, hubbub had become widely known in England. Even Shakespeare used it, though he spelled the word as who-bub. Speelman may have identified the native word with the one he had known at home. But this is unlikely. WilliamWood in New England’s Prospect (1634) described hubbub as a game resembling dice (“…smiting themselves on the breast and thighs, crying out, Hub, Hub, Hub!”). English hubbub is certainly not from Algonquin, but the coincidence is striking. Similar words have been found in some other languages. For instance, in 1904, a report from Egypt mentioned habub “a dust storm of considerable extent.” Hubbub is, most certainly, an onomatopoeia that could have originated almost anywhere at any time. The question is whether the English word is native or borrowed and, if borrowed, then from where.
Thanks to the excellent research of two scholars, David Greene and Alan Bliss, we know a good deal about the history of hubbub. The seemingly plausible suggestion that hubbub is from French, rather than from Irish, should be discarded. But surprisingly, the Irish form is from English! The source of hubbub must have been the Middle English adverb abo “above,” pronounced as aboo. This pronunciation has been recorded even in some archaic eighteenth-century British dialects. The etymon of hubbub seems to have been some war cries like Irish ub! ub! ubub!
Medieval Irish warriors. A plate from The Image of Ireland by John Derrick, 1581. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
But this reconstruction leaves out the origin of initial h in hubbub. Though the history of this h is unclear, we should note that the earliest form of hubbub, recorded by the OED, has the spelling whobub. Similar spellings were common in the sixteenth century and some time later. As Alan Bliss explained, the story may or even must have begun with fubbub, whose f became voiceless hw (as in the pronunciation of those who say what, which, why with voiceless hw) and later h. Details would take us too far afield. All we have to know is that, most probably, hubbub originated in Early English, was taken over by the Irish, and later returned to English. Not unexpectedly, the word changed its pronunciation more than once along the way. To us this itinerary is full of gaps, and we are left wondering why in the sixteenth century the word was reborrowed into Early Modern English. However, something about this itinerary has been traced with a good deal of certainty, so that hubbub is not “a word of unknown origin,” which is good. Thus, after all, our ado (hubbub) was not about nothing.
P.S. Thank you for the comment on sorrow. The alleged tie between the Hittite and the Germanic words is curious, but of course, its existence cannot be demonstrated, unless both forms are sound-imitative.
Featured image: Photo by Joe Van. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.
For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing. We covered technology (from scrolls to scrolling), the impact of the book on culture, economics (how publishers and bookstores make money), and much more. I invited authors and editors to class. We toured a printing company and an audiobook studio. A ghost-writer friend came one Halloween. A book restorer told harrowing tales of damaged books and her heroic efforts to repair them.
One of the highlights for me was slicing and dicing a book in front of the class.
In a room full of writers, readers, and bibliophiles, cutting up a book never failed to elicit wide-eyed gasps and groans. There was a serious point to the cutting: to familiarize students with the parts of a book. As I cut, tore, and otherwise mutilated the book, I marked its various parts and passed around the remains.
I pointed out the two boards that made up the cover and noted the inner and outer hinges. I pulled back the endpapers and pointed out the pastedown and flyleaf. I marked up the front matter: the title page and the verso of the title page, with its copyright material, ISBN, and mysteriousedition numbers. Sometimes there was a cloth headband atop the spine of the book, and we speculated about its purpose (protection of the spine or decoration?). It was rare to find a full-length sewn-in headband.
We examined the text block of the book and pulled apart its signatures. (In a later class, I would give students a large-sized piece of paper with sixteen numbered blocks and challenge them to fold it to a correctly numbered signature.) We noted the gutter, the margin where the left and right pages come together. We looked at the ways in which the signatures were bound and contrasted that with the less expensive perfect binding and burst binding, which inevitably led to a discussion of textbooks that fall apart when you read them. One time, we got into a discussion of the differences between hot-melt adhesives and organic glues.
After the initial horror of the dissection, the students learned a lot from the exercise and were able to pick up just about any book and understand how it was made.
You can try this exercise at home, with a thrift-store hardback, a Sharpie, and a box-cutter. Just remember to cut away from your body. Safety first.
It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from. No fear: sorrow is native—only joy is borrowed. The word that interests us is Common Germanic. Its cognates have been attested in all the Old Germanic languages: in the fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament, in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Icelandic. Outside Germanic, even in the ancient Tocharian language, an apparently related noun turned up, though there it means “disease.”
Satisfied but not sad. The English Glutton. Public domain via Picryl.
Words designating abstract concepts usually have concrete foundations. For example, sad goes back to the idea of “sated; weary.” Dutch zat and German satt still refer to a full stomach (among other things), and Latin satis (as in the root of the English borrowings satiated and satisfaction) means “enough.” Sad “melancholy, unhappy,” it appears, has a most prosaic foundation. Attempts to find a similar concrete foundation of sorrow have been less than fully satisfactory, to use the polite jargon of disgruntled etymologists.
However, one thing is almost certain: sorrow is related to neither sore nor sorry, while those two words are indeed related to each other. Yet for centuries, sorrow, sore, and sorry have formed a union and influenced one another. It is quite natural that speakers looked upon such similar-sounding words referring to similar concepts as related. To repeat, the sense of sorrow developed from “physical pain” to “grief.”
The origin of many ancient names of diseases and physical defects is obscure for an important reason. People were afraid to pronounce frightening words. The situation is familiar: talk of the devil and he will come. For instance, someone will say wolf (cry wolf, as it were) or bear, and the beast, which of course knows its name, will hear it, take it for an invitation, and arrive. That is why Germanic has bear, that is, “a brown one,” rather than some continuation of ursus, and Russian has medved, literally, “someone searching for and knowing honey.” For the same reason, the etymology of ache is almost impenetrable. Taboo names were meant to be undecipherable, and they often remain such to us. (By the way, from an etymological point of view, ill is one of the most obscure English words.)
I have mentioned taboo for a reason. Among some rather secure Slavic and Lithuanian cognates of sorrow (Tocharian has already been mentioned) we find a few words meaning “disease, sickness” and “to be sick, ill.” The most problematic forms related to sorrow are those beginning with sw-. Among the Old Highs German words, the verb sworgen turns up. Where is the initial sw– from? The w after s is not accidental here. Also, a secure Albanian cognate once began with sw-, and the first syllable of a rather probable Sanskrit cognate was sū-.
It is rather likely that also the Old Germanic root of sorrow once began with sw– and later lost w under the influence of its “twin” word sorrow. The group sw– is often sound–imitative and sound-symbolic. Consider the following list of Modern English words beginning with sw– (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in writing): swab “mop” (15), swagger (16; swag also exists), swank (19), swarm (Old English), swarm “climb” (16), swash (16), sway (16), sweep (14), swell (Old English), swift (Old English), swig (17), swill (Old English), swindle (18), swing (partly Old English), swipe (19), swirl (18), swish (18), switch (16), swither “to hesitate” (16), swoon (13), and swoop (16).
In the sw-world: a swarm of bees. Photograph by Sichy007. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I realize that reading word lists is not the most entertaining occupation in the world. But I needed a background for my hypothesis. I suggest that sorrow or rather Old English sorg ~ sorh and its Germanic cognates, all of which sounded almost the same, were “emotional” sw-words. It is hard to tell what this sw– alluded to (perhaps sometimes to the loss of balance and erratic movement: consider swing, sway, swipe, and the rest). Above, I did not mention swamp, a late word in English (17). It has always meant “low-lying wet ground,” and swamps are not good to walk in.
Later, sorrow, Sorge, and their likes influenced sworg-, all of which survived but lost none of their emotional impact. Etymologies of this type cannot be proved: they are not theorems. But considering that dictionaries are happy with the statement “ultimate origin unknown,” I see no harm in offering my hypothesis. If I am right, taboo probably played no role in the history of sorrow, but emotion did: it shaped its origin, and chance modified its ultimate form.
As is well-known, people are afraid of two things: of venturing to say something new and of repeating something so trivial that it needs no proof. Above, I committed both sins. English etymological dictionaries do not begin their story of sorrow with sw-. Yet in other sources, matter-of-fact references to sw– in this context are common. Among other places, I found them in the earlier editions of the main German etymological dictionary and in the writings of the great French scholar Antoine Meillet. Thus, I said something that is new (no one has explained the variation s- ~ sw-) but not earth-shattering. If some historical linguists decide to comment on my reconstruction, the first thing for them to do will be to reread F. O. Lindeman’s paper in Indogermanische Forschungen 98, 1993, 48-54, and the chapter “Sorga” in the 1957 book by Heinrich Götz Leitwörter des Minnesangs (pp. 93-105). The absence of comments will give me much sorrow.
With Frau Sorge, two forgotten books. Both are good reading. Courtesy of the British Library. Public domain via Flickr.
In the meantime, I’ll mention a novel titled Frau Sorge (that is, “Lady Sorrow”) by Hermann Sudermann. Today, few people have heard of it. Yet the epoch described in that book is worth remembering. At one time, I read many such sad books, including John Greenwood’s novel The True History of a LittleRagamuffin.Maxim Gorky read and admired it in his youth.
A few remarks on sorry may not be out of place here. Its Old English form was sārig “pained at heart,” as defined by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (thus, with a long vowel in the root). Later, that is, in Middle English, ā changed to ō (it did so in all words: hence stān to stōn and stone) and was shortened before the “heavy suffix” -ig. This is when sorry began to interact with sorrow.
The title of today’s essay is from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I preferred it to the trodden-to-death more in sorrowthan in anger. Familiar quotations with sorrow are numerous. I will finish this post with my favorite lines by Shelley: “The desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/ The devotion to something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.”
Postscript. My thanks are to Martin Smith for citing German bergen “to protect” in connection with the post on burg (April 1, 2026) and to Ian Richie, who cited the place from Rob Roy, to which I referred in the post for April 15, 2026. See the comments following those posts.
NOTE. For scheduling reasons, the next post will appear two weeks from today.
Featured image: La Mélancolie by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
